Subject: CHIPS Act - question for 1pg
So, I've been reading a lot of hot takes about the 2024 election. I imagine we all have, since we're (generally) political junkies here. There's one take, though, that I've seen a number of times that I think I disagree with. Here's one expression of it:

For the past three-plus years, the Biden administration tailored economic policy to blue-collar union workers including making historic investments in green-energy and microchip manufacturing and supporting tax relief for families with young children. Biden walked the picket-line with striking autoworkers. And Biden and Harris pushed tax hikes on the super rich and corporations and savings for the middle-class through measures to lower prescription drug costs.

But the Biden-Harris sweeping economic agenda − which includes projects that are a decade out − failed to connect with working-class Americans' immediate concerns about inflation and high consumer costs.

https://www.usatoday.com/story...

The general idea is that the Biden agenda was really tailored to working-class voters - that the Democrats were doing a good job in centering the needs of that group. Thus, the reason they lost is either: i) inflation swamped it all; or ii) workers didn't realize how awesome the Democrats were for them.

There's a lot to support the claim that inflation doomed the Democrats no matter what they did - but I really want to interrogate the idea that the Democratic agenda was supportive of working class voters. I'm not sure it was. Just like Donald Trump has been lampooned as a "poor man's idea of what a rich man is like," I think the Democratic achievements may be a "college-educated man's idea of what a working man wants."

I don't think the working class wanted "historic investments in green-energy." Fighting climate change generally ranks towards the bottom of voter preferences, and I'm confident there's an education skew in what support it does have. Investments in new technologies often are also both disruptive and delayed - which makes them less useful for remedying current problems that the working class was upset about in 2022.

My question for 1pg relates to that. Democrats have been citing the CHIPS Act as evidence of them actually delivering for the working class, since it is bringing semiconductor manufacturing jobs back to the US. But your reference to workers in such plants having engineering degrees made me wonder if this is not, in fact, an example of Democrats delivering for the working class but instead an instance of them completely missing the mark. If you generally need an engineering degree to work in a semiconductor fab, then this is not something that's helping those without a college education, but another example of Democratic policy favoring those with degrees. While economic strife can hit anyone, especially in a time of rising inflation, I'm not sure "college graduates with engineering degrees" was a group that was experiencing greater-than-typical problems or needed to be prioritized for help at any point in the last four years.

Do these facilities hire a lot of non-college educated folks? Or are they mostly places where a college degree is generally a pre-requisite for applying?