Welcome to reality. Other than convincing the Chinese to riot against THEIR economic system and demand a wage raise, this is the way it's going to be. Consumers demand higher salaries with one hand, and lower priced goods with the other. International trading and offshoring is everywhere and this process can not be stopped.
Who, exactly, do you suggest pays up for this difference in cost of labor? Will the consumers agree to pay more? Will the employees agree to be paid less? Or are we just going to do the easy thing and reach out to the pockets of the wealthy and take whatever money we need to close this gap?
My problem with this policy is that beyond being unjust - unless like comrade Jhhnn you believe it's all stolen from the public anyway - it is also irresponsible and unsustainable. You can fool yourself for so long but eventually the American worker IS competing with the Chinese worker, today in manufacturing and tomorrow in engineering. The sooner reality is accepted, the better off everyone will be.
Nice framing, particularly the part about reaching into the pockets of the wealthy.
It's not like this country was some sort of communist dictatorship prior to Reagan, when we did, in truth, reach much deeper into the pockets of the wealthy than today, and when we did a much better job of reducing the conflicts of interest so prevalent in the financial situation of today. We also had mechanisms other than taxes that promoted better circulation of money in the economy and wealth creation among the middle class, Unions and tariffs being chief among them.
What we're discovering, despite denials from those on the Right, is that cheap foreign goods and bigger lines of credit are insufficient compensation for the job loss of offshoring and automation. It shows in the radical redistribution of income from the lower 75% of workers to the top 1%, and in the acquisition of debt, both governmental and private.
As a democracy, we have the right and the responsibility to demand more from our own capitalists, and they have a greater responsibility to the society that protects their interests than they're currently willing to owe up to.
If we're expected to pay first world overhead to support our capitalist system in terms of housing, energy, food and whatever, we need to have the incomes to do that, and that simply can't be achieved if we invoke the false paradigm of competing directly with Chinese labor. Denied the mechanisms of tariffs and jobs where labor can organize, we have little choice other than imposition of higher taxes on America's wealthiest citizens.
They paid much higher taxes pre-Reagan, and also had much higher labor costs, but still managed to thrive, to be wealthy, and more than a few Americans managed to become wealthy at the same time.
As I've offered above, we can very much favor the interests of business by shifting taxation away from business itself and onto the ownership of business, and we can also increase the competitiveness of American business by moving burden of health insurance onto the govt, as well. We can take taxes out of the back end, the dividend and capital gains end, rather than the front end, the corporate end, to accomplish all that.
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