Posted on 08/17/2016 7:09:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
International trade figures heavily in the presidential race. Presidential candidate Donald Trump said, "Hillary Clinton unleashed a trade war against the American worker when she supported one terrible trade deal after another - from NAFTA to China to South Korea." And adding, "A Trump Administration will end that war by getting a fair deal for the American people. The era of economic surrender will finally be over." He lamented, "Skilled craftsmen and tradespeople and factory workers have seen the jobs they love shipped thousands and thousands of miles away."
Hillary Clinton has offered her own condemnations of trade and globalization. Some see her stance on trade as little more than typical campaign rhetoric. Bill Watson's Reason magazine article "Hillary Clinton's Protectionist Promises Would Do Serious Economic Damage," looked at Clinton's trade agenda. Watson concluded that for "fans of free trade and globalization, Clinton is a much more appealing candidate simply by not being horrible."
It is true that the number of manufacturing jobs in the United States has been in steep decline for almost a half-century, but manufacturing employment disguises the true story of American manufacturing. U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40 percent. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion. To put that in perspective, if our manufacturing sector were a separate nation, it would be the seventh richest nation on the globe.
Daniel Griswold's Los Angeles Times article tells the story: "Globalization isn't killing factory jobs. Trade is actually why manufacturing is up 40 percent." Griswold is senior research fellow and co-director of the Program on the American Economy and Globalization at George Mason University-based Mercatus Center. He says what has changed in recent decades is that our factories produce fewer shirts, shoes, toys and tables. Instead, America's 21st-century manufacturing sector is dominated by petroleum refining, pharmaceuticals, plastics, fabricated metals, machinery, computers and other electronics, motor vehicles and other transportation equipment, and aircraft and aerospace equipment.
Griswold suggests that political anger about lost manufacturing jobs should be aimed at technology, not trade. According to a recent study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, productivity growth caused 85 percent of the job losses in manufacturing from 2000 to 2010, a period that saw 5.6 million factory jobs disappear. In that same period, international trade accounted for a mere 13 percent of job losses.
Manufacturing job loss is a worldwide phenomenon. Charles Kenny, writing in Bloomberg, "Why Factory Jobs Are Shrinking Everywhere," points out manufacturing employment has fallen in Europe and Korea and "one of the largest losers of manufacturing jobs has been China."
While job loss can be traumatic for the individual who loses his job, for the nation job loss often indicates economic progress. In 1790, farmers were 90 percent of the U.S. labor force. By 1900, about 41 percent of our labor force was employed in agriculture. Today, less than 3 percent of Americans are employed in agriculture. What would Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton have done in the face of this precipitous loss of agricultural jobs? They might have outlawed all of the technological advances in science and machinery that have made our farmers the world's most productive and capable of producing the world's cheapest food.
There's one thing to keep in mind. Losing a job due to outsourcing or losing it to technological innovation produces the same result for an individual: He's out of a job. The best thing that we can do is to have a robust economy such that he can find another job.
History suggests another alternative to those concerned about manufacturing job loss. The Luddites were 19th-century English textile workers who protested against newly developed labor-saving technologies. They went about destroying machinery that threatened to replace them with less-skilled, low-wage laborers.
Our economy is $19T is $353B. So overall the cost of compliance is < 2%.
> Entire chemical related industries no longer exist in America because of EPA regs.
>>That doesn’t really answer the question. Did they offshore to save money on EPA compliance to save 10%, 20% or was more like 1%? I’ve seen bean counters make really stupid decision to save tiny amounts of money.
In some cases the EPA just up and made the chemical work illegal.
Here’s an example:
>The Herculaneum smelter is currently the only smelter in the United States which can produce lead bullion from raw lead ore that is mined nearby in Missouri’s extensive lead deposits, giving the smelter its “primary” designation. The lead bullion produced in Herculaneum is then sold to lead product producers, including ammunition manufactures for use in conventional ammunition components such as projectiles, projectile cores, and primers. Several “secondary” smelters, where lead is recycled from products such as lead acid batteries or spent ammunition components, still operate in the United States.
>Doe Run made significant efforts to reduce lead emissions from the smelter, but in 2008 the federal Environmental Protection Agency issued new National Ambient Air Quality Standards for lead that were 10 times tighter than the previous standard. Given the new lead air quality standard, Doe Run made the decision to close the Herculaneum smelter.
And industry is about 20% of that.
Companies offshore for labor arbitrage reason more than to avoid regulations. They just pass that cost on.
>Interesting. I would like to see a study on one company. Like maybe an auto manufacturer. So would the USA be better if the EPA never existed? If we got rid of all regulations would the USA be better off? No seat belts, dirty air, remember the 60’s? I would say most of the EPA is BS but some of it was good. Same with OSHA.
All of the big gains from clean air and water happened in the first round of regs. Everything since then has been industry and job destroying crap. The problem here is the EPA’s ability to create regulations out of thin air. The only regs directly created by congress should exit.
Not sure epa regs only covers manufacturers.
>So let’s get rid of the tilt, and have real free trade. If Americans choose to overtax and over regulate our industries, that’s not any other country’s fault, it’s our own.
It’s prefer not to live in a 3ed world de-indrustalizied nation.
Mining and agriculture are part of that $353B.
All of these safety innovations came about without regulation. They were mandated after the fact. What begins as product differentiation ends as standard equipment. It doesn’t take some government agency to do that. As far as economy goes, I suggest we would have been much better off without the EPA. Manufacturers spend far too much trying to comply with asinine regulations that steal money straight from R & D. Can you say smog pump, ethanol, or diesel restrictions? And, if getting rid of leaded fuel made everyone smarter, how did Obama ever get elected?
As far as gross environmental concerns go, there probably should be some oversight. However, that oversight needs to be Constitutional, and that means legislation, not regulation.
There should be no governing body that is not directly accountable to the people. Every one of these agencies have quite predictably usurped powers reserved to the States and the People. To add injury to insult, there is often no legal recourse to their pronouncements. They are the only authorities competent to interpret the arcane penumbras of internecine bureaucratic flatulence. It all seems reasonable until you have lost your livelihood, business, home and family.
We have become a nation of law, except for those who make them.
Start taking care of our own. Not everybody is college material and that's the type of job fits the bill.
If the teamsters are agin it, it must be good
Per employee in India?
Yup. Per year.
How do you know how many they have?
Negotiate. Hit @ triple the # you think they have.
They’ll send you a picture. 3 guys.
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