Thank you! Yes I was, and I'm of the view that our greatest strength as a democratic society is our ability to discuss opposing views civilly. I spend a lot of time overseas in societies where this ability is not present and Americans really, really underestimate how bad things can get when you lose it.
So "leaving money on the table" is admittedly very vague, using it here I'm principally referring to two things:
1) For many decades we've had a trade posture and foreign policy regime which emphasized moving production offshore. This generated a lot of corporate profits and some consumer benefits but was absolutely decimating for working class incomes and job prospects. We "left money on the table" here in the sense that money which would have been generated in the US and paid wages in the US tended to end up mostly in the hands of wealthy people in poor countries (and to some degree in the hands of their middle classes).
2) The other way we left money on the table was by opening up our markets to countries which didn't reciprocate in kind -- we reduced our tariffs on them, and they didn't reduce their tariffs on us. This again encouraged the flow of production, jobs, capital etc. out of the US and again hit the most vulnerable economic classes hardest.
The net result of this is that we have a lot of money in the US in a record few number of hands -- when you add corporate consolidation & monopolization to the mix you have a pretty complete picture of why a lot of people in this country are struggling.
So did we benefit from these policies, yeah, we did in certain ways that accrued particularly toward the top of our economic pyramid, but it seems that the bottom of it has had just about enough of this and is getting loud about it at the ballot box.
Those are valid problems, but siding with Russia against Ukraine and attempting to extort natural resource wealth from the latter doesn't address any of those issues. I understand and to a large extent agree with the domestic discontent about who has benefited and who has been hurt by decades of American trade policies, although I think much of that complaining ignores the real benefits it brought to American consumers in the form of cheaper and more available goods. But addressing those issues doesn't require flushing American foreign policy and diplomacy down the garbage disposal and in fact doing so is likely counter-productive.
So "leaving money on the table" is admittedly very vague, using it here I'm principally referring to two things:
1) For many decades we've had a trade posture and foreign policy regime which emphasized moving production offshore. This generated a lot of corporate profits and some consumer benefits but was absolutely decimating for working class incomes and job prospects. We "left money on the table" here in the sense that money which would have been generated in the US and paid wages in the US tended to end up mostly in the hands of wealthy people in poor countries (and to some degree in the hands of their middle classes).
2) The other way we left money on the table was by opening up our markets to countries which didn't reciprocate in kind -- we reduced our tariffs on them, and they didn't reduce their tariffs on us. This again encouraged the flow of production, jobs, capital etc. out of the US and again hit the most vulnerable economic classes hardest.
The net result of this is that we have a lot of money in the US in a record few number of hands -- when you add corporate consolidation & monopolization to the mix you have a pretty complete picture of why a lot of people in this country are struggling.
So did we benefit from these policies, yeah, we did in certain ways that accrued particularly toward the top of our economic pyramid, but it seems that the bottom of it has had just about enough of this and is getting loud about it at the ballot box.