So your solution to protecting the middle class is to reduce their wages enough to keep those jobs from being outsourced? Seems to me that it would be hard to do that and still keep those jobs as middle class jobs, wouldn't it?
Help me out here. I'm having some trouble understanding your point.
I don't have the solution. The problem is wages for this type of work became uncompetitive in the world economy. You didn't necessarily ask for a solution, but a cause.
The solution generically speaking (in which the US really can't do with wages) is to make producing here in America less expensive to where we can make these things that were taken from us again. We have a numbers problem...all those unskilled jobs we had in the 50's and 60's started disappearing in the 70's and never came back (and a rewards system for non-producers that enable them to never produce ever in their lifetime if they choose), and now we have a sea of people who are not armed enough to make a middle class living nearly in the numbers as it did prior.
I personally think the receiving countries have to have their wages increase to where the savings is less attractive. That may take a generation or two to occur. Again, if you're talking purely wages - our labor costs have to go down if all other things are equal. It's that simple. If I can build a car for 50% less labor costs in China than I can in the US, it doesn't take a math major to figure out what I will investigate.
No sane person here is going to forcibly advocate making wages decrease. And unions certainly aren't going to advocate that either - moreover, unions seem to think that jobs should be guaranteed, even if the industry evolves where the worker is not needed any more. How sane is that? And here is your side, saying we have to hit companies and damn near every producer in this country hard with higher taxes and taking away subsidies etc, thereby making the situation even worse.
So, how do we reduce the cost of producing things here in America to offset the distinct disadvantage we have in labor costs while overcoming also the technological advances we're inventing today to reduce the human interaction to producing? After all, you don't have to pay a robot a single penny - robots don't get pensions and health insurance either. We wouldn't have robots building cars if the workers didn't cost so damn much money to put a bolt on a car. Forcing higher wages ain't going to work and never will. Then we lump higher taxes and costs on top of everything and you might as well call the moving vans and book a ship to China for all the manufacturing plants.
The jobs might disappear FOREVER. And in some industries, they are never coming back.
You have to decide what you want. Higher uncompetitive wages but less people working overall (or the job simply disappearing altogether), higher taxes thereby driving even more business away, or trying to make it where we're producing all the piddly million little things we used to produce for the unskilled among us.
Which is it going to be? Saying flipping burgers is now a middle class job deserving living wages and all that ridiculous claptrap doesn't make it so. Business will find a way to eliminate the worker or abandon the market.
Business always adapts to the environment they dwell in. If they can't make money here, they'll go where they can make money.