If you were POTUS, how would you fix the Rust Belt?

[Anonymous]

Trump can't even find enough Americans who are willing to work at his hotels and golf courses.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Trump can't even find enough Americans who are willing to work at his hotels and golf courses.

Sure he can - he just does not want to have to pay them anything worthwhile.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump can't even find enough Americans who are willing to work at his hotels and golf courses.

Sure he can - he just does not want to have to pay them anything worthwhile.

+1 maybe he can relocate some of them to work at his resorts instead of hiring foreigners. See, he really can create jobs for Americans, if only he were less greedy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:1. you need extremely tough anti-trust laws enforced and also new ones written.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2016/how-to-make-conservatism-great-again/

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/maraprmay-2016/the-real-reason-middle-america-should-be-angry/

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and-bust/

http://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/marchapril-2010/who-broke-americas-jobs-machine-3/

Consolidation of business due to the power of mobile capital destroyed the relative 'losers' and allowed for immense concentrations of wealth to pop up.

2. Flyover states have low population growth - you need a revamped immigration system that allows people in on a pts system but tells them if they come in, they have to live in certain 'zones' - i.e. flyover country

3. huge infrastructure investments to better connect flyover country to other parts of the country

4. move most '2nd tier' federal agencies out of DC. This happens as infrastructure investments improve and people telecommute more.

This is already happening, not necessary with the entire agency, but with departments. DHS moved lots of people to Tampa, FL over the last four years.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Tell the unemployed to move to farm country to take the jobs of all the illegal immigrants Trump will be kicking out.

Will he kick out the ones who work for him first?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Tell the unemployed to move to farm country to take the jobs of all the illegal immigrants Trump will be kicking out.

Will he kick out the ones who work for him first?

c'mon PP, you should know better than that. Rules don't apply to him. He can hire foreign workers, send the manufacturing of his products overseas, but Ford and Apple should be condemned for doing so.

[Anonymous]

Wonder if Betsy DeVos will try to move the U.S. Dept. of Education to Grand Rapids, Michigan?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Trump can't even find enough Americans who are willing to work at his hotels and golf courses.

Sure he can - he just does not want to have to pay them anything worthwhile.

Exactly

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:FWIW Hamilton was pretty much okay with NYC being the seat of both finance and government.

The country was much different, geographically. Much smaller and no conception that much of it would be anything but rural.

Richer urban areas and poorer agricultural areas, with vast wealth disparities. That hasn't changed.

Woah woah. Not richer urban areas and poorer rural. In a lot of cases, the opposite! Either way, Hamilton was thinking London vs. rest of England kind of thing. NYC/philly vs rest of colonies. Not Arizona, Colorado, Washington state.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Conservative here – grew up in the Rust Belt in a working middle class home.

Trump pulled the perfect Jedi mind trick and people were so caught up in the fervor that many did not catch it – he clouded the issue. I was in my hometown a week after the election and a lot of people somehow thought that immigrants were taking the jobs THEY WANTED. These folks do want to pick apples or cut grass – they want the $25 dollar manufacturing jobs with benefits. They have a hard time understanding that the economy (and the lure of CHEAP labor overseas) makes those jobs obsolete. What they do know is that those manufacturing jobs (and the service industries derived from them) served as the foundation of the middle class in their cities. If you were a line worker at Ford or a brew worker at Miller, you were doing pretty well. However I do wonder whether people and corporations will actually want to make the sacrifices – because “fixing” the problem will require government market intervention on some levels. Here are a couple of observations.

1. The issue in many of these places is the lack of a consistent stable tax base. Relocating some government operations and giving a Federal incentive (in addition to state and local measures) for companies to move to certain areas and to hire and train local folks will help with this.
2. If you really want to get tough – even out the costs of manufacturing overseas through import tariffs or corporate level taxes. The issue is that folks may have to pay $800 for their iPhone – that’s the trade-off.
3. Many of these places will need a massive retooling away from typical Rust Belt jobs similar to what happened in Pittsburgh, Cleveland and is now starting to happen in Detroit. So invest in post HS education whether it be traditional college tuition or vocational education. Problem is that this does not solve the problem of the 45YO laid off line worker who would have to retrain.
4. As PP said, recognize that this is a bigger issue outside of the cities and requires a different mindset. Cities are a bit more organic and require less of a Federal touch. Focus outside of the cities.
5. Continue to give grads incentive through a bonus or student loan forgiveness to live and work in some of these areas – especially rural. The issue in many of these places is talent drain. Many kids head off to college and the big city and never come back and it is difficult to get folks to relocate to these areas.
6. Understand that is an issue that you cannot just throw money at. It is going to take a lot of cooperative work between the Feds and the state and local governments and it may requires Conservatives stepping away from a couple of their core planks.

Wow, very impressive - this is a great range of ideas, not hanging it all on re-education. Appreciate if you describe why you consider yourself a conservative. I think of many of these proposals to be traditional Democratic Party planks.

Well, I am a Conservative for many reasons that I do not want to get into here. But on this particular question of "fixing" the Rust Belt, I know firsthand how the priorities of working class Republicans differ from the Republican elites. I am also a pragmatist. I believe in letting the market work generally, but in some of these places, government effort is required to get them to a place where the market can function. A lot my fellow Conservatives do not embrace that - which is why I said it may require them to step away from the platform.

NP here. I agree with many of your ideas (liberal who grew up in the "Rust Belt" but with professional, UMC parents). But I don't think the tariff idea will work. It'll lead to retaliatory tariffs and also to corporations moving headquarters overseas whenever possible. Consumer power outside of the US is growing rapidly, so access to US markets isn't the incentive to keep manufacturing in the US that it used to be. So, we'd end up paying more for iPhones and *still* not getting more jobs in the US.

Overall, I don't really have a good solution to the problem. Part of the issue is that workers are far more productive (in the economic sense) today than they have been throughout human history. We are well past needing the entire employable population to produce even the silliest of luxuries. And nonetheless even jobs are concentrated among few people. Companies would rather have a smaller workforce and pay overtime than have a large part-time base of employees. I don't know the answer other than some combination of (i) making OT so unaffordable as to be obsolete, (ii) reducing the number of hours considered full-time, and (iii) guaranteeing a minimum income where necessary. There honestly is not enough work to go around.

[Anonymous]

I think helping the rust belt cities (Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, etc.) is a different problem than helping rural areas which happen to be in the rust belt.

In terms of cities, jobs need to be encouraged in high-paying growth areas such as IT, finance, and health care. And the city centers need to be attractive to younger people and young families. That means access to good, reliable public transit, access to amenities, walkable, liveable communities, good public schools and/or reputable charter/private schools that actually provide a good education and aren't fly-by-night profit factories, and reducing crime. Gentrification, basically. There are plenty of smart, younger people in these areas. If good jobs are there, they will stay and not permanently move away after college. The laid-off 50 year old former factory worker can benefit from re-training programs, and tax breaks to encourage skilled manufacturing jobs as well. But all those problems are mostly solved at the state and local level - not sure what the federal government could do there other than provide some funding.

You've also got the problem that those cities used to be quite a bit bigger, population-wise, than they are now. So you have entire blocks that are just burned-out building after burned-out building. It's very expensive for these cities with an inadequate tax base to maintain these streets and patrol for crime - so either money is wasted or they become huge hotbeds of crime. Redevelopment here isn't, like, "move in a Whole Foods and an outdoor strip mall and hope it takes off." With the loss of population, there's no need for the city to be as physically large as it is.The blighted areas have got to go as they are dangerous eyesores.

In terms of the rural population, in general, I'm honestly not sure what can or should be done. That's where you're going to see generational poverty - little kids growing up with no books and no toys, barely literate by the time they graduate high school, drug use, alcoholism, a true lack of opportunity and basically any kind of jobs, really, really different from urban poverty. The problem is it's just not an efficient use of anyone's tax money (federal, state, or local) to concentrate on an impoverished rural county with a population of 15,000, or even a whole region with a population of 500,000, when you can reach that many people easily in a city and its suburbs all in the same state. Maybe the people living in those areas just need to be encouraged to move, I don't know. Not that cities don't have a lot of problems - they do. But if I'm a rural poor person stuck in nowhere, Kentucky, if I don't have a reliable car I'm stuck at home - no public transit. It's probably hard for me to get food - no corner stores to walk to. My local library is probably 45+ minutes away if I even had a car, and due to funding cuts the hours aren't great. I really don't think it would be such a bad thing if those areas were completely depopulated apart from some farmers and the residents relocated to more urban areas with more opportunities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:
In terms of cities, jobs need to be encouraged in high-paying growth areas such as IT, finance, and health care. And the city centers need to be attractive to younger people and young families. That means access to good, reliable public transit, access to amenities, walkable, liveable communities, good public schools and/or reputable charter/private schools that actually provide a good education and aren't fly-by-night profit factories, and reducing crime. Gentrification, basically. There are plenty of smart, younger people in these areas. If good jobs are there, they will stay and not permanently move away after college. The laid-off 50 year old former factory worker can benefit from re-training programs, and tax breaks to encourage skilled manufacturing jobs as well. But all those problems are mostly solved at the state and local level - not sure what the federal government could do there other than provide some funding.

See, I'm not sure the logic holds up for these arguments. IT is currently highly-paid, so there is room for more people to work in the industry...but at some point, it's a service job that needs to serve other activities. What are those activities going to be? How many more dating apps does the world really need? Similarly, finance needs to finance something. It's least dangerous when it funds economic activity. Part of the 2008 recession was an attempt to keep the finance sector afloat after the first dot-com bubble burst by shifting capital to housing (Bill Clinton actually gave an interview soon after he left the WH suggesting this was a good thing). But obviously, this was not a great thing. And again, healthcare needs to serve a population. And most jobs are not highly-paid. They are medical assistant-type jobs that barely require a HS education (though plenty of for-profit colleges will give you a certification). I mean, it's better than being unemployed...

A major issue is that we've moved to a service economy, and increasingly fewer Americans can pay for those services. At the same time, productivity the world over has increased, so there simply isn't enough work to be done. Other countries will start to see similar issues as we've had in the US. It's already happening in China. It might be we really need to rethink some of the fundamental tenets of capitalism.

[Anonymous]

This has been going on for more than 50 years but no one cared until it affected white middle income workers.

First most low-paying farm labor & sharecropping jobs disappeared due to mechanization and many of those poor people moved to cities. Then many of the unskilled labor jobs disappeared, then the low-skilled labor jobs, and now the skilled blue collar jobs.

At the same time, the number of jobs for women increased - not high-paying jobs but more professional careers. For a few decades the middle class survived because of the shift to two income families instead of one male breadwinner, but now the trend is increasing numbers of non-college educated men without good jobs and more unmarried college educated women.

It doesn't help when people like Trump and Sanders lie and tell them they could bring back the old manufacturing jobs. They can't. NAFTA didn't do this. It is primarily the result of technology advancements that are not ever going backwards. People need the education and skills that are in demand in the current economy, not the ones that were in demand 40 years ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This has been going on for more than 50 years but no one cared until it affected white middle income workers.

First most low-paying farm labor & sharecropping jobs disappeared due to mechanization and many of those poor people moved to cities. Then many of the unskilled labor jobs disappeared, then the low-skilled labor jobs, and now the skilled blue collar jobs.

At the same time, the number of jobs for women increased - not high-paying jobs but more professional careers. For a few decades the middle class survived because of the shift to two income families instead of one male breadwinner, but now the trend is increasing numbers of non-college educated men without good jobs and more unmarried college educated women.

It doesn't help when people like Trump and Sanders lie and tell them they could bring back the old manufacturing jobs. They can't. NAFTA didn't do this. It is primarily the result of technology advancements that are not ever going backwards. People need the education and skills that are in demand in the current economy, not the ones that were in demand 40 years ago.

+1. I grew up in the "rust belt" and no one was wringing their hands when the black working class were downsized from jobs in the late 1960s. Twenty years later this started with the white working class. No one cared about how college education was so expensive for us. My student loan debt in the early 1980s is no different, adjusted for inflation, of what many kids have today. But as long as the white middle class had jobs and access to college, big whoop. That said, I am with the self-described conservative PP, who indicates the government may need to take some steps to help here.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Liberal pro-Hilary highly educated white collar working living in the rust belt, after some time all over east coast (and lots of international travel)....this thread is so clueless. The stereotyping is insane. Also, this isn't 'rust belt' versus east coast, it is urban v. rural....take a look at a blue/red map.

And what do I think it will take to fix this problem? We have a problem with wealth accumulation in this country. We need to invest in our working class, our poor and our middle class. The hollowing out isn't of the rust belt, it is off the middle class period. We need to re-invest in what has been abandon.

Sadly, the Republicans are the least likely to do this.

+1. Finally someone who makes some sense and has some idea what they are talking about (in stark contrast to the "shale" poster).

+1. Or, as Warren Buffet said, "You don't need 4% GDP growth, you can do much better with better distribution of 2% GDP growth." The US as a whole needs fewer third- fourth- fifth-rate colleges, and more of a well-designed, adaptable vocational training program, country-wide. Support the creating of a high-skilled middle class (that doesn't mean hedge fund analysts).

yes, but what it also needs is progressive tax rates as such that salary between hedge fund analysts and auto-mechanic are not that large - maybe 3x at most after taxes and transfers.

as a former forex trader, being a HF analyst (and most finance jobs) are fucking boring. sitting at a desk all day, eating like shit, with 6 screens staring in your face like you are some lab rat is not self actualizing.

I also tool around in my car - if i could go back, and i knew i could make 6 figures as a 'wrench' (including some sort of wage support to get to that six figures) I would've been happier being an auto mechanic professionally.

in places like germany the delta in income between white and blue collar isn't so large as it is here