alt Hacker News> Just reopening won't bring back the comparably high wages from that time period.
It's a start though. If the plant stays closed, those "comparably high wages" certainly aren't coming back. If the plant opens, there's a chance.
There's a lot of "letting the perfect be the enemy of the good" protecting a shitty status quo: "don't do that because it doesn't fix X," implicitly requires that one solution fix everything perfectly all at once.
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sn9 • 04/03/2025
That's a helluva defense of nuking our trade relationships and sparking a trade war.
Like it wasn't perfect but it sure was preferable to what's about to come.
We could have kept that and implemented policies that were far less painful and far more likely to increase wages.
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I'm not saying it has to be perfect.
I'm saying that this outcome will never exist because more has changed than just the plant closing. If we coupled "reopen the plant" with "the plant makes entirely new things" and "the plant trains local workers to take these jobs" and "the plant pays above local service/construction wages" and "the plant will be successful in geopolitical competition" and "the plant can do 10x the amount of business due to advances in automation to get to the same level of employment" and on and on.
We could solve _each_ of these problems, absolutely - but they are all interlocking parts of a wicked problem. Blowing up the economy and threatening a global recession won't actually solve any of these.