>That Americans are poor is likely a consequence of the current trade imbalances.
This story is improbable because the overwhelming majority of America's poorest are employed in the domestic service industry who are not facing negative exposure to international trade. Every store clerk, every McDonalds worker, every garbage man, cleaning lady, janitor, nanny, teacher and so on will be one-sided losers of an increase in prices due to reduced trade.
The benefactors will be a relatively small number of American manufacturing workers (given that it's overall only a small source of employment), who already earn solidly middle-class wages.
In places like the oil boom towns in west Texas and South Dakota the average salaries for all jobs are multiplied higher. Because the average worker in an oilfield makes so much more they have to pay the cashiers 4x what they normally would make. You are wrong.
What if they are only in those jobs because there are no factory jobs for them? If we started employing a lot of factory workers, they would have to come from somewhere. A lot would come from worse jobs. This would also make labor scarcer for those jobs allowing the people who do them to demand higher wages and better conditions.
there is no such scenario because manufacturing would not have stayed. As explained in my original post, automation constitutes the bulk of replacement of manufacturing jobs. If every single manufacturing job from China came back to the United States we would be talking about a low single digit percentage number of the american workforce.
