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Video: Stephen Colbert Breaks Down Sam Nunberg's Breakdown

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Blind Frog Belly White3/06/2018 1:40:35 pm PST

re: #107 KGxvi

Here’s what I’m trying to figure out about these tariffs and the supposed point that they’ll protect/create American jobs… Unemployment is under 5%, that’s effectively full employment. If they create new jobs (they won’t), who is going to work those jobs? Especially if it’s manufacturing? Younger workers aren’t necessarily interested in manufacturing jobs because they’ve grown up in a service economy. Beyond that, we are importing steel and aluminum because our demand for those materials is outpacing our supply. In what world does it make sense to institute tariffs?

Another point is that production of steel in the US has not actually declined in the last 30 years. But as productivity has increased, fewer workers are needed. So, it’s not that China stole our steel jobs. It was the robots.

But overall, you have a guy whose worldview is no deeper than image. Coal mining, steel making, autobuilding, shipbuilding - these are all manly, broad-shoulder things he associates with America’s heyday. Largely white man jobs. REAL jobs that a guy like him - a doughy blob with soft baby hands who grew up rich - sees as ‘what real men do’. I think he really believes that if only we get rid of foreign competition and environmental regulations, the same industry we had in the 1950s will come back, employing the same numbers, doing the same jobs.

He thinks he can take America back 70 years, and we’ll thrive. After all, we thrived then, didn’t we?