Posted on 02/18/2004 5:12:57 AM PST by beaureguard
It is the major national security issue we face. Bush and the Republicans better show some leadership on it or they're going to have their a$$es handed to them by Kerry and the Rats.
Nations can use trade as a weapon every bit as much as they can guns and bayonets and missiles and bombers. The founders realized this, and as a result they gave Congress, as the elected representatives of the people, the power to oversee and formulate trade policy. They realized the awesome power the marketplace holds, and foresaw the dangers that nations driven by an agenda that is not in our interest could present if the market were used against us.
Placing the fate of our nation in the hands of outsiders is not a prescription for national security. There will be a price to pay if we do that, and it is a price so high that it can never be reflected in any price paid, or commodity bought and sold in the marketplace.
The best a politician can do is create an environment for the public sector to create jobs.
I work for a large company and, while we are growing, the largest growth is among our subcontractors (the majority of which are small businesses). The tax cut created this in my opinion. It is allowing these small businesses to flourish.
A lot of the older ones of us are forming their own small businesses because the big companies, like mine, can't move fast enough to react to the changes and needs of our customers. This is being driven in my company because the people who control the IRAD funds haven't got a clue about our customer's needs (my sour grapes). I'll probably leave soon and be out of work till I find my niche.
Naw, The repubs did that.
I have never heard anyone but a FReeper even talk about it.
IMO, the public is quite disengaged on the issue.
There was a time, when NAFTA was getting rammed through that it was news, but since then the issue has been pretty moot.(except among a rather close group of anti-globalism people,)
Tanning salon?
+<]B^)
>There is no such "equlibrium". There is no such law of economics.
Well, there is one of a sort. With free competition, profits will tend to be driven down to the natural time preference for money (i.e., about what you could get at the bank for equivalent money invested).
Good. For a moment, I didn't have a clue what you were referring to.
Possibly. But it does not mean that the policy going into opposite extreme cannot cause a disaster/revolution.
I believe there are three basic reasons we are losing our design and manufacturing jobs to other countries:
(1) Americans have decided that we are absolute masters at planning, scheduling, shuffling, collating, and organizing. Thats why our colleges and universities are over-run with communication arts, journalism, travel and tourism, and business administration majors. The number of mechanical/civil/chemical/electrical/nuclear engineering, math, physics, and chemistry majors is a small percentage of what it was fifty years ago. And a large number of those who are sitting in those classes are non-Americans anyway. The number of young people attending vo-tech schools is also dropping, as are the number of apprentices in hands-on building and repair jobs. When it comes to designing, hammering, welding, drilling, forging, weve decided to leave that peon handwork to the lesser developed countries. We had our fill of that back in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Let the rest of the world get their hands dirty now. Were above that. Weve evolved to a higher plane that involves more cerebral pursuits.
(2) Our high standard of living, and the stranglehold that unions and socialist-oriented special interest groups have had on this country for decades, has caused our average hourly wages and benefits to far exceed reasonableness.
(3) The federal/state/local tax burdens that have been placed on American companies have contributed to the high cost of operating a business to the point where a significant portion of the cost of a finished product is money that has been extorted for payment to the government, simply for the privilege of doing business in America (a privilege to which many companies are now saying Thanks, but no thanks).
As I have already said too many times here, an industrialized society cannot continue to long exist coincidental with liberty -- when it exports to other countries the design and manufacturing jobs for those nuts and bolts tangibles that it will one day rely upon for its very survival (and the double-edge swords lies in exporting them especially to other countries which are its political and ideological adversaries). Its not only the jobs we are losing. Its the physical source parts needed for our existence. To heat and cool our homes and businesses. To move ourselves and our lives necessities from one place to another. To build and maintain our infrastructure. To grow, harvest and preserve our food. To purify our water. To have access to the air, sea and land equipment and weaponry necessary to defend our shores. And to possess the wherewithal to repair and maintain all of the above.
If and when the madmen of the world believe they have the upper hand, a nation whose people are masters at scheduling, planning, paper shuffling, organizing, and collating, and who cant design or manufacture their way out of a paper bag, isnt going to keep those madmen at bay. Its not only a serious matter of economics. Its a matter of survival.
Yet, I strongly suspect that soon-to-be democrat presidential nominee Kerry is going to be running on an Its the economy, stupid! theme, just as his equally disingenuous democrat predecessor (and his equally disingenuous democrat predecessor) did.
Anyone who believes that the three reasons listed above are indeed responsible for our loss of the jobs needed to maintain our strength and prosperity needs to ask himself, Which ideology (socialist/democrat or less-government/conservative) was most responsible for the evolution of those three conditions?'
I also strongly suspect that candidate Kerrys solution for our jobs/manufacturing losses will be more of the same programs/philosophies which caused the problems listed above: the continuation of the special interest/union strangleholds, the socialist/anti-capitalist disdain for the profit motive, and the knowledge that government can line its coffers, instill dependence on government, and redistribute wealth, by taxing the makers and producers.
So when the Kerry/Edwards ticket focuses most of its rhetoric on the economy, it will be in order to play on the guaranteed ignorance of the voting public. Because any American who isnt aware that it has been the democrats' (same old, same old) policies that got us into this mess to begin with will no doubt fall for their empty promises yet again. And well dig ourselves even deeper into the economic/national security hole. (What was it that we used to say as children? If we dug deep enough, wed eventually reach China? ... Were we prophetic or what?)
~ joanie
Why not? It would serve them right.
Very interesting!
What is a nonsense. Fifty years from now 401K might not exist. Even in twenty years a lot can happen. Imagine predictions made in 1928 about 1948. Or 1913 about 1933, or 1972 about 1992. They should teach about less transient things like math or history (the past is more stable).
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