A hypothesis says mass immigration reversal, immigration restriction (including of students or talented workers), and tariffs on imported goods are bad because that risks nuking American/Western living standards. Not only will it—it should. You WANT it to do so. Why? Consider a classically “powerful” and “wise” and “brave” person; a King. No one is more in charge than a king. A king receives tributes, information, has authority, considers, and commands. All serve him. Kings have other people dress them and feed them and deal with their excrement. But so do ‘weak old people’; the elderly. And so do ‘week old people’; babies (and really young children for a while). Absolute and total power *looks* a lot like dependence. Americans in their history *did*—at various points in time,and in some locations, synchronously and not——did get extremely accustomed to having masses and masses of Blacks, Hispanics. and Asians doing much of their work; imported, outsourced, enslaved and free, legal and illegal, low and high skilled labor——with most of the benefits accruing to the very top strata of White American society, which has been playing increasingly self-serving financial games while becoming increasingly incapable of genuine work of any kind, backed up by the muscle of the bottom of White America to fight in global wars and maintain infrastructure (look up Smedley Butler, this is a very old pattern): Effectively ‘all the soldiers and all the firefighters’, so to speak, have also been Whites, true, but generally *not* the Whites enjoying the benefits of anything from large plantations of slaves to extremely cheap factories in outsourced labor markets. In fact that’s rather explicitly the way in which caste is delineated among White Americans (sorry to break it to you, but you guys have it, too) — and among Anglos generally. If you *have* to move heavy things around and swear and sweat while doing so in the course of your occupation, you are not part of the upper castes. If you are not mostly making decisions for others to implement, you are not part of the upper castes. This has nothing to do with your worth as a person, it’s an anthropological observation. Where has this mismanagement, compounding and compounding in a near worthlessly inflated dollar led? Americans (and Westerners writ large) now look a lot more like *dependents* on others to get dressed, more so than Kings being garbed. Here is the thing; the choice then is; Poor Baby, or Rich Elderly. Are your best days AHEAD, and filled with struggle, learning, and growth? Or are your best days BEHIND, and the future filled with comfort seeking, replaying memories, and decay? So, yes. Bring on the extremely expensive groceries and fruit rotting in the fields. We will double our efforts to build robots to harvest them. Bring on the shuttered science departments and understaffed hospitals. We will push ourselves to study and research and engineer solutions to care for the sick and injured—our own sick and injured. Bring on the sharply cut money supply and the lack of leverage. We don’t mind every asset being marked to market. We don’t mind having to liquidate some early. Americans will have to worship at the altar of the Gods of the Copybook Headings, and not the easy lure of Mammon, but they do it or they die.