Posted on 10/02/2008 2:02:05 PM PDT by T-Bird45
Prolly not going to happen. Finance, Education, Tax Policy, Environmental policy, Labor Policy — all of it is geared away from manufacturing & toward a service economy. Maybe if we had a 10-15 year recession/depression the next generation might straighten things out. But it will be a bumpy road getting there.
I have one word... union.
LLS
I agree with everything in this article. The exportation of our jobs is the core cause of Americas current problems. I cannot fathom any red blooded american believing otherwise. Ross Perot was right.
Certainly a glaring oversight to have left that out...
Between the tort lobby, excessive regulation, and labor, manufacturing died
More glaring oversights...
This jackweed is blaming Wall Street
I think he is really trying to point out the glaring differences between how Congress (the root of both problems, IMO) reacted to the financial meltdown and the loss of manufacturing.
“CRT’s....and have a worse picture than LCD TV’s and monitors”
Tell that to my Sony KD-34XBR960!
http://reviews.cnet.com/direct-view-tvs-crt/sony-kd-34xbr960/4505-6481_7-30787600.html
:)
If you don’t compete you lose.
Yankeeland chose not to compete and is dying or already dead.
Meanwhile, East Tennessee is booming
Perhaps. But one company that I sold for was having certain model machine tools built in mainland China. This was like 10-12 years ago, so off-shoring to China was still novel & risky. Turns out that the Chinese supplier was getting the foundary & machining work done in a Gulag. Dozens of machines were impounded by the US Dept. of Commerce. Bottom Line: The chinese were defrauding their customer with phoney bills of lading & invoices just the same as they recently defrauded the Olympics with phoney birth certificates.
No, the article is an illogical diatribe that does not examine the confluence of factors that drove much production overseas (unions, regulations, lawsuits, etc.) and devolves into the usual Bush / Iraq / claptrap.
His focus is entirely in that NE corrider of blindness, witness the cities he lists (did he write that riding Amtrak from NY to DC?) Out here in flyover we lost mills and manufacturing, and didn’t bitch and cry about it but got up, dusted ourselves off and went about innovating new technologies. The Chinese (and the Taiwanese, and Koreans, and Germans and so on) make some good stuff, and lots of it goes into bigger things we make. And we turn a profit. And it doesn’t have a damn thing to do with George W. Bush.
There is manufacturing out here, and it is smarter than ever. Lots of older manufacturing plants and techniques went to lower skilled (and lower wage) places because technology compensated for training. We neither need nor want $50/hr union labor watching a machine do its thing. Waste of money. If that union worker wants to train to program the machine, then hell yes we’ll use him. But the world is too competitive to permit nostalgia jobs. They are gone with the wind.
I lay our decline to the environmental anarchists and excessive government regulation. I am afraid that our grandchildren will curse our names and spit on our graves.
The America that I knew is passing (has passed?) away. At one time Pennsylvania made more steel that any country in the world. The dollar was an iron man eagerly sought all over the world. And so on.
Many Pennsylvania/NY/NJ companies moved down to the Carolinas in the 80's-90's. Many of those companies have already moved-on to Mexico or Asia when their tax-break deals expired. These are light-to-medium manufacturing companies to which I refer. Electronics & Appliances, mostly.
BTW we have used prison labor before as well. It's not economical. Not if you need production and quality.
The yankees have always believed that they are America.
All I know as a consumer just about everything I buy comes from China.... my damn toothbrush in made in China... oh yeh..just bought a Bissel Vacuum cleaner. it was made in Korea. There’s lots of blame to go around...Government, Corporations, Unions. etc....Eliminate capital gains tax and reduce Corporate taxes and manufacturing will return again.
Not one job has ever been "exported". That's just liberal newspeak. Workers here failed to compete with workers somewhere else and lost their jobs as a result. There is nothing wrong with that. If you do not compete you deserve to lose. Why should everyone else have to work to support you?
We also need real tort reform. No class actions, loser pays, and no caps.
A company cheated with official sanctions.
When you say countries can't "cheat", have you considered things like manipulation of currency? Lack of Child Labor laws or basic Environmental regulations? Companies go where the best deal is since they can't control the playing field.
They may make better widgets, but chances are pretty good they may be out of business before the market discovers they make better widgets. This is where NATIONAL INTEREST comes in. Most Favored Nation trading status should never have been a carrot to tempt China to do a few cosmetic reforms. It should have been a reward to those countries which actually earned it by playing by the same rules we expect for ourselves and our real allies.
Tort reform is a huge need.
You would not believe some of the hoops you have to jump through in certain industries. And that is the realm of the John Edwards of the world, not the George Bushes.
But all of this started way, way before Iraq, and that’s one of the things that ticked me off about the article. The author is making a connection that simply is not there.
I don't know where "out here" is for you but I am in OK and agree with your view on the unions' role in some of this and how labor that knows how to program is more valuable than the nostalgia jobs you cite. Manufacturers have absolutely gotten smarter but there has also been some short-sighted choices made when off-shoring. I will grant you that some of those choices were driven by factors cited by other posters, such as liability laws, but other matters like exchange rates and transportation costs are now looming large.
Thanks for your reply and I agree with everything you say, but my post had different context. The poster I was replying to said US is losing less jobs than China in manufacturing.
He did not specify time span for comparison.
My point is that if you add up all the jobs lost in US since 1970’s, it will be huge. China did not manufacture and export much 10 years ago.
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