I think the reality is that nimble adaptive companies won by quickly moving production and identifying suppliers in China (ie Amazon/Costco/Walmart/Target).
These are the same companies that are going to quickly identify suppliers and redirect operations to other countries that don’t have massive tarriffs. The same way large American companies adapted to globalization and the pandemic, you’re going to see a quick rapid adaptation where American goods are made in other countries faster than anyone thought possible.
msandford · 4h ago
I find this kind of article hilarious. "Numbers go up! You're not allowed to feel poor or think that there's a problem! Our number is bigger so you must be rich!"
I saw this 10-20 years ago when economists were telling people that inflation is low despite their feelings about inflation. "Our math is correct and you ignorant folks should be grateful for how this economy is managed."
Just because you can produce equations like physicists doesn't mean it's the same field. Ground truth in economics is just as much people as it is anything else.
bryanlarsen · 2h ago
In the 70's a middle class family had 1 car, a 1200 square foot house, ate out once a month, had less than a dozen sets of clothes per person (most of which were work clothes).
They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.
And because they felt secure. They did not feel in any danger of losing the essentials of housing, food, clothing and health care.
Now we have a lot more, but we've lost that feeling of security vis a vis housing & health care.
spacemadness · 2h ago
It’s always housing. We’re basically at economic war with each other. Home owners vs. non-home owners. Home owners get anxious when their house value doesn’t continue to rise past inflation. So they vote against policies that would help non home owners get into the market without drowning out of self interest.
CoastalCoder · 4h ago
I'm not an economist, but it It sounds like you're maybe conflating (mathematical models of economics) with (economics statistics).
It's one thing for their models to suck at fitting historical data or making bad predictions.
But I think your real beef is that their empirical statistics are touted as characterizing the middle class' lived experience, but don't?
ceejayoz · 4h ago
Do you consider it impossible for propaganda to impact public perception?
spacemadness · 2h ago
How anyone can look at housing costs and say everything is fine look the other way is insane to me. How delusional and/or out of touch do you have to be? And if you enter the market it’s nothing but massive stress and chasing promotions to simply pay some exorbitant mortgage.
wat10000 · 4h ago
That goes both ways, though. Just because you feel a certain way doesn't mean that's how it is. A lot of people's perceptions of economic performance are more connected to their opinion of the President than to any actual facts.
How people feel matters, of course, but that doesn't mean that the numbers are wrong if they don't match. People's feelings about inflation are not ground truth about inflation, just ground truth about feelings.
wormlord · 4h ago
The liberal intelligentsia pointed at graphs and said "it's the people who are wrong" all the way down into a fascist regime. So I don't think the strategy is a smart one.
wat10000 · 4h ago
And the conservative "intelligentsia" point at people and say "it's the graphs which are wrong" to the point of rejecting basic medicine and sabotaging the economy because people feel aggrieved.
I'm not happy with either one but at least the liberal one is connected to reality in some fashion.
wormlord · 4h ago
Sure yeah conservative leaders are evil most of us get that. My point is that if you want to WIN if you want to DEFEAT fascists you have to change tactics. You can't just ignore people's complaints and tell them they're wrong, they will go to the other side. Politics is transactional-- liberals think of quid pro quo as a dirty word, but why have democracy if you're not gonna get something out of it?
wat10000 · 3h ago
I totally agree, but I'm not seeing any alternative approach being taken besides declaring that the numbers are incorrect and the feelings are the real facts.
Much of our current political woes can be traced to widespread rejection of various facts. Figuring out how to remedy that (which has to include understanding that particular facts don't always give you the full picture, and people's feelings matter whether correct or not) is critical, but this sort of "lol stop talking about numbers you stupid scientists" response is not helpful.
wormlord · 3h ago
Bernie is a good example of the alternative approach. I personally don't think he's radical enough, but he promises people things and makes people feel listened to. If you can establish a two-way street where people feel seen and heard, they will start to believe you again when you show them numbers. Of course you can see the response of the Democratic party to progressives like Bernie and AOC. The democratic party isn't going to win until they abandon the neoliberal technocrat schtick, literally nobody likes it. (also who knows if we will even have elections anymore so whatever)
watwut · 4h ago
It is right wing who are currently busy installing a fascist regime. And supporting far right fascist parties abroad. And yes, it is entirely possible for republican voters to be wrong and for republican politicians lie about economy enough.
wormlord · 4h ago
See my other response in the thread. It's not about being more right than fascists. Fascists always lie that's their main strategy. If you want to defeat them though you cant just keep acting like a bunch of technocrats. You must project power, you must provide something transactionally for voters and make them feel good, and you must go after anti-democratic elements viciously without fear of being perceived as "too partisan" or authoritarian.
owebmaster · 4h ago
> I find this kind of article hilarious. "Numbers go up! You're not allowed to feel poor or think that there's a problem! Our number is bigger so you must be rich!"
When US americans got filthy rich, can the US americans that did not made it rich with the help of globalization complain that the world is taking advantage of them? Go fight your oligarchs, start a revolution.
Yeah this completely ignores the fact that many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"
watwut · 4h ago
The people you talk about are consistently voting for more police state, for more social atomization and for higher cost of living. They see empathy, help to others and cooperation as negatives. Those are just facts.
As for working with hands rather then pushing numbers in spreadsheet, most people do not want to work as workers in factories - that is based on surveys. That includes tradesmen.
wormlord · 4h ago
Damn maybe if the democrats didn't kill any progressive or grassroots momentum, or ceded ground to conservatives on issues like the border (Kamala endorsing building the wall) they wouldn't have hollowed out their base of support and lost to fascists.
No comments yet
mrguyorama · 3h ago
>many people would rather work on making things with their hands that they can physically see, rather than pushing numbers around on a spreadsheet.
So why aren't they making bank in the trades? Why aren't they learning a craft? Why instead are they yelling that we should start digging coal again, an economically nonsensical thing to do? Nobody wants to buy coal, not even the people who happily buy oil and natural gas.
Welders make good money. Plumbers are essential workers who literally keep shit flowing. Parts of my family work in construction, forestry, trucking, general contracting, all classic machismo jobs that pay well for effort and experience. All essential industries. All in constant need of more workers.
The main problem seems to be that even the good "low education" jobs still require you to move to where people are. There are no jobs in dying towns because there is no economic activity in rural towns when the main income source is welfare.
wormlord · 3h ago
From what I have seen, personally, the younger guys that would follow in their dad's footsteps and enter trades do not because of a few reasons:
1. Their dads tell them to go to college because trades are hard on your body.
2. For whatever reason, their kids end up really lazy. Doing drugs and trying to live life the easy way, ending up in their late 20s still living at home with their parents and not having any skills.
3. They join the trades but their coworkers are extremely toxic. Either always starting fights, being racist, shitting on apprentices. One guy told me a story of how a disgruntled coworker got kicked off a job site only to come back with his AR. Needless to say that guy has been trying to pivot into civil engineering instead of concrete work.
It's a bit of a rabbit hole to go into, but I think that the reason is that the idea of "every generation having a better life than the last" is easier said than done. Parents in the trades who want their kid to be white collar workers end up sorely disappointed when they don't give their kid any of the advantages that white collar worker parents did-- early childhood education, summer camps, SAT prep, etc. Or when their geographical location doesn't have decent white collar jobs. The kid ends up not prepared for either type of work.
If a lot of these jobs were better unionized (I know many already are), there would be no need to view them as "stepping stones" to a better life. You could have several generations all working the same trade, making good livings.
mensetmanusman · 4h ago
Globalization played a role but so did bad policy.
When the Obama administration didn’t respond to China dumping below-cost solar on the US, I know many technologists who lost their job and career in the US because they couldn’t compete with companies that didn’t have to follow environmental protection rules.
Americans are addicted to artificially low prices that put the burden of costs on future generations who have to clean up a huge mess.
jordanb · 16m ago
Globalization was a policy!
There was always this doublespeak that came to trade deals where they say "globalization is inevitable and uncontrollable and therefore we must make these trade deals to facilitate and guide it to be good."
Of course if it's an inevitable force of nature then it does not need to be facilitated by nor can it be controlled by trade deals. There's no enabling legislation for gravity.
robotcapital · 4h ago
The article's point isn't that globalization (or policy) didn't play a role, it's that the premise of middle class downfall is false to begin with. See the section under the header "The American middle class was never hollowed out".
FuriouslyAdrift · 3h ago
The middle class of the 1980s/1990s are the poor of today... the middle class of today are different people (and probably would have been upper class professionals in the past)
dullcrisp · 2h ago
Well we’re all different people, which is why they’re looking at median incomes. Unless the problem is that these are different people?
mystified5016 · 4h ago
You act as if it's an active, deliberate choice to only buy the cheapest possible thing.
The hollowing out of the middle class means most Americans are forcibly dependent on the cheapest possible goods because they don't have disposable income.
It's a vicious cycle and the average consumer is not at fault. Most people would like to buy domestically, but domestic goods are either simply not available or not affordable.
owebmaster · 4h ago
> When the Obama administration didn’t respond to China dumping below-cost solar on the US
What should other countries do against VC tech dumping?
mensetmanusman · 1h ago
Whatever they want, it’s their country.
smt88 · 4h ago
What exact job title was lost in the US because of Chinese solar manufacturing and mining?
By your logic, Tesla (equally dependent on Chinese pollution and mining) wouldn't employ any technologists.
daniel_reetz · 4h ago
I've purchased equipment from scrapped solar factories in the Bay Area. Tons of people lost jobs and not just technologists.
FuriouslyAdrift · 3h ago
From someone who lived through the first wave of disruptions (agriculture going to Mexico and auto manufacturing getting disrupted by Japan/moving to Canada/Mexico) in the 1980s/1990s (earlier agreements with Canada then NAFTA), then the second disruption (textiles, light industrial, then everything going to China) in the 2000s (China most favored nation status and WTO) in a heavy industrial/ag state (Indiana) and seeing everyone they knew get wiped out over those 15-20 years...
I can say the sentiment comes from the people who USED to be middle class that are no longer.
The people who are middle class today are rarely the same people.
fooblaster · 3h ago
I wish the author would have done the due diligence of questioning why his data might not have the full story.
- Looking at income without looking at working hours can mask the fact that working more hours looks like income growth at the expense of quality of life.
- where is this money going? Housing spending apparently has not grown, but are these same workers building equity or renting?
- what amount of income is spent on healthcare vs 50 years ago?
- Other quality of life factors? What are low income workers actually getting with their increased wages?
- Is the way with which we characterize inflation giving an incomplete picture of the experience of all income classes (the rich and the poor don't buy the same things, and prices don't shift evenly)
yesfitz · 3h ago
What bothers me about using GDP and Wages as a denominator or a measure of progress is that it ignores the impact of things becoming more expensive (except for inflation adjustments).
In fact, if we paid more for everything except imports, GDP would grow and it would look like we weren't importing as much. If we paid less for imports over the years, and then used them to generate a lot more money (e.g. a computer), it would look like imports were of shrinking importance.
With wages, the OECD definition of "Disposable Household Income"[2] is all income minus taxes, mandatory contributions, and interest on loans. So what isn't excluded? Rent. Childcare. Healthcare. Things that have dramatically increased in price (and also increased GDP).
We can measure everything in dollars, but that doesn't mean that the goods and services represented by those dollars are fungible.
The first comment asks the important question: Why, "despite all of this prosperity, do so many Americans still feel angry, disillusioned and frankly, even cheated"?
One thing which can't be captured by these numbers (no matter how accurate) is when people end up settling for something perceived to be of lower value. So for instance, it might be that my income has gone up faster than the cost of the things I'm buying, but I'd rather buy a house (out of reach) than buy rent.
idle_zealot · 4h ago
> One thing which can't be captured by these numbers (no matter how accurate) is when people end up settling for something perceived to be of lower value
This is always going to happen so long as wealth inequality isn't addressed.
MaxPock · 4h ago
Globalization made America very very rich just that the wealth was not shared with the Americans
FuriouslyAdrift · 3h ago
The finance sector and those that primarily hold capital got rich... everyone else, not so much.
Basically, we mortgaged our future for cash today.
blueflow · 4h ago
This article is standing out because it is about American politics and yet didn't make me want to throw up. Whatever this author is doing different is worth copying.
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
and re-industrialization won't save it
we can't possibly compete with (much) cheaper overseas labor, tariffs will do nothing but exclude the US from this cheap labor while other countries continue to benefit from it
eventually more of it will be automated anyway, and areas that saw booms from cheap labor will face similar class crises
there's also this idea that maybe our standard of living needs to regress some ("2 dolls instead of 30"), but you're insane if you believe that this can happen without significant strife and political upheavals... we're already at a point where many young americans feel as though they'll never be able to buy a house
the only "clean" path I can see out of this is some form of universal basic income, which likely has many problems to figure out, but at least doesn't treat humans like fuel for operating machinery
hparadiz · 4h ago
I recently was looking at a 4 speaker switch on monoprice. It was $20 two months ago. Now it's $40. It occurred to me that the parts in this speaker switch amounted to be $2 of raw parts. The simplest of plastic pieces with basic copper wires and metal screws. Yet they were shipping it here and forcing American consumers to pay $20 in taxes instead of possibly claiming an almost $36 profit margin by paying $2 of taxes on raw parts and assembling it here. Now I know it hasn't been long enough but these are the types of opportunities that are now available in the economy. If an assembling plant is there then that creates opportunities downstream to in-source even the raw parts too. Anyway that's just been where my mind goes about these things recently. I generally support free markets.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
1) Labor will be a lot more expensive if assembly is done in the US, and since parts are cheap, labor will likely be the biggest expense.
2) Working at assemblying cheap shit is bottom of the barrel work that people only do when they are desperate. It's either work or starve. It's why those jobs are outsourced to where labor is extremely cheap.
I am not from the US, but I read these posts with some mild amusement, because there is poetry that I am unable to capture.
Like, the goal of most countries is escaping the middle income trap and becoming advanced economies, and now people in the richest, most advanced economy there is want a regression to have assembly sweatshops instead of an advanced economy based on services and finance.
The funny part is that people that advocate for that wouldn't want in a million years to work in an assembly sweatshop. They count that someone else will do the job. Maybe immigrants, before they are deported to some concentration camp in Central America.
dullcrisp · 2h ago
On the other hand we always rail against exploitative overseas labor practices here. Maybe this is actually a very progressive policy. We can all spend one day a week assembling electronics like Marx would have wanted.
micromacrofoot · 2h ago
I'll assemble electronics 5 days a week if I own part of the company. That is what Marx wanted. Apple generates $10 million+ per employee right now.
dullcrisp · 2h ago
And they offer equity compensation so things are looking pretty good
micromacrofoot · 29m ago
to assembly line workers?
SpaceCoaster · 3h ago
US manufacturers response to 25% tariffs on washing machines was to raise their prices by exactly 25%. $80 million was collected in tariffs, $2 billion was paid by US consumers in increased prices. Increased prices caused a reduction in units sold. US manufacturers increased profits on reduced sales led them to close plants, lay people off and fund share buybacks. Chinese manufacturers avoided the tariffs by moving production to Vietnam and increasing US prices. Net result, higher prices and reduced employment.
wat10000 · 1h ago
Are you going to make an investment to seize that opportunity when you don't know if your $2 in parts might become $50 overnight because the President woke up with economics on his mind?
micromacrofoot · 4h ago
How much more do you think it will cost for Americans to assemble? (at least double but more likely 5 times considering other factors like healthcare, environmental and safety regulations)
What do you think happens when China and other countries lose manufacturing capacity to US re-shoring... they will seek to regain elsewhere. Guess where most of the raw materials for electronics come from... it's not the US. This can't be redistributed.
Manufacturing reshoring is not an answer, it's a delay. You spend tons of capital getting it back and then it dies in 10 years anyway.
Simultaneously, everyone in charge thinks the US population needs to increase. It doesn't math out.
surgical_fire · 2h ago
> everyone in charge thinks the US population needs to increase.
Of course they do. With less people the pool of available workers is reduced, and this gives labor an edge.
Those in charge thinks that this is very icky. They would rather keeping the underclass desperate enough.
watwut · 4h ago
> Yet they were shipping it here and forcing American consumers to pay $20 in taxes instead of possibly claiming an almost $36 profit margin by paying $2 of taxes on raw parts and assembling it here
You assume that salary of people involved in putting the speaker together (or more likely robotic automatization) would amount to 2$ per speaker?
hparadiz · 3h ago
No no. $2 for the tax on raw parts and then there's $36 of profit per unit to work with. Potentially. Just a thought experiment.
ReptileMan · 4h ago
Cheap labor is a drug. And the west one way or another got hooked on it. But it should be the opposite - labor should be relatively expensive or we will never innovate or automate things.
spacemadness · 2h ago
“This is an increase of 50% since the early 70s. I wish it had been more, of course, and it has its ups and downs, but 50% is nothing to sneeze at.”
These are the same companies that are going to quickly identify suppliers and redirect operations to other countries that don’t have massive tarriffs. The same way large American companies adapted to globalization and the pandemic, you’re going to see a quick rapid adaptation where American goods are made in other countries faster than anyone thought possible.
I saw this 10-20 years ago when economists were telling people that inflation is low despite their feelings about inflation. "Our math is correct and you ignorant folks should be grateful for how this economy is managed."
Just because you can produce equations like physicists doesn't mean it's the same field. Ground truth in economics is just as much people as it is anything else.
They felt well off, because they were doing fabulously well compared to the 30's which were still lived memory.
And because they felt secure. They did not feel in any danger of losing the essentials of housing, food, clothing and health care.
Now we have a lot more, but we've lost that feeling of security vis a vis housing & health care.
It's one thing for their models to suck at fitting historical data or making bad predictions.
But I think your real beef is that their empirical statistics are touted as characterizing the middle class' lived experience, but don't?
How people feel matters, of course, but that doesn't mean that the numbers are wrong if they don't match. People's feelings about inflation are not ground truth about inflation, just ground truth about feelings.
I'm not happy with either one but at least the liberal one is connected to reality in some fashion.
Much of our current political woes can be traced to widespread rejection of various facts. Figuring out how to remedy that (which has to include understanding that particular facts don't always give you the full picture, and people's feelings matter whether correct or not) is critical, but this sort of "lol stop talking about numbers you stupid scientists" response is not helpful.
When US americans got filthy rich, can the US americans that did not made it rich with the help of globalization complain that the world is taking advantage of them? Go fight your oligarchs, start a revolution.
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
This article ignores alienation, cost of living, social atomization, enshittification, the police state, and many other factors that contribute to everyone feeling like shit. The liberal intelligentsia need to learn that voters don't care about their numbers and charts, education has been hollowed out and the populace is going to respond to material promises and aggression. Not "hmm well did you consult my graph??"
As for working with hands rather then pushing numbers in spreadsheet, most people do not want to work as workers in factories - that is based on surveys. That includes tradesmen.
No comments yet
So why aren't they making bank in the trades? Why aren't they learning a craft? Why instead are they yelling that we should start digging coal again, an economically nonsensical thing to do? Nobody wants to buy coal, not even the people who happily buy oil and natural gas.
Welders make good money. Plumbers are essential workers who literally keep shit flowing. Parts of my family work in construction, forestry, trucking, general contracting, all classic machismo jobs that pay well for effort and experience. All essential industries. All in constant need of more workers.
The main problem seems to be that even the good "low education" jobs still require you to move to where people are. There are no jobs in dying towns because there is no economic activity in rural towns when the main income source is welfare.
1. Their dads tell them to go to college because trades are hard on your body. 2. For whatever reason, their kids end up really lazy. Doing drugs and trying to live life the easy way, ending up in their late 20s still living at home with their parents and not having any skills. 3. They join the trades but their coworkers are extremely toxic. Either always starting fights, being racist, shitting on apprentices. One guy told me a story of how a disgruntled coworker got kicked off a job site only to come back with his AR. Needless to say that guy has been trying to pivot into civil engineering instead of concrete work.
It's a bit of a rabbit hole to go into, but I think that the reason is that the idea of "every generation having a better life than the last" is easier said than done. Parents in the trades who want their kid to be white collar workers end up sorely disappointed when they don't give their kid any of the advantages that white collar worker parents did-- early childhood education, summer camps, SAT prep, etc. Or when their geographical location doesn't have decent white collar jobs. The kid ends up not prepared for either type of work.
If a lot of these jobs were better unionized (I know many already are), there would be no need to view them as "stepping stones" to a better life. You could have several generations all working the same trade, making good livings.
When the Obama administration didn’t respond to China dumping below-cost solar on the US, I know many technologists who lost their job and career in the US because they couldn’t compete with companies that didn’t have to follow environmental protection rules.
Americans are addicted to artificially low prices that put the burden of costs on future generations who have to clean up a huge mess.
There was always this doublespeak that came to trade deals where they say "globalization is inevitable and uncontrollable and therefore we must make these trade deals to facilitate and guide it to be good."
Of course if it's an inevitable force of nature then it does not need to be facilitated by nor can it be controlled by trade deals. There's no enabling legislation for gravity.
The hollowing out of the middle class means most Americans are forcibly dependent on the cheapest possible goods because they don't have disposable income.
It's a vicious cycle and the average consumer is not at fault. Most people would like to buy domestically, but domestic goods are either simply not available or not affordable.
What should other countries do against VC tech dumping?
By your logic, Tesla (equally dependent on Chinese pollution and mining) wouldn't employ any technologists.
I can say the sentiment comes from the people who USED to be middle class that are no longer.
The people who are middle class today are rarely the same people.
- Looking at income without looking at working hours can mask the fact that working more hours looks like income growth at the expense of quality of life.
- where is this money going? Housing spending apparently has not grown, but are these same workers building equity or renting?
- what amount of income is spent on healthcare vs 50 years ago?
- Other quality of life factors? What are low income workers actually getting with their increased wages?
- Is the way with which we characterize inflation giving an incomplete picture of the experience of all income classes (the rich and the poor don't buy the same things, and prices don't shift evenly)
In fact, if we paid more for everything except imports, GDP would grow and it would look like we weren't importing as much. If we paid less for imports over the years, and then used them to generate a lot more money (e.g. a computer), it would look like imports were of shrinking importance.
With wages, the OECD definition of "Disposable Household Income"[2] is all income minus taxes, mandatory contributions, and interest on loans. So what isn't excluded? Rent. Childcare. Healthcare. Things that have dramatically increased in price (and also increased GDP).
We can measure everything in dollars, but that doesn't mean that the goods and services represented by those dollars are fungible.
1: Table 3 of https://www.bea.gov/sites/default/files/2025-03/gdp4q24-3rd.... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
One thing which can't be captured by these numbers (no matter how accurate) is when people end up settling for something perceived to be of lower value. So for instance, it might be that my income has gone up faster than the cost of the things I'm buying, but I'd rather buy a house (out of reach) than buy rent.
This is always going to happen so long as wealth inequality isn't addressed.
Basically, we mortgaged our future for cash today.
we can't possibly compete with (much) cheaper overseas labor, tariffs will do nothing but exclude the US from this cheap labor while other countries continue to benefit from it
eventually more of it will be automated anyway, and areas that saw booms from cheap labor will face similar class crises
there's also this idea that maybe our standard of living needs to regress some ("2 dolls instead of 30"), but you're insane if you believe that this can happen without significant strife and political upheavals... we're already at a point where many young americans feel as though they'll never be able to buy a house
the only "clean" path I can see out of this is some form of universal basic income, which likely has many problems to figure out, but at least doesn't treat humans like fuel for operating machinery
2) Working at assemblying cheap shit is bottom of the barrel work that people only do when they are desperate. It's either work or starve. It's why those jobs are outsourced to where labor is extremely cheap.
I am not from the US, but I read these posts with some mild amusement, because there is poetry that I am unable to capture.
Like, the goal of most countries is escaping the middle income trap and becoming advanced economies, and now people in the richest, most advanced economy there is want a regression to have assembly sweatshops instead of an advanced economy based on services and finance.
The funny part is that people that advocate for that wouldn't want in a million years to work in an assembly sweatshop. They count that someone else will do the job. Maybe immigrants, before they are deported to some concentration camp in Central America.
What do you think happens when China and other countries lose manufacturing capacity to US re-shoring... they will seek to regain elsewhere. Guess where most of the raw materials for electronics come from... it's not the US. This can't be redistributed.
Manufacturing reshoring is not an answer, it's a delay. You spend tons of capital getting it back and then it dies in 10 years anyway.
Simultaneously, everyone in charge thinks the US population needs to increase. It doesn't math out.
Of course they do. With less people the pool of available workers is reduced, and this gives labor an edge.
Those in charge thinks that this is very icky. They would rather keeping the underclass desperate enough.
You assume that salary of people involved in putting the speaker together (or more likely robotic automatization) would amount to 2$ per speaker?
TLDR Inflation does not exist.