OPINION:
While “America’s white-collar recession” (Web, Oct. 28) reflects on a plethora of economic variables that have backed the U.S. economy into a corner, there is a need to recognize that many of President Trump’s tariff negotiations represent transitory circumstances aimed at reducing trade imbalances and promoting U.S. manufacturing and job growth.
Despite the necessity for an immediate and almost wartime level of defense production, offshoring U.S. debt to finance further trade imbalance effectively represents additional deficit spending on top of the present and increasingly unsustainable $38 trillion national debt.
Furthermore, Mr. Trump’s impositions of tariffs are part of a negotiation to respond to the reluctance of our allies and others to restrict Vladimir Putin’s ability to fund the war in Ukraine through Russian energy sales. Despite political posturing and intentional alarmism from the left, most of the more onerous tariffs are intended to be transitory.
Likewise, deporting a few thousand illegal aliens out of an estimated illegal population of 20 million can hardly be characterized as mass deportations or be all that impactful to the overall economy. In the past, temporary migratory farmworkers went back and forth across the border on a regular basis. Reported shortages of these temporary workers are more a reflection of the closure of the southern border to control permanent illegal immigration and foreign subversives, further highlighting the need for a biometrically monitored guest worker program.
Overall, the primary causative impact of artificial intelligence on a white-collar recession cannot be overstated. AI has administrative, monitoring and predictive capabilities that are simply more efficient, quicker and more accurate overall than humans, without the considerable efforts and employment of middle-level managers. China has demonstrated that AI robotics can run “dark factories” without the need for any middle management.
In context, the prospects for a continuing white-collar recession should be sobering.
WILLIAM T. FIDURKSI
Clark, New Jersey
Please read our comment policy before commenting.