Posted on 04/16/2004 1:24:31 AM PDT by sarcasm
Last week, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao announced her Skills to Build America's Future" initiative. This is a "nationwide outreach and education effort designed to attract young people and transitioning workers to" the "key" occupations of the [near] future: "skilled trades."
This initiative, understandably, was proclaimed with little fanfare. While President Bush looks toward Mars, Ms. Chao can hardly be proud of her decidedly pedestrian prophecy that "construction laborers, operating engineers, carpenters, iron workers, cement masons, bricklayers, truck drivers and many other construction related crafts are among the trades expected to see the greatest demand in workers over the next 6 years." (This demand will be filled, I predict, by "guest workers," i.e., illegal aliens awarded shiny new government permits.)
Telling America's young people that the best they can hope for is careers as tradesmen certainly casts a pall over an administration given to grandiose planning and posturing. Essentially, the mathematically precocious – youngsters with aptitudes for science, engineering or accounting – must be yanked down to earth. Reaching for the stars in the America of the future will be the exclusive province of "American Idol" participants.
And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics latest Employment Situation Summary, Ms. Chao's future is now. For all the din sounded over the addition of 308,000 jobs to the economy in March, the government-fed news filters failed to mention which job sectors were surging. Sure enough, it transpires that employment opportunities are optimal in construction, retail trade, food services, social assistance, and (naturally) in government.
As economist Paul Craig Roberts – a rare independent thinker on the issue – observes: "Only labor involved in non-traded goods and services is safe from foreign substitution." In other words, young Americans had better learn to live by their hands lest their livelihoods be outsourced.
If President Bush intends to revive America's space program, engineers will be at a premium. Yet the IEEE-USA, the world's largest technical professional society – representing more than 225,000 electrical electronics, computer, and software engineers – reports that "American high-tech firms shed 560,000 jobs between 2001 and 2003, and expect to lose another 234,000 in 2004." This contraction cannot be dismissed as the nadir of the dot-com correction. The jobless rate for electrical and electronics engineers was in fact lower in 2002 (4.2 percent) than in 2003 (6.2 percent).
Meanwhile, the Computing Research Association's Taulbee's Survey found that total enrollment in bachelor-degree programs in computer science and computer engineering fell 19 percent in 2003, a factor it attributes to "the decline in the technology industry and the moving of jobs offshore." (Curiously omitted are the impacts of the H-1B and L-1 work visas.)
College administrators are already hip to Ms. Chao's future. For example, San Francisco State University is considering the closure of its engineering school.
Indeed, today's college graduate cannot even expect to find entry-level jobs in the hi-tech industry, warns entrepreneur Rosen Sharma. Sharma heads a Silicon Valley start-up that "could not survive without outsourcing." Nevertheless, he fears for America's future. "As a father my reaction is different than my reaction as a CEO," he admitted to Time.
Pay no attention to such Chicken Littles, high-tech-industry lobbyists counter. Outsourcing is good for America, they claim. Their studies employ the "impregnable" science of econometrics to prove that outsourcing high-tech jobs creates more jobs than it kills. One such study, commissioned by the Information Technology Association of America, predicts 317,387 such jobs will materialize by 2008. The study's premise, however, begs the question, as it assumes the new jobs are and will be as good as the old (vanished) ones.
Why, they'll be even better, brags economist and outsourcing enthusiast, Catherine Mann. Dr. Mann, who also labors under the illusion that only bottom-rung jobs are vanishing, plays Pollyanna to a doubting Thomas, Ron Hira of IEEE-USA. Professor Hira confessed to Washington Post readers that he, an industry insider, had no idea what shape the "new" putative high-value jobs would take. "Is it nanotech, biotech, bioinformatics?" Of one thing he is certain, however: "Other developing and developed countries are targeting those very same industries and jobs."
Thankfully, author Virginia Postrel has located America's burgeoning (and indubitably "dynamist") occupations. She faults the Bureau of Labor Statistics for failing to recognize the rise of spa-related personal services – e.g., manicure and massage therapy – for the powerhouse growth industries they are. Of course, if Ms. Postrel is to remain faithful to the central thesis of her first book – that all change is always good – she is obligated to remain, like Ms. Mann, a Pollyanna, despite the new employment reality. Ms. Postrel's second book, the sum of which is that all that glitters is gold, even better encapsulates her enthusiasm for the role eyebrow waxing and other crafts will play in an economic recovery.
Although preliminary – even tentative – the Bureau's Employment Situation Summary suggests that high-value knowledge jobs are being replaced with low-value service and manual-labor jobs. The ensuing loss of income to American workers will surely outweigh the lower prices outsourcing engenders.
If I refuse to genuflect to this brave new world, it's because the idea of living in communities where applied scientists are unemployed while colonic hydrotherapists thrive isn't particularly enthralling. I'll leave it to the motion obsessed, ever-evolving Ms. Postrel to celebrate that kind of future.
Not that I can think of.
Are you saying that your figure has already been adjusted to account for purchasing power or is it RMB converted into American dollars.
Grant, I'll give you, had Conservative monetary ideas, but was "dirty"...not to mention the fact that he wanted to annex the Dominican Republic, which isn't exactly what I'd call Conservative.
Hays was pretty good, but since he vetoed a Congressional Bill, disallowing Chinese immigration and I know where you stand in regards to immigration, I would have thought that Hays' immigration policies, would be off putting to you.
Shall I continue, or would you like to go look up all of the GOP presidents from Lincoln to Ike,so that you can make a more educated reply?
Are you saying that your figure has already been adjusted to account for purchasing power or is it RMB converted into American dollars.
Purchasing Power is the same when exchange rates are at equilibrium (not when exchange rates are equal).
Exchange rates stay at or close to equilibrium based on currency market forces.
Thus any commodity in the world described with a common currency is a commodity that has been adjusted for PPP. Any commodity in the world that is not described with a common currency is a commodity that has not been adjusted for PPP.
My GDP figures use a common currency.
Lots of TR nostalgia going on here at FR over the last few days. Somebody here yesterday was waxing nostalgic for TR concerning the subject of the Mid East.
What's up with this?
The Free Trade Gospel according to Arthur Jensen.
Arthur Jensen: "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?! You think you have merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity. It is ecological balance. You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations! There are no peoples! There are no Russians! There are no Arabs! There are no third worlds! There is no West! There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast interwoven, interacting, multi-variate, multi-national dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, Euro-dollars, Reichmarks, Rubles, Yen, Pounds and Shekels. It is the international system of currency that determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic, subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And YOU. . . WILL. . . ATONE!!
"Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? (pause) You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen, and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and ITT, AT&T and Du Pont, Dow, Union Carbide and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state -- Karl Marx? They pull up their linear programming charts, statistical analysis and minimax solutions and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments just like we do.
"We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a collage of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children, Mr.Beale, will live to see that perfect world in which there is no war or famine, oppression or brutality – one vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock, all necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you to preach this evangel, Mr. Beale."
Howard Beale (whispers): "Why me?"
Mr. Jensen: "Why? Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday."
From the motion picture Network, in 1976. A film way ahead of its time. The gospel message of free traitors everywhere.
They know. And no, they don't care. Hope you're investing in hard, tangigble assets. Like weapons and ammo. You may need them sooner than you think.
All of America's IT and other technical jobs are NOT being oputsourced and won't be.
In a closed economic system you have producers and consumers. The producers create products and sell them at a profit to the consumers. The wealth generated in that transaction (compensation in excess of cost to produce the product) is available as disposable income to purchase the products of other producers. There is a synergy of wealth that flows between producers and consumers in an economy characterized by division of labor into specialties.
The trades are producers of residential and commercial buildings. The developer takes out a construction loan to buy materials and pay for the labor. The bank allows the loan because the value produced is likely to be paid back. That has been the value proposition for the trades. The customers who purchased those buildings are mostly white collar business people. Those customers are the new unemployed class. The people of southeast asia can perform that work at a lower labor cost. The white collar workers are in asia. The demand for new buildings is in asia...not here in the U.S.
When building vacancy rates go up, there is no demand to build new buildings. That means reduced work for the trades. What work is available will be handed off to cheap illegal alien laborers. Many construction sites around Houston were deserted this week as rumors of Border Patrol raids circulated. Clearly, the bulk of the construction labor in those areas is already being done by illegals.
Such is not the case with the RMB - there is a fixed exchange rate.
Both Lyndon and Andrew Johnson were Democrats.
Grant, I'll give you, had Conservative monetary ideas, but was "dirty"...
I don't believe that he was personally dishonest - he would have died broke except for the success of his memoirs.
Hays was pretty good, but since he vetoed a Congressional Bill, disallowing Chinese immigration and I know where you stand in regards to immigration, I would have thought that Hays' immigration policies, would be off putting to you
The United States had very different labor needs in 1876.
From whom?
Punks think because they were good at differential equations make them qualified to work... most can't communicate worth dirt, and most can't even climb a flight of stairs.
Such animosity - did you fail calculus?
Citibank gives financial aid? Are the loans subsidized by the taxpayers?
where do you get your loans?
I don't have any loans.
Grant took expensive gifts,was hoodwinked by Fisk and Gould,but then did later give orders to sell gold,thus breaking Gould and Fisk's attempt to corner the gold market;I'll give him that,still look what he did regarding Reconstruction.
His to his penurious situation,after he left the presidency, it was due to his stupidity ( failed investment firm,with a crooked partner!)and not to his "honesty".
You're spinning,re the immigration thing. The Chinese immigrants took jobs,at much lower pay, than American natives would.any businesses,at that time, fired their native American workers and replaced them with the Chinese.It was almost outsourcing;not really all that removed (and it was actually worse!)from hiring H1B workers!
The 1870s were dreary years in America,and 1876 was one of the worst,during that decade of depressions,PANICS,and monetary catastrophes.In the mid 1870s foreclosures were rampant,the majority of farmers neither owned the land they worked,nor the houses they lived in.Jobs were not easy to come by,nor secure.As a matter of fact,hordes of the unemployed became wandering bums,terrorizing the countryside.
Historical facts,not revisionist history or imagined history,matter!
My point in asking you the question I did, was to prove that NO president has EVER been as Conservative as what some here claim to want/want to go back to.Thanks for proving me correct.Now, shall we go through the rest of the GOP presidents, from Lincoln to Ike,or have you had enough? :-)
Nope - he remained a Democrat - that's one of the reasons why he was despised by the radical Republicans
His to his penurious situation,after he left the presidency, it was due to his stupidity ( failed investment firm,with a crooked partner!)and not to his "honesty".
Give me an example (besides gifts) which shows personal dishonesty.
You're spinning,re the immigration thing. The Chinese immigrants took jobs,at much lower pay, than American natives would.any businesses,at that time, fired their native American workers and replaced them with the Chinese.It was almost outsourcing;not really all that removed (and it was actually worse!)from hiring H1B workers!
It was actually racism which caused the various Chinese exclusion acts to be enacted. There weren't moves to restrict immigration from Europe until much later. In 1876 the United States was still expanding and immigrants were needed in many areas of the west.
The 1870s were dreary years in America,and 1876 was one of the worst,during that decade of depressions,PANICS,and monetary catastrophes.
The panic of 1873 was a European economic failure which spread to the United States. The main cause was the overbuilding of and speculation in railroads - similar to the dot com mania and crash. Things were bad all over - not just in the United States.
You prefer that the taxpayers subsidize your loans.
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