American Economics Thread

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luminary

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A sensible and thorough discussion of why the US middle class is so angry.
The resulting devastation: Social pathologies in America

With FDR’s helping hand having been replaced by trickle-down’s cold shoulder, the American middle class had to face the globotics shocks alone.

The shocks without safety nets devastated the middle class, leading to outcomes never seen before: frequent school shootings, an opioid crisis, an obesity epidemic, medical bankruptcies, high maternal mortality rates, crushing student debt, world-leading incarceration rates, high rates of old-age poverty, concerning levels of homelessness, rising suicide rates among low-education middle-class people, and other deaths of despair (Case and Denton 2020). Such social pathologies are unknown at comparable levels in other advanced economies.
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Middle class frustration: Watching the rich pull away as the poor catch up

All the while, the middle class was forced to witness the rich pulling away from them on the upscale side, while the poor were catching up on the downscale side – as John Burn-Murdoch showed in his recent Data Points column (Burn-Murdoch 2025). If you think about that, you’ll see that it meant that the American Dream was working – just not for the middle class.
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The seeming merge of lower and middle classes into a general "underclass" vs 0.1% "upperclass" probably hurt pride, considering how classist their societies tend to be.
Tariffs, however, will not – indeed cannot – fix the plight of the American middle class. It is literally impossible.

  • Tariffs protect goods-producing sectors, but few Americans work in those sectors (about 8% in manufacturing and about 2% in farming); most have service jobs.
  • Tariffs cannot be put on service imports (tariffs are added as goods clear customs, but services don’t go through customs so they cannot be tariffed).
This means that tariffs harm most middle-class workers; they drive up goods prices without providing extra protection to service-sector jobs. I’m waiting to see how middle-class workers with service-sector jobs will react when they see that tariffs have driven up the prices of things they buy every week in Walmart.
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Hilarious that Americans still haven't realized they're a service economy. Still living in Cold War era.
Anti-trade policies as an excuse for not undertaking effective policies

So, tariffs won’t help the middle class. At the same time, the solutions used in other advanced economies to help the middle class won’t work since the US median voter is miles away from believing that more government and higher taxes would improve the situation.
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FairAndUnbiased

FairAndUnbiased

Brigadier
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luminary said:
A sensible and thorough discussion of why the US middle class is so angry.


The seeming merge of lower and middle classes into a general "underclass" vs 0.1% "upperclass" probably hurt pride, considering how classist their societies tend to be.

Hilarious that Americans still haven't realized they're a service economy. Still living in Cold War era.

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Under class vs upper class is very accurate. A software engineer only makes 5x (200k) what a janitor makes (40k) but 20x less than the average CEO (4M).
 
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luminary

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The prospect of losing access to China’s huge film market comes as U.S. studios have been trying to dig out of financial holes created by debt, the COVID-19 pandemic, Hollywood labor strikes and overspending during the streaming wars.

In recent years,
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against an increasingly robust slate of Chinese movies with culturally appealing themes. China’s film industry has become adept at churning out movies with high production values
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luminary said:
.Entertainment companies are struggling in ways nobody anticipated just a few years ago.
The TV business also hit a wall in 2023. After years of steady growth, the number of scripted series has started shrinking.

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Music may be in the worse state of them all.


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