Hahahah....
Ooooh boy that was a good one.
Where have I ever espoused higher taxes? Even once?
You are a tax! And your endless apologias for China...you must be related to this guy:
Posted on 01/02/2006 4:19:44 AM PST by ventana
AP Middle-Class Job Losses Batter Workforce Sunday January 1, 8:53 pm ET By Kathy Barks Hoffman, Associated Press Writer Middle-Class Job Losses Batter Workforce As Companies Slash Payrolls, Send Jobs Overseas
LANSING, Mich. (AP) -- Thirty years ago, Dan Fairbanks looked at the jobs he could get with his college degree and what he could make working the line at General Motors Corp., and decided the GM job looked better.
He still thinks he made the right choice. But with GM planning to end production of the Chevrolet SSR and shut down the Lansing Craft Centre where he works sometime in mid-2006, Fairbanks faces an uncertain future.
"Back when I hired in at General Motors 30 years ago, it seemed like a good, secure job," said Fairbanks, president since June of UAW Local 1618. Since then, "I've seen good times and I've seen bad times. This qualifies as a bad time, in more ways than one."
Many of the country's manufacturing workers are caught in a worldwide economic shift that is forcing companies to slash payrolls or send jobs elsewhere, leaving workers to wonder if their way of life is disappearing.
The trend in the manufacturing sector toward lower pay, fewer benefits and fewer jobs is alarming many of them.
"They end up paying more of their health care and they end up with lousier pensions -- if they keep one at all," says Michigan AFL-CIO President Mark Gaffney. As wages and benefits drop, "it's the working class that's paying the price."
West Virginia steelworkers are all too familiar with the problem. The former Weirton Steel Corp., which 20 years ago had some 13,000 employees, today has just 1,300 union workers left on the job.
The steel mill has changed hands twice in two years, and just last month, Mittal Steel Co. told the Independent Steelworkers Union it would permanently cut the jobs of 800 people who'd been laid off since summer.
Larry Keister, 50, of Weirton, W.Va., has 31 years in the mill that his father and brothers all joined. His son tried, but got laid off quickly.
"I'm too old to go back to school. I've worked there all my life," says Keister, who drives a buggy in the tin mill. "I went there straight out of high school. It's all I know."
Though Keister is safe for now from layoffs, he wonders what will happen to the hundreds of friends and co-workers who will be jobless by the end of January.M
Gary Colflesh, 56, of Bloomingdale, Ohio, said there are few jobs in nearby Ohio or Pennsylvania for workers to move to.
"They're destroying the working class. Why can't people see this?" asked the 38-year veteran. "Anybody who works in manufacturing has no future in this country, unless you want to work for wages they get in China."
Abby Abdo, 52, of Weirton, said workers once believed that if they accepted pay cuts and shunned strikes, they would keep their jobs. Not anymore.
"Once they get what they want, they kick us to the curb," he said. "There's no guarantee anymore. No pensions. No health care. No job security. We have none of those things anymore."
Fairbanks of the Lansing GM plant said the changes are going to force a lot of people to retrench to deal with the new economic reality. For some, it will make it harder to send their children to college or be able to retire when they want. For others, it will mean giving up some of the trappings a comfortable income can bring.
"You're going to see lake property, you're going to see boats, you're going to see motorcycles hit the market," he said. "People get rid of the toys."
Economists agree the outlook is changing for workers who moved from high school to good-paying factory jobs two and three decades ago, or for those seeking that lifestyle now.
"It was possible for people with a high school education to get a job that paid $75,000 to $100,000 and six weeks of paid vacation. Those jobs are disappearing," says Patrick Anderson of Anderson Economic Group in East Lansing, Mich. "The ... low-skill, upper-middle-class way of life is in danger."
General Motors Corp. has announced that it plans to cut 30,000 hourly jobs by 2008. Ford Motor Co. is scheduled to announce plant closings and layoffs in January that could affect at least 15,000 workers in the United States and Mexico, analysts say, and is cutting thousands from its white-collar work force.
GM and Ford have won concessions from the United Auto Workers that will require active and retired workers to pick up more of their health care costs, and DaimlerChrysler AG is seeking similar concessions.
Thomas Klier, senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, says the transition for manufacturers toward leaner, lower-cost operations has been going on for some time. But the bankruptcy of the nation's largest auto supplier, Delphi Corp., pushed the issue into the headlines.
Its 34,000 hourly U.S. workers could see their pay cut from $27 an hour to less than half of that, although the company is still trying to work out a compromise unions will support. Workers also could have to pay health care deductibles for the first time and lose their dental and vision care coverage.
Delphi worker Michael Balls of Saginaw, Mich., hears the argument that U.S. companies' costs are too high to compete with plants that pay workers less overseas, but he doesn't buy it.
"I think if Delphi wins, they lose," he says. "If I'm making $9 an hour, I'm not making enough to buy vehicles."
Unfortunately for workers like Balls, the old rules no longer apply in the new global economy, says John Austin, a senior fellow with the Washington-based Brookings Institute.
"We're in a different ball game now," Austin says. "We're going to be shedding a lot of the low-education manufacturing jobs."
Some of those workers are likely to try to move into the growing service sector, Austin says. But he says the transition can be tough, even if the jobs pay as well as the ones they had -- and many don't.
"Pointing out a medical technician job is available if they go back and get a certificate doesn't solve the issue today for those 45-year-olds who are losing their jobs at Delphi," he said.
Dick Posthumus, a partner in an office furniture system manufacturing company in Grand Rapids, Mich., says that "basic, unskilled manufacturing is going to be done in China, India, places like that because we are in a global world, and there's nothing anyone can do about that."
His company, Compatico Inc., buys much of its basic parts from South Korea, Taiwan, Canada and China, where Posthumus has toured plants he says rival modern manufacturing plants in the U.S. But the company still saves its sophisticated parts-making and assembly for its Michigan plant.
"The manufacturing of tomorrow is going to look somewhat different from the manufacturing of yesterday," Posthumus says. "It doesn't mean that we no longer manufacture ... (But) it's going to be a painful adjustment."
Associated Press Writer Vicki Smith in Morgantown, W.Va., contributed to this story.
God, I hope not. It probably runs 24-28 inches, and he'll likely post it here.
I'd be willing to say that someone with two $20 gold coins is wealthier than someone with one (everything else being equal). I can show you how what Americans own today can be exchanged for more gold than what they had twenty years ago. What I can't do is make you accept gold coins, land, inflation adjusted dollars, or whatever as a definition of wealth.
Anyone can always say that we're worse off because he doesn't like whatever he doesn't like. My only objection is that it's an idiotic way to do business and I usually end up having to support those clowns with my taxes.
Ok. let me ask you this question: Person "A's" job depends on free trade. They are say a banker. Person "B's" job is taken by free trade. Do you penalize A to benefit B?
Hahahah....
Ooooh boy that was a good one.
Where have I ever espoused higher taxes? Even once?
You are a tax! And your endless apologias for China...you must be related to this guy:
Ping me --I need to know if I like high taxes so I can hurry up and change my mind. Man, what would I ever do without the Freerepublic!
Silly, YOU ARE A TAX! [hoot]
"Fairness" in a capitalist system is more or less what you can get while following the laws. In this respect collective bargaining/unions are fair. They may go against the grain of American individualism, but they're fair.
The guy running the injection molding machine wasn't overpaid. The market had simply set a new price on his expertise. It went from $15 or $20 bucks an hour to 50 or 75 cents an hour. That's a conversation I wouldn't relish having with anyone. "Hey pal, the thing you spent the last decade doing for eight hours a day -- the job that has paid the mortgage, fed the kids and makes you a hero to your family -- is now worth five bucks a day."
The hedge fund guys are just the latest thing. Twenty years ago it was the M&A guys and the arbitrageurs (love that word). And before that it was the go-go years brokers, who followed the bond brokers...
Uh, contradiction alert: By your nebulous terms, your preferred policies are penalizing B to benefit A in the same example. If we adhere to these stark tradeoffs, then it is purely a zero-sum redistributionary exercise. I stipulate this is a grossly simplistic example, however, and there are even starker effects than this simple win-lose equation, than you might realize. You noted "A" was a "banker", so that places him in the financial services sector. You failed to designate which category "B" was in.
It can make a difference on the macroeconomic level, undercutting any claims of "win-win" which some free traders usually try to tout for the alleged virtues. It literally could be a win for the one sector, the financial, but a catastrophic loss for manufacturing, its service sector, its internal feeder chain, other manufacturers, etc. And the taxpayers picking up the tab of financing the outsourcing with OPIC funds and IMF loans, and oh yeah, unemployment compensation, and also retraining costs. Maybe even ultimately welfare. Label those "social costs" if you will, although they have a tangible price tag potentially. From your limited hypothetical there is no sufficient information to tell.
And regarding the redistributionary impacts, you really do need to take into consideration the mulitiplier effects of various kinds of activities. These are broadly generalized as follows:
Chart Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
To reiterate from my previous post, and summarize the import of the above:
Manufacturing’s use of intermediate goods and services in its production process means that it generates substantial economic activity at the intermediate level. This is called the multiplier effect, and it turns out that manufacturing’s multiplier effect is stronger than other sectors.
Specifically, every $1 of a manufacturing product sold to a final user generates an additional $1.43 of intermediate economic output, more than half in sectors outside manufacturing. Manufacturing’s multiplier effect is greater than any other sector and far greater than that of the service sector, which generates only 71 cents of intermediate activity for $1 of final sales—half of the additional intermediate output generated by $1 of manufacturing final sales.
Have you seen this old, 2001 publication which puzzled over some disconcerting facts...Just How Productive Are U.S. Workers?. It bears on this discussion because most free traders have been attempting to claim that we can shed via outsourcing...without any real impact on U.S. manufacturing, i.e., that it is actually uneffected by the imports displacing their previous functions. If the underlying facts speculated herein are true, it helps explain the two-year "jobless recovery" that had the Administration sweating tacks....we have encountered an accounting confusion which masks the real damage suffered within the U.S.
I see you are running for the tall grass already....
It's reputed that Karl Marx himself said, "I am not a Marxist." By that he meant that his theories were misunderstood by those calling themselves Marxists. But who could blame them? Five thousand pages of German economics? I'd rather shave my genitals with a cheese grater while chewing on tin foil.
I haven't read Sowell. I stick to the classics, left and right.
My fear at this point, and I don't think it's unfounded, is that we're getting close to the point where a populist demagogue makes an entrance. There's plenty of fuel and fear for the fire.
China is losing "manufacturing jobs -- if you count those old worthless Mao-era state-owned enterprises as manufacturing. Many of them are responsible for the Chi-coms' banks' nonperforming loan problem. "Loans" to inefficient state-owned enterprises are not repaid and are needed to keep from cutting more jobs thus increasing the growing unrest among the tens of millions of unemployed.
Manufacturing jobs are being cut by closing inefficient state-owned enterprises (SOEs).
Manufacturing jobs are growing in China's special economic zones. Here is a news item excerpt from a Yahoo! Asian source:
"China's soaring productivity stems from downsizing and restructuring of public companies, and upsizing of foreign firms and firms with foreign investment as well as private domestic Chinese producers, according to the study." [End excerpt]
It's an insult to equate worthless Mao-era state-owned Communist "enterprises" with Western free market private enterprises.
China losing real manufacturing jobs is spin that would make a whirling dervish envious.
"Anyways, boiling your statement down, you in fact have advocated doing nothing. You are being a defeatist."
Ok, so I'm not an economist....that doesn't mean I'm defeatist - I just don't see returning to funding the government with a tariff on all imports as a workable way to fund all the social programs Americans demand. As much as I'd love to see government limited and spending reduced, I'm afraid it will only happen when we can no longer borrow money to grow government.
It's not defeatist to acknowledge that Americans love getting their gov't checks in the mail and love thinking that "the rich" are paying for it.
Except in the extreme micro sense (saving ones own job) I do not understand the underpinning of protectionist theory.
Metternich, Realpolitick, blah, blah, blah.
You might be interested in The Rise and Decline of the State by Martin van Creveld
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