Jobs and factories will come roaring back?

American companies are spooked, costs are rising, and uncertainty rules the day.

American companies began sourcing products from China following the establishment of trade relations in the 1970s. By the 1990s, many were relocating their factories there to take advantage of lower labor costs.

President Trump promises that "Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country” as a result of his escalating trade war with China. Speaking on Air Force One last month he predicted, “We’re going to take in hundreds of billions of dollars in tariffs, and we’re gonna become so rich you’re not gonna know where to spend all that money. We’re gonna have jobs, we’re gonna have open factories, it’s gonna be great!”

Most companies doing business with China, however, have been moving to other providers over the past several years as wage increases for Chinese workers cut into their profit margins. With the tariff wars, they’re moving faster to relocate, but those factories and jobs are not “roaring back” into America. They’re shifting to cheaper providers in Mexico, India, and Southeast Asia.

The reality is that US factories won’t be popping up any time soon with production lines making the inexpensive appliances, clothing, toys, widgets, and gizmos upon which American middle-class consumers have come to rely.

Bread & Circus

The term "bread and circus" originated in ancient Rome, attributed to the poet Juvenal, who used it to describe how the wealthy political elite distracted the masses with free food and entertainment to maintain control and prevent unrest. It’s the same idea as “Keep ‘em fat and happy.”

In America, the rich have kept getting richer while the poor get poorer, but who cares as long as there is junk food, cheap entertainment, and all that cut-rate stuff from China? Or anywhere else in Asia or Latin America… just keep it coming!

The American Dream

In his 1931 book The Epic of America, Historian James Truslow Adams defined the American Dream as an opportunity to realize our fullest potential regardless of our station in life.

Even with America in the grip of the Great Depression, Adams worried that the dream was at risk of turning into a meaningless lust for material possessions, benefitting the industrial titans and widening the gap between the rich and poor.

“A system that steadily increases the gulf between the ordinary man and the super-rich, that permits the resources of society to be gathered into personal fortunes that afford their owners millions of income a year, with only the chance that here and there a few may be moved to confer some of their surplus upon the public in ways chosen wholly by themselves, is assuredly a wasteful and unjust system. It is, perhaps, as inimical as anything could be to the American dream.”

America’s top 10% now own the majority of the country's wealth. The top 1% control nearly a third. The tax cuts enacted during Trump's first term provided the top 1% an additional tax cut averaging $61,090 per person, while the bottom 60% received less than $500. His newly proposed tax cuts would again disproportionately benefit the super-wealthy.

In a recent post on his media platform Truth Social, the president said the U.S. is "doing really well on our TARIFF POLICY. Very exciting for America, and the World!!!

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Resources:

More Than 90% of North American Companies Have Relocated Production and Sourcing Over the Past Five Years ~BCG Consulting

American Dream, Ideal of the United States of America ~Brittanica

God Bless America - it’s Made in China! ~Perspectives

Shooting Holes in the Boat ~Perspectives

Massacre of the American Dream ~Perspectives

Controlling The “Group Mind" for Profit and Power Without Them Ever Realizing It. ~Perspectives