On shoring

The practice of off shoring manufacturing jobs had its beginnings in the late 70’s and 80’s but accelerated with the NAFTA free trade agreement of 1992. For those old enough to remember the presidential debates, where candidate Ross Perot said about NAFTA, the giant sucking sound you hear is the sound of jobs moving to Mexico. Next came Chinas entrance into the WTO in 2001 and this resulted in the transfer of millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of companies moving part of their operations out of the country. The devastation to American industry can be seen in the rust belt states of middle America. This has resulted in large corporate profits and an income and wealth gap. In the United States, the top 10% of households hold roughly 69% of the total wealth, while the bottom 50% hold only about 3%. This basically transferred both income and wealth from those people who worked for wages to those who worked for salaries. It was the middle- and lower-income groups that got hurt the most. This whole process was called globalization and Trump is trying to reverse this by bringing jobs back home. By March, foreign companies committed to $3 trillion in new investment in the US. One incentive that government can use to bring home jobs is tariffs. For many years tariffs have worked against the US but this is changing but not without disruptions. Those who are adversely affected will try to old onto the old ways and the fight is now on between the globalist and the proponents of on shoring.