Henry Ford is a problematic character, but he got it right when he paid his workers enough to afford the product they built.
Corporate greed and race-to-the-bottom neoliberal globalism put paid to that for Americans, and in the last few decades an enormous supply chain, distribution, and retail apparatus has been put in place to keep it that way. Absent extreme protectionist policies (ones that would see Americans screaming about the price of their goods doubling or tripling) things will continue in the current unsustainable direction: a growing unneccessariat that won’t be able to afford goods at their current prices, let alone “made-in-America” ones.
That’s before we take into account domestic automation, which has “stolen” more jobs in coal country than bad ol’ Al Gore ever did. The fact is that a lot of those lost jobs that paid something approaching a middle-class wage are never coming back. That, combined with outsourcing and offshoring, means a permanent 20% unemployment rate. The only real solutions I see here are either a revived independent trade union movement or a UBI. The latter is most likely to be (given that union-averse neoliberals will have no choice but to accede) a highly restrictive one aimed at maintaining a sham consumer economy and keeping the profits flowing to the incumbent wealthy.
