I'm getting cancer from these two paragraphs. The generalizations they contain and the amount of utter nonsense within is making it hard for me to breathe.
You'll forgive me. Or maybe you won't. But I'm sick and tired of the total lack of empathy for folks who have played by the rules, only to be screwed by Globalism, then be labeled as Deplorable in a general sort of way.
The working class folks who have gotten the crap end of the Globalist stick aren't the type to play the victim. But what they see in public policy is all the attention and concern and (most importantly) the resources going toward the folks who are willing to take the most militant victim posture. And in Trump, they had a candidate who extended to THEM a degree of respect they hadn't experienced from the party and politicians who were living off what their grandfathers did for their grandfathers, while calling them "Deplorable". The folks here who don't get this are folks who just flat out don't want to get this, because it would mandate greater introspection if they did.
Stagnation in the west requires a different approach. The policies of Ford and Carter didn't end stagflation. Paul Volcker's Federal Reserve did. Populism will be just as ineffective as those two Presidents.
I understand your frustration, but attacking the symptoms isn't going to help.
The rise of the poor globally is directly proportional to the fall of the working class in the rust belt.
Take the textile industry for example, the bed rock of Industrial Revolution in Britain & in the West, this is a very labor intensive industry which employs a lot of people. The jobs in this industry has gone down by half post NAFTA.
Textile & apparel employment decreased sharply from 1,662,000 to around 750,000 between the period 1993 and 2007 (US Department of Labour - Bureau of Labour Statistics). Similarly automobile industry is gone from the rust belt compared to what once was. Most labor intensive industries will relocate to other countries taking into account the cheap cost of labor.
I have a lot of research material on this topic. If you look at the history of global growth, tariffs were always there. Freaking Nissan, the auto company, couldn't sell their cars to Europe because of tariffs. South Korea's miracle growth story was fueled by tariffs, import quota, etc. I am not justifying the same - I am saying there is no empirical evidence to prove that free trade lifts all boats or helps poor workers.
And another key aspect is that Non-College educated blue collar workers get a 10% premium in Mfg jobs compared to Service jobs as per current data available. Thus, this has been incredibly harder on the industrial workers - Unions have also declined & have no low bargaining power now that any corporation can threaten to move jobs to Mexico!
The only silver lining is the considerable growth of Service sector jobs (even accounting for outsourcing of some jobs) but that is not enough to make up for all Mfg jobs lost & in the future people would need college education to get better wages (with more decline in Mfg). Now tell me how is that possible with huge cost of college?
Mfg workers have got massively screwed in the last 20-30 years - Perhaps since the 1980 odd when Reagan started the Most favored nation status to China which Congress had to pass annually then !
