The same is true for many people, e.g. the Japanese. You’re prohibited from digging up the bones of ancient empties and doing DNA testing to see if they’re korean.
As recently as the 1980s, 70% of domestic clothing was made in the U.S., including by brands like Gap and JC Penny. Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s? Is the cheap, disposable, foreign made “fast fashion” we have today better?
If you watch [this Climate Town video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CkgCYPe68Q), then absolutely not, the disposable fast fashion we have today is not better. It's cheaper, but it's not higher quality, it requires trans-continental shipping, and it absolutely gets thrown away in ridiculous amounts.
Overall, it's worse in just about every metric other than "I can get this fun shirt online at 2am for $6."
Yes, if you forced 2025 americans to live like americans did in the 1980s there would be mass riots. Quality of life has gone up signicantly in many ways.
> Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s (compared to now)?
Nope.
I had plenty of hand me downs, but the majority of stuff I owned lasted for years and years, and I beat TF out of my clothes; so getting three or four years out of a pair of jeans was an achievement. I remember being constantly upset with my parents because when I would ask to get something new, they would tell me I had to wear out the stuff I already had first.
So at the time, paying more for a pair of Levi's or Nike's were worth it because they were built to last for years, not months like they are now. I was in college during the late 90's and even then I had three pairs of shoes that lasted my entire 4 years in college.
Back then stuff was durable and was meant to last for years. The "fast fashion" and "disposable fashion" trends essentially ended monopolies that brands had because kids weren't wearing stuff for more than a few months before discarding it or having it fall apart so they can wear the latest thing.
The textile industry in the US was synonymous with worker abuse and sweatshop conditions. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire is the canonical example. Heavily dependent on immigrant labor.
Well into the 1990s, we made shirts and canned soup in Oregon, a place that had very few immigrants at the time. My wife's dad's family came here before the American revolution and he worked at a Heinz soup plant until NAFTA.
This is an answerable question: the median American household allocates 2-3% less of its household income to clothing in 2025 than it did in the 1980s. That's about $2000, for the median household.
But now both adults need to work to afford a detached house, and the labour participation rate of middle aged men is at an all time low. So, the answer is probably no. I'm sure lots of people would pay and extra $2k for clothing if housing, food, health care, and cars were at similar ratio to wages from the 1980s.
The housing cost thing is generally a canard (houses cost more, but people live in much larger houses than they did before --- cost burden changed, but so did preferences) but that's completely besides the point of whether people in the US do or don't benefit from more efficient clothing production. The jobs supporting inefficient clothing production were not holding up the economy.
I don't think clothing manufacturing is more efficient overseas, it is just cheaper labour. And it is cutting off income stream to lower-skill/intelligence workers in the "advanced" countries. You can see that in the number of working-age men who are no longer in the working population. Not everyone can get a phd and do "advanced, high-value, cutting edge work", any more than everyone could dunk like Michael Jordan if they just trained hard enough.
Also, the financial environment that created "cheap clothes" is also the environment that suppressed middle class wages, and drove the cost of housing up ridiculously. The two are linked. Pretending they aren't is just fantasizing.
Finally, while people are financing larger new houses, the old small houses and apartments are still ripping upward in price. It isn't like people can just choose to pay 1980's prices for 1980's housing stock. They are stuck paying much inflated 2025 pricing for 1980's housing stock.
Today it's also the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month. You didn't buy in the 80s stuff to be obsoleted in a few months. And because most of the people cannot afford every few months a new wardrobe made of (halfway) quality items, today's taste requires fast fashion garbage. So here we are, and we can get back to sanity only when we get rid of the influencer-led economy, good luck with that.
I'm amazed how much of the internet economy has turned out to be advertising. People complain about ads when they watch TV, but they'll go out of their way to spend hours watching ads on social media. And lots of kids dream about being an influencer, basically an advertiser, for their work.
One reason why I have no interest in going to facebook anymore is that the vast majority of people's social media activity on there nowadays is advertising... something. People showing their latest purchases, vacations, experiences, etc, all basically showing something they spent money on.
> the desire of the customers, as pushed by social media, to follow a fashion changing almost every month
A lot of it is top down, pushed onto customers by the industry. It's very hard to find timeless classics these days, we are given trendy bits that change every year to speed up obsolescence so they purposely look kitschy.
The desire of costumers is to go well beyond psychotic measures in order to save the tiniest amount of money on a purchase, rather than purchase domestic or locally produced for a bit more expensive. And that applies almost worldwide, not only to Americans.
Plenty of people would buy domestic goods if they were “a bit more expensive”. I’d say 5% on a large ticket item or 15-20% on a small item would be “a bit”.
Rarely is “made in the USA” just a bit more expensive in my experience.
For the very small ticket item you might even have to pay 100% more if you want to support your local community or your nation. Which should be fine, it's just a few dollars. For big ticket item 15-20% is acceptable. But people only think about their own purse.
Frequency matters. A few dollars extra / 100% extra on some small thing you buy a handful of times per year? Sure. If it’s a small ticket item you buy every day, most people aren’t going to be able to spend an extra thousand dollars per year on every single category of thing they buy; they just don’t have that kind of money.
If it's food then it's perfectly acceptable to spend an extra thousand dollars per year to support your community or nation. And your own health.
Except for food, I don't know what anybody would spend money on which isn't utilities, rent or gas. All of which you cannot choose between domestic or imported.
>Did Americans have an impoverished standard of living in the 1980s?
Yes. Ask some of your older relatives who remember that time how often they got hand-me-downs or patched old clothes up and compare it to the wardrobe of an average income American today.
This is not evidence for what you are saying. Handing down stuff, including clothes doesn't equate to poverty, sometimes the opposite. Better clothes also last longer. Check out the Sam Vimes theory of socioeconomic unfairness. To take this a little literally, for much of my young adulthood, I wore my dad's old snow boots, not because I was poor, but because they were too well made, even at an old age, not to use.
Choosing to buy more, cheaper, clothes is as much an example of consumerism, as anything else.
That's not impoverished; it's just not wasteful. Half my kids' clothes are from Once Upon A Child, and most of my younger one's are hand-me-downs from the older one. For that matter, I'm wearing 20 year old gym shorts right now.
The fault is firmly with the consumer. People are addicted to cheap shit and consuming like crazy.
We had cheap clothes 10 years ago, then Shein and their ilk showed up with even cheaper clothes, and people flocked to them in droves.
And you can still buy good quality clothes, $120 shirts and $150 pants of good quality are readily available. But who wouldn't want to have 10 shirts and 5 pants instead?
Where can I find good quality (by this I mean durable) shirts for $120 and pants for $150? I’ve examined clothing in that price range and it’s virtually just as bad as $20 fast fashion: synthetic fibers mixed with cotton, poor stitching, loose weave on the fabric, etc.
If you have brand names for polo shirts, jeans, and chinos that are durable and long lasting, please share them because I can’t find them. I have yet to place a test order at Bill’s Khakis, I should do that.
So far (only six months in), Normal Brand (https://thenormalbrand.com/) has been good to me. Seems better quality, nothing I have is synthetics, well stitched.
This is correct. On average I go through a pair of jeans and a pair of hiking pants a year. 30 years ago I wore my dad's jeans quite a bit as a teenager, I remember even passing a driving test in them.
Perhaps, but if clothes are cheap, income is disposable and fashion is fast, why bother?
Other than jeans, shoes, socks and underwear, I haven't worn through or grown out of anything in forever, nothing to pass on really.
That said, the textile collection and resale industry is huge; stuff gets sorted, parts go to secondhand shops and charity, part gets baled up and exported, parts get recycled, etc. Same with electronics, it ends up in low-wage countries in Africa and south-Asia where there's thousands of people processing it.
Hand-me-downs are great. My youngest has some hand-me-downs he got from his older brother who got them from my neighbor’s son. Your kids don’t need new clothes.
> Most countries identify industry shortages and tailor their immigration needs to bring in people to fulfill those roles.
This makes no sense economically. Auctioning immigrant slots to the highest bidder should allocate those spots to where they'll be most valued in the economy. What the countries you seem to be describing are doing is industry-selective wage suppression.
When you are a smaller country that's more exposed to the international markets than the US, wage suppression is often good for the economy. High wages indicate lack of competitiveness, as foreign businesses can generate the same outputs cheaper than your businesses.
If we could measure externalities accurately and tax/subsidize businesses accordingly, visa auctions might lead to even more accurate wage suppression than immigration policy. But because we can't, auctions optimize the wrong measure. Some industries create more value than they can capture, while others create less.
Western countries don’t have the stomach to maintain “temporary” worker programs as such. Turkish workers in Germany were supposed to be temporary as well. In the U.S., H1B is still legally a “temporary (nonimmigrant)” but was turned into a gateway to permanent immigration by executive branch practice.
The H1 visa was created in 1952, and H1B was created in 1990. To this day, H1 visas are, in the actual statute, for temporary workers under 8 USC 1101: “H) an alien (i) [(a) Repealed. Pub. L. 106–95, § 2(c), Nov. 12, 1999, 113 Stat. 1316] (b) subject to section 1182(j)(2) of this title, who is coming temporarily to the United States to perform services…”
The INA has a provision that requires all temporary workers to have non-immigration intent. Moreover, it requires UCIS to presume immigrant intent if someone files an application for permanent residency, which would make the H1B deportable. The state department created “dual intent” decades ago as a legal fiction to allow H1 immigrants to skirt this provision of the law.
Congress accommodated that somewhat in 1990 and in 2000 (with AC21). But it’s all a hack on top of a kludge. The statue now exempts UCIS from being required to presume non-immigrant intent if someone files a permanent residency application. And AC21 allows extensions while a green card application is pending.
But nothing stops the administration from deciding a green card application constitutes immigration intent, or denying an extension. Congress has never changed the wording of the law—on paper it’s still a temporary worker program. A future administration could start treating it as such at any time.
> Hospitals and labs can’t afford to match tech spending to obtain H1Bs.
That's the point! You can train Americans to do those jobs. Visas should be reserved for truly exceptional workers that will create enormous value in the U.S., as opposed to those doing mundane skilled work who wills imply drive down wages for Americans.
I’ve changed my mind on dictators. Name one asian country that became prosperous without a phase where it was ruled by a highly authoritarian ruler?
Even in the west, the civil institutions that underpin democracy were mostly created under “enlightened despots” (or so I learned in AP Euro). You probably need a dictator to break the familial and clan ties and organizer the country around individuals interacting with the civil organs of the state.
Japan was like several european countries in having a monarch in the 19th-early 20th century who developed a modern centralized state, and then having war lead to democracy in the 20th century. Then you had McArthur rule as a dictator for seven years during which time he imposed major government reforms, including land reform and welfare reform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supreme_Commander_for_the_Alli.... After the end of occupation, a single party, LDP, held power for almost 40 years, from 1955-1993.
MacArthur was there till 1952 and was tasked with rebuilding, establishing a viable democratic government, then exiting. The majority of growth came after him.
Compare to Mao, Stalin, and other dictators of the era.
Isn't the rebuttal that these states merely were able to kickstart the import substitution process and could not produce endogenous economic progress without a developed country to borrow memes from?
I don’t think that’s a rebuttal but instead an orthogonal point. Lots of countries are stuck in dysfunctional situations where they can’t even copy progress from developed countries because of corruption, civil unrest, etc. A dictator can help cut through that.
India is the biggest democracy in the world. Bangladesh was a functional democracy for a good stretch until last year. At least on paper, Afghanistan and Iraq were democracies.
Afghanistan was almost never a democracy tho. It was mostly monarchies until 1973.. then a totalitarian state from 1978-ish until 1989… then mostly in civil war until 1996.. when it was again mostly a totalitarian state.. then it got invaded by the US in 2001.. until 2021 when it got again under a totalitarian state.
The word “modern” is misleading and confusing. Most “modern” people are tribalistic. What the author appears to mean is “western european.” People who have weak inter-familial ties, in comparison to most other people in the world, who organize themselves into tightly knit extended families.
That’s not quite an accurate description of the Princeton Study. What the study actually shows, if I’m thinking of the correct one, is that for the most part average americans agree with the elite. The results of the study are driven by the fact that when elites and average americans disagree, the politicians tend to side with the elites.
A prime example of this is the immigration system. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi... (“On the Ballot: An Immigration System Most Americans Never Wanted”). Americans never asked to import tens of millions of people from the third world. When Congress reformed the immigration system in 1965, they promised that wouldn’t happen. But for decades, there’s been a coalition of pro-foreigner liberals and pro-cheap-labor conservatives that have facilitated massive immigration that average americans never asked for.
Trump, ironically, is a reaction to the very thing the Princeton study identified.
> is that for the most part average americans agree with the elite. The results of the study are driven by the fact that when elites and average americans disagree, the politicians tend to side with the elites.
The case when everyone agrees doesn’t tell you anything. It’s only when people disagree that you can find who has actual power and in this case the general public has effectively zero actual meaningful power day to day.
Systematic voter suppression plus gerrymandering etc may win you rigged elections, but ultimately voting isn’t about the system in place it’s avoidance unrest. We’re entering uncharted territory with how strongly people disagree with what the government is doing, which is where the general public actually has a say, namely by destroying the existing power structures rather than voting. It’s not even a question of insurrection, not having kids plus 60’s style dropping out at scale is ruinous.
Either one results in an immediate liquidity crisis/credit crunch and the delegitimizing/insolvency of most institutions. The beginning of the COVID pandemic was, essentially, this.
I would add in "general bank run", but I imagine that they just... wouldn't let that happen. Ironically, an emergency "injunction" against withdrawals.
> The “protests” recently were tepid and nearly all elderly liberals with nothing better to do.
They set records for size and you know it. What do you mean by 'tepid', because they didn't riot? Would you acknowledge them as more valid if they had rioted, or declared angry tones that they had to be put down immediately?
> A big chunk of the country really wants mass deportations, and for the most part, folks in the broader left don’t care much to oppose it
Absolute BS. No matter what they do, you'll cook up some reasons to delegitimitze it. But I guess you have to, the moment you cease being useful to the GOP you'll become a target.
> They set records for size and you know it. What do you mean by 'tepid', because they didn't riot?
According to whom? I'm in the D.C. metro area, and the protests are far less noticeable than the 2017 pink hat protests or the 2020 riots. They organized a bunch of small protests all around the country so more people maybe participated, but the intensity is low even in DC.
> Absolute BS. No matter what they do, you'll cook up some reasons to delegitimitze it. But I guess you have to, the moment you cease being useful to the GOP you'll become a target.
I’m just observing. The anti-Trump resistance I know in real life have retreated literally and metaphorically to a bubble in BlueSky. I was at a conference recently, steeling myself to deal with PMCs complaining about Trump, and nobody said anything. People were in a great mood. The vibe shift is real. And your second point is genuinely conspiratorial and fantastical thinking.
Different goals, they are trying to influence congress which cares a lot more about local protests than the number of people showing up to DC. Going to DC is counterproductive for that kind of thing.
People agree on most things for sensible reasons. There’s no country where people are going to be ok legalizing murder in all situations. Similarly we aren’t going to randomly convert street signs to cuneiform or other language nobody speaks etc.
> You’re overestimating how much people care about any of this stuff. I’m in a blue state and I hear almost nothing about it other than from some overly empathetic people on facebook. The “protests” recently were tepid and nearly all elderly liberals with nothing better to do.
> A big chunk of the country really wants mass deportations, and for the most part, folks in the broader left don’t care much to oppose it
I’m not talking about one specific issue here but how much people in general dislike what’s happening. That includes Democrats, Republicans, and Independents.
I know multiple hard core Republicans since Gerald Ford who now dislike winning elections only slightly less than they dislike loosing them. As one put it ‘Democrats do a better job of fucking balancing the budget, what I am doing?’
> I know multiple hard core Republicans since Gerald Ford who now dislike winning elections only slightly less than they dislike loosing them. As one put it ‘Democrats do a better job of fucking balancing the budget, what I am doing?’
And I know multiple "blue by default" democrats who voted for Trump. My Muslim immigrant mom posted approvingly today about this Supreme Court decision, because she doesn't like that the courts have stymied Trump's agenda.
The GOP hasn’t been fiscally conservative since Coolidge. By the 1980s republicans paid lip service to the concept but couldn’t actually cut spending because they needed the FDR Catholic vote. Now with Trump, he doesn’t even need the lip service. If Gerald Ford Republicans are upset about what's happened to the party, they have only their own immigration policy to blame. The Trump GOP is the politically viable conservative party given our current demographics.
Trump is “still paying lip service to it” DODGE was a shit show but the sentiment still exists within the party it’s politicians ignoring what the base wants.
“The Tea Party movement focuses on a significant reduction in the size and scope of the government.” It resulted in a wave of Republicans getting elected who then completely ignored why they were there effectively killing the movement. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_Party_movement
> Now with Trump, he doesn’t even need the lip service.
He was speaking to Tea party events back in 2016, today he’s done with elections.
Trump did DOGE to get Elon on board. He wasn’t even talking about the budget deficit until then. And it wasn’t on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. In retrospect, the Tea Party’s popularity was probably because it was anti-Obama and his brand of government managerialism, not because of promises to balance the budget.
Any actual fiscal responsibility would be met with massive backlash and will never happen. In the America we live in today, the only way to be a viable political party is to buy votes from relevant groups, like Trump did to win Nevada with No Taxes on Tips.
> He wasn’t even talking about the budget deficit until then
His platform required it.
#6 “LARGE TAX CUTS FOR WORKERS, AND NO TAX ON TIPS!” needs smaller government. So it’s the same old platform with a different emphasis.
Or did you think he was suggesting extreme taxes on companies or wealthy people? Deficit spending runs into #3 “END INFLATION”, and he explicitly stated to “PROTECT SOCIAL SECURITY AND MEDICARE WITH NO CUTS, INCLUDING NO CHANGES TO THE RETIREMENT AGE”
Obviously the option to not even attempt large tax cut exists, but assuming the attempt was made while also trying to lower inflation the math requires less spending or major new taxes on who exactly?
> His platform required it... Or did you think he was suggesting extreme taxes on companies or wealthy people?
No, I figured he was proposing deficit spending, just like every GOP President in my lifetime. Trump's platform is like that of every third world politician that promises voters everything they want without anything they don't, and America is a third world country now.
Ahh you simply misunderstood then. Heavy deficit spending eventually = inflation, ie why it spiked during COVID and why inflation was higher at the end of Trump’s first presidency than the start of his second.
He’s been surprisingly consistent in at least make token efforts to do what he said he was aiming to do.
You’re conflating two different points: what’s true in reality, and what voters thought they were voting for. Trump’s platform is aimed at people who don’t understand that deficit spending leads to inflation. (It didn’t under Reagan or Bush.) Or, alternatively, they thought there was trillions of dollars of fat in the budget that could be cut without affecting services they want.
It’s like how Democrats think you can balance the budget and expand social spending by “taxing the rich a little bit more” (hand gesture). Counting on Americans to be innumerate is winning politics.
Things are kept vague so people can create their own narratives. But in 2024 he continued to used terms like “Drain the Swamp” that directly refer to downsizing government. So your argument is basically he had no intention of carrying though when he’s doing exactly what he said he would. Perhaps you may want to rethink what exactly you are basing that assumption on.
As to Democrats it’s not a hand wavy standpoint. Historically, taxing companies and wealthy represented a much larger fraction of the overall tax burden. ~Half of federal revenue came from companies in the 1950’s today it’s vastly lower. Changing that means lower taxes on yourself and or much lower deficits.
> But in 2024 he continued to used terms like “Drain the Swamp” that directly refer to downsizing government.
In this context, "drain the swamp" refers to downsizing the Democrat-voting civil service. It's chiefly an objection to the fact that, even when a Republican wins, the actual government is controlled by people who hate Republicans and try to undermine the elected administration's policies.
RCP has Trump at 45% approve, 51% disapprove, which is where Obama was for much of his second term. Biden was significantly below that for all but two short periods after 2021. So if people voted for Trump thinking he'd cut Social Security and Medicare and now are disappointed about it, it's not showing up in the polling.
> As to Democrats it’s not a hand wavy standpoint.
You could double the federal tax burden on everyone from Facebook program managers up to Mark Zuckerberg and not come close to closing the deficit, much less making room for universal healthcare and free college. But "we'll have generous government services and the rich people will pay for it" is the same sort of innumerate fantasy as "we'll build a wall and Mexico will pay for it."
Every European country today pays for its welfare state with heavy, broad-based taxes on the top 60%. If you're telling people that you can have a European-style welfare state without European-style middle classes taxes, then you're in RFK Jr. anti-vaxxer levels of denying reality.
> ~Half of federal revenue came from companies in the 1950’s today it’s vastly lower.
It was never more than about 30%, during World War II and immediately thereafter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_taxation_in_the_Uni.... It was back below 20% by the mid 1960s. But it's 2025, not 1955. The U.S. doesn't have the leverage to tax trans-national corporations the way it did when Europe's economy was obliterated by World War II.
The massive reduction of corporate income tax as a source of tax revenue has happened across the entire developed world.
> The total income of people in the top 1% that year was $3.3 trillion, and they paid $560 billion in income taxes
3.3 trillion * actually paying the current top tax 37% is an additional ~700 billion in revenue or roughly half the nominal deficit. I don’t think making the effective tax rate 37% vs nominally 37% is particularly unpalatable. (We can also quibble about the income definition used but that’s a separate issue.)
So 50% from wealthy + 50% from companies doesn’t seem ludicrous on the surface.
However actually balancing the books nominally means inflation on the 37T national debt is effectively paid off each year. That 700 ish billion @2% in ‘hidden’ revenue meaning just from wealthy tax payers we are breaking even in real terms. Debt then shrinks with growth in the overall economy.
> It was never more than about 30%
Corporate income taxes are only one category. Companies pay tariffs and fees etc. Ultimately all taxes are coming from individuals or organizations which is a meaningful distinction due to foreign stock ownership. When created half of payroll tax came from companies as essentially a tax on workers the other half reduced employe paychecks. Every time they increased the rate the same thing happened where employe paychecks shrank by half the increase.
Excluding 1/2 of payroll from corporate taxation actually makes the reduction in their tax burden much larger. This is really bad for the US population because of foreign owners.
> The massive reduction of corporate income tax as a source of tax revenue has happened across the entire developed world.
Lobbying works. However, companies do still pay quite a bit in taxes and can be forced to pay significantly more. Asian countries for example get about double from corporate income tax vs OECD. It’s a political choice not some impossible goal. https://www.oecd.org/en/data/datasets/global-revenue-statist...
Patents are both overprotective and underprotective. Out of a desire to screen out patent litigation that lacks merit, we have made the system unbelievably expensive for all but the most well funded litigants. That, in turn, has helped the biggest companies. Their freedom to infringe with impunity becomes part of the moat that helps preserve their market position.
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