We’re Workers Too
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From an economic standpoint, governments look at citizens as workers, consumers or both. Most people, of course, are both: we work and earn, and we spend. Our dual economic roles inform the core of the affordability discussion at the center of current politics. For as long as everyone but the oldest of us can remember, both major parties have focused on and messaged to the individual as homo consumerus. Clinton promised that tariff-eliminating ‘free trade’ pacts like NAFTA and the WTO would improve our living standards by making imported goods cheaper. On that point, if the prices of imported stuff at Wal-Mart is a good indicator, he seems to have been mostly right. But Clinton had no good answer to protectionists who worried about offshoring the good manufacturing jobs that propped up the economy of the industrial Midwest. Cheaper prices are well and good, but the unemployed can’t buy anything. Trump promised to and claims to have reduced not only…
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