Does anyone else think it’s weird all the domestic manufacturing jobs obsessives don’t seem that interested in producing housing? The thing you absolutely have to make in the U.S., there is a severe shortage of it, a ton of pent up demand, and opportunities for good paying jobs producing it?
Excellent point. However, MAGA is based in rural/exurban areas, and cities are where the housing shortages are. They hate cities and want nothing to do with them.
It's a difficult business to scale and create monopolies in. It can make lots of millionaires but not many billionaires.
This is because it's all PTSD from covid, they think we wouldn't have had shortages if we only Made Things Here so now they will seal the USA in a bubble forever. It's evermasking for nation states. Of course houses don't count
hadn't noticed, good point
ah wait! no, i do remember something about this! cayimby.org/news-events/...
This was also the only plausible legitimate “inflation” complaint that we heard last year, even though Fed policy under Biden made it worse and these Trump tariffs are going to absolutely eviscerate building.
Like wouldn’t this country be better off with a bunch more union electricians as opposed to guys soldering toasters?
Can't blame dirty foreigners for all that, so not gonna work for his political message. But also, go ahead and look up the completion rate for union apprenticeships. Its fuckin abysmal. The jobs are there for people who want good wages working hard with their hands. Americans do not want them.
Apprenticeship completion rate is about 34%. I would guess a number of them leave when they find permanent employment. College grads are about 45% after 6 years.
Yup. Abysmal. Lower completion rates than college. If they were finding jobs in the trades we wouldn't be this short on trades people.
They want us to die instead. Problem solved.
A common belief on the right is that mass deportations will drive down house prices.
I heard this during the campaign. I know it’s bunk but I’m just curious what the rationale is (besides xenophobia lunacy). The stereotype is that 20 migrant workers will pile into a two bedroom, two bath.
They believe both. They believe that there are so many migrants that they are piling 20 of them into each and every housing unit available, which is why mass deportation is necessary.
🤦🏼♀️ Six impossible things before breakfast.
Which is complete BS. The foreign students sleeping three to a room in basement suites are NOT the reason you can’t buy a house. They are not competing in the same market.
I think it's hard to understand Republican behavior, until you realize that they aren't interested in "solving problems" - they're mostly interested in performing cruelty to people they hate. They don't want Those People to have housing, or affordable goods. They want them to suffer, and die.
Logging and modern sawmills don't really employ that many people and are difficult to set up. There's not a surplus of guys in rural areas who know how to run a head rig or maintain highly automated mills Meanwhile the Chinese just stopped all US log exports, so coastal states, esp. Alaska are boned
No, see, it’s part of the plan. Trump is going to clear cut the entire National Forest system of California, Oregon, and Washington. Oh, wait, but he has no industry incentives, he gutted the Biden infrastructure and IRA and the mills will take years to put back online. Whoops!
people mythologize manufacturing jobs as savior of the white working class, people see actually-existing construction jobs as for immigrants
I mean it’s also that they’re stupid but yeah
it's silent but always there - like p in pterodactyl
The 2000-2005 shift of manufacturing workers to housing construction was seen as a demotion.
Real fight for the ethnic identity of off-site housing construction jobs.
and theres no push to actually modernize american construction, so much of it is in the stone age compared to peer nations
And a lot of that is just downstream of having a batshit immigration system lol
There’s definitely political limits on how immigration policy can be formulated but at the same times it’s actually crazy how most politicians and experts ultimately opt for a system where only extremely extremely extremely exceptional people can immigrate
Doesn’t help that like we often talk about you know, the tiny share of immigrants who develop scientific breakthroughs who are constantly being fought over by global institutions rather than like, Central Americans to fill in “missing middle” skilled labor like high end multifamily construction
The EU was blessed by merging Soviet technical education and western actually having an economy
yeah, the thing is that the kind of immigration the economy needs the most is Bulgarian elevator technicians, but for whatever reason they're just completely absent from the discussion
But that means company CEOs will actually have to invest in their own companies.
Not weird at all, as they already have houses. What, did you think they cared about people?
It's grift all the way down, with the evil onanist delusion of Yarvin draped over it like a cum stained trench coat, the occupant of which thinks it makes them look like a totally normal businessman.
You don’t need housing if you’re forcing the population into abject poverty..?
if everyone had a house they might not want to sleep in the shoe factory
🎯🎯🎯🎯🎯
They are building our new housing in detainment centers. I wish I was joking
Maybe they don’t think these jobs are masculine enough 🤷
not giving a shit about construction jobs is kind of a refutation of the idea that its about gender. it is legit a Juche self-reliance thing I think. Trump doesnt like supply chains.
It’s about the macho vibes of blue collar work. Republicans are culture warriors, not economists
You can't get more macho and blue collar than construction.
That's because housing (and real estate generally) is easily the worst type of domestic manufacturing to be in, it's a miserable slog of legal troubles, permit hell, and uncertainty where a normal factory is essentially permanently making money. If you could build 600 houses like you do parts, ez.
Trump’s coalition is full of nearly every stripe of NIMBY except for hardcore left NIMBYs.
Good question but there's a flaw in your logic: these people want there to be an underclass of suffering people, and an even lower class destitute people. Because the point is not a cohesive economic strategy or the public benefit; the point is the cruelty.
I do. I think about the good paying jobs that Americans want are construction jobs, not manufacturing ones but we’re going to war mostly with ourselves in the name of the manufacturing ones. Just proves how stupid and out of touch Trump is.
They want slavery. You can put a lot of slaves into very little housing
They want us to want houses , but not be able to have them. The ruling class wants to keep the workers struggling to stay above water. It's easier to maintain control if we're fighting each other for scraps while they take everything for themselves.
Without needing a factory…
I mean we could have a lot more factory built housing! Industry just needs a lot more investment.
construction materials and prefab housing are great bc the fact that they are relatively low value density means American manufacturing can be competitive due to shipping costs even with high labor costs and a free trade regime
vermodhomes.com Case in support of point.
See, but you own the factory, nobody can tell you what to do within its four walls - but if you're trying to build 600 new buildings it's basically impossible with the 85 layers of bureaucracy and legalese necessary to build each one, and they're all separate.
Part of thinning out process.
No it's okay he just EO'd opening half of all National Forrests for lumber. I'm serious
He tried this with the Tongass last time and it didn't even create jobs. Not a lot of sawmill capacity for it and modern sawmills don't want old-growth logs. Also can't export logs from public lands, not that it matters because China just cut us off completely.
He's still gonna try, this great leap backwards shit is just going to destroy federal land and provide nothing.
USFS timber sale approvals already took a long time to approve and he just fired a bunch of their employees. Lumber futures are going down because he's ruining the rest of the housing supply chain. I wouldn't doom about USFS being clearcut quite yet.
This! God this. 10 minutes of forest economics reading would show anyone why this won't work.
bsky.app/profile/madd...
They all think we're going back to making vacuum cleaners, even though if we did those vacuums would be something in the order of $1000. Just go back to 1985 - a midlevel Kenmore canister run thru an inflation calculator is about $1000. But now all the tooling to make them is gone too.
Robots will be doing most of the manufacturing if it comes to it.
If you produce housing at the level needed, you screw over the base of corporate landlords. It should be at the focus of every economic initiative… they think it’s solved by kicking out migrants, which… how? lol.
build all the houses you want but if people can’t afford it it still doesn’t matter- we have an entire empty ritz carlton in portland that is being foreclosed but it ain’t soaking up houseless residents
They need homelessness as a stick.
It's also part of real estate, which is the legitimate field of business where Trump spent the longest time. It's how his dad made the fortune that Trump lived off of until he became a game show host.