Posted on 07/27/2010 9:03:56 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Second-quarter earnings reports are coming in, and they’re making Wall Street smile. Corporate profits are up. And big American companies are sitting on a gigantic pile of money. The 500 largest non-financial firms held almost a trillion dollars in the second quarter, and that money pile is growing larger this quarter. Profits that plummeted in the recession have bounced back. Big businesses have recovered almost 90 percent of what they lost.
So with all this money and profit, they’ll start hiring again, right? Wrong – for three reasons.
First, lots of their profits are coming from their overseas operations. So that’s where they’re investing and expanding production.
GM now sells more cars in China than it does in the US, but makes most of them there. The company now employs 32,000 hourly workers in China. But only 52,000 GM hourly workers remain in the United States – down from 468,000 in 1970.
GM isn’t just hiring low-tech assembly workers in China. Last week the firm broke ground there on a $250 million advanced technology center to develop batteries and other alternative energy sources.
You and I and other American taxpayers still own over 60 percent of GM. We bought GM to save GM jobs, remember?
GM officials say no American taxpayer money is being used to expand in China. But money is fungible. Because of our generosity, GM can now use the dollars it doesn’t have to spend in the United States meeting its American payrolls and repaying its creditors, for new investments in China.
Second, big U.S. businesses are investing their cash in labor-saving technologies. This boosts their productivity, but not their payrolls.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
“Robert Reich: The Great Decopling of Corporate Profits from Jobs”
I didn’t realize they were ever copled...
Nasty, mendacious little svartalf.
Rush is right. We need to export liberalism. Why do anything in America when the government will just put its boot on your neck and take it away?
I ain’t rich...but so far, I have laid off two guys from a small business, fired a gardener and his two helpers, a pool guy, cut up many credit cards, dropped AARP like a hot rock, moved my insurance, gone to a cash basis in both personal and business matters wherever possible and no longer subscribe to any lefty newspapers. So to recap, as more of us do this, the unemployment will grow.
What does this dumb POS think I will do, sell my house and car to keep employing people? As the cuts keep coming, who does this ahole think is going to suffer more, me or them?
And why do they always refer to “the rich” as if it is some permanent condition?
I and many people I know who own businesses have had up and down years, lean times and now hard times. Screw this idiot and all of his lefty buddies who think taxing is the way out. The dumbest SOB on the planet can see this coming.
Print more money, keep paying off your layabout constituency and bring back the good old days of Carter economics. I won’t give a shite by then; I’ll be out of it and I will have helped cause it OUT OF CHOICE.
Don’t forget that they are also pushing whatever profits they can forward to avoid any tax increases.
No, we bought it to save union (primarily UAW) jobs and retiree payments. Since the advanced technology center in China is primarily engineering instead of bolt turners it is non-union and therefore of no concern.
Robert Reich is shocked, shocked that U.S. corporations move overseas in order to avoid paying U.S. corporate taxes, shocked again that government (our) tax money used to bail-out one of these companies results in the money going overseas, and issues a dire warning to supply-siders not to consider cutting corporate taxes.
My new word for the day. Fits him to a tee. Thanks.
BRAVO SIR. I am very much like you.
With midget man working with tenure for UC Berkeley, he will never have to worry about a non-elitist paycheck, ever
Well well, Dr. Simon Pritchett speaks!
And not just reliable paychecks: for those of us who have been fortunate enough to keep our paychecks, we need to see the wealth (the value of our assets) that we had accumulated over a lifetime restored...along with the ability to acquire credit with our assets. Even those of us with paychecks have cut back dramatically — and not just from timidity — but because we simply do not have the wealth we had a few short years ago. We will buy and invest again when we have the means to do so...the paycheck allows us to make it from month to month, it’s the destroyed wealth that needs to be returned (how about some tax cuts so our monthly income is enough to allow us to build wealth again?)
Pelosi is worried about “excessive executive pay” when she should be focusing on excessive executive stupidity.
Business conditions were better in the successful states than in the lagging ones. Capital and labor gravitated to where the burdens were smaller and the opportunities greater.
No one should let Michigan politicians blame their problems solely on the decline of the U.S. auto industry.
Yes, Michigan lost 83,000 auto manufacturing jobs during the past decade and a half, but more than 91,000 new auto manufacturing jobs sprung up in Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Texas.
http://news.theag
e.com.au/business/toyota-will-reopen-three-us-plants-20081101-5fov.html
I've cancelled the yard service, the tree service, the bug guy, the contract to put the pool in the backyard, cut up all the credit cards but one, reduced my insurance coverages, started going to Wal-mart instead of pricier grocery stores, I travel by air once per year instead 6 or 7 times, budget just one ski trip instead of 3 or 4, eat out maybe once every two weeks instead of 3 times per week and so on.
And that's just because I'm trying to rebuild wealth that was lost when the various crashes occurred. I'd guess there's at least a couple of folks working less, or out of work, just from the difference in what I was spending then compared to now.
Maybe some tax cuts...real ones...and I don't mean just continuing those we have today, might let us spend more so that more people can have jobs. Whatever happened to the idea of putting money into the people's pockets -- the people who can then afford to spend it, not just subsist on the welfare from the Great Black Father.
I'll be with you helping to cause it...partially from choice but mostly in response to what these evil bastards have done and are doing.
Mini-Bob longs for a Hillary! presidency and a second lap around Wash DC.
“My high tax policies created this mess, I can’t even spend your tax money the way I used to, but don’t you even think of cutting taxes.”
You need to stand there and hand over more and more of your money to the government, traitor.
Yeah, well, so far Obama hasn't forced them to buy more expensive health care for technology. I'm sure he's working on it, though.
What do those Marxists imagine that Capitalists do with those evil profits? Pour them down a black hole?
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