Posted on 01/20/2010 6:12:38 AM PST by Kaslin
MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- This town of 15,000 in southwest Virginia is a good candidate for Anywhere, USA. There is bingo at the Elk's Lodge every Monday night. Bowling is a blood sport. But Martinsville also has an unwanted distinction -- a 20 percent unemployment rate, the highest in Virginia.
As the State of the Union approaches, the political class will turn en masse to the issue of unemployment. So I sat down with the objects of this attention -- a group of men studying at a Martinsville vocational training college. From them I learned: It is not easy to make a living while a way of life collapses around you.
In Martinsville's golden age of textile and furniture manufacturing, recalls Larry Jessee, 48, "If you were fired from one job, you could go to another immediately. Unless you wanted to take time for lunch." Most of those jobs have fled abroad. The work that remains is mainly in retail and fast food -- fields hurt by the current recession -- or in service industries such as health care and call centers.
The call centers -- outsourced customer service for large companies -- demand typing skills, which don't come easily to former factory workers. And a thick, rural Virginia accent isn't usually considered a good phone voice.
So J.D. Privette, 56, and Walter E. Hamell, 59 -- friends and bowling buddies from their days at the table factory -- are training to be office medical assistants. Most medical jobs, however, involve a round-trip commute of 100 miles or more. "You can't afford to move, and no one will buy your house anyway," says Privette.
(Excerpt) Read more at townhall.com ...
I really wish we would make more use of tariffs. The concept seemed to get a bad reputation with Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression, but I think tariffs to protect domestic jobs are not so bad. I think taxes on corporations and personal income are far more destructive.
America is in a world of hurt for so many, many reasons these days. A lot of stupid decisions and mistakes from the past are really catching up with us in a big way, all across society.
“In the long run, Wilcox predicts this will undercut marriage in working-class communities and leave men more rootless and socially disconnected.”
A cornerston of ‘The Communist Manifesto’ is to destroy families by any means possible and to get the children AWAY from the parents by any means possible.
My heart really goes out to these guys. Too bad they didn’t band together right from the start and pool their tools and skills and set up their own woodworking shop.
Eh, it was just an idea...
I guess hope and change didn't work out. Just wait until obamacare, rising taxes, cap and trade, etc. are passed. You are going to have 50% unemployment in your town.
So, basically, these people are whining about not being able to get a job because they couldn’t be bothered to learn modern career survival skills? Yeah, no sympathy here.
And come on, in the era of the Internet, how the hell can you not learn basic keyboarding skills???
WAY past time to slap a 500-1000% tariff on imports.
It is National Suicide to allow China to sell it’s cheap, subsidized junk here, while our manufacturing base further erodes.
I commend British Leyland to your attention. All protective tariffs do is encourage and protect inferior products and allow the protectees to produce more and more inferior goods, which then means they fall further and further behind the competition.
Sure, in the short term it might preserve some jobs, but in the long run it destroys industry and the jobs disappear forever.
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=517119
Our manufacturing base isn’t dead or dying - it’s just that automation has decreased the number of people needed for the same amount of work.
The Constitution allows tariffs. The Constituion allows income taxes only through a rather flawed Amendment. There are upsides and downsides to everything, but I never understand why some folks only seem to see the downside of tariffs and yet act like corporate and personal taxes don't have any serious drawbacks.
It's all about trade-offs. When we tax ourselves, we weaken ourselves and strength the politicians. When we impose tariffs, we weaken foreign competitors and we make an effort to strengthen our domestic economy.
I believe tariffs can be done poorly and I believe they can be done well. Our default position seems to be pretty close to "let's not do them at all".
The problem is that the products that people say “need’ tariffs are usually the same inferior domestic products.
Something else to consider is the example of Sterilite. They are a hugely successful competitor to Rubbermaid (who seems to manufacture exclusively in China) who just happens to make all their stuff in the US, most of which is far superior to the Rubbermaid product. Oh, and they’re cheaper than Rubbermaid, too.
They achieved this through extensive automation and endless efficiency drives. Even in a field of ‘cheap plastic crap’, they still manage to undercut and outsell their made-in-China competition.
Tariffs are almost always a band-aid covering up incompetent managment of industry.
I tried Sterilite a few times but their totes couldn’t stand up in the cold. They turned brittle and cracked so I went back to Rubbermaid...just sayin’.
I found the exact opposite - on the other hand, Sterilite makes several different grades and types of totes. They even make Pelican case clones.
My Rubbermaid laundry basket (made in China) lasted six months, the equivalent Sterilite basket I replaced it with cost less and has lasted several years.
Another case of how a tariff ‘done well’ has ended up going hideously wrong is the Reagan era Harley Tariff. Sure, Harley perked up, but where are they now? Back at the verge of bankruptcy with only a couple of modern bikes with the rest being antique dinosaurs that can’t compete in a fair and open market.
Each and every American should work hard at NOT BUYING Chinese-made goods. It may be impossible in some cases, but in quite a few cases, you CAN find the made in US item. You may have to do without. Certainly, you can't know where every component in a machine/appliance comes from, but make SOME effort. Call it an "individual, voluntary tariff."
The past several Christmases, we've bought exclusively American. Yes, we bought less, sometimes spent a bit more, but it was more thoughtful, less wasteful, less consumeristic.
Now that is true about the Laundry basket. We like Sterilite better, but unless they changed their formula the larger totes always cracked on me. Hadn’t heard about the pelican case though?! May have to look into those.
It is actually possible to go to Walmart, buy all the normal sorts of products one needs, and leave with nothing that was made in China with most of it being made in the USA.
I tend to avoid Chinese goods not just because of any political or patriotic reasons, but because the products are just plain unsafe and can get you killed. Chinese-made suspension parts are just frightening, for example.
An easier way to keep Chinese goods out of the US (if that is your goal) that doesn’t actually involve a tariff, is to promulgate and enforce product safety laws.
Yeah, I spotted them at the local Walmart recently. The color du jour for them (as you probably know, Sterilite stuff changes colors with the seasons) seems to be a light blue. They appeared to be be reasonably sturdy, but weren’t as thick or heavy as an actual Pelican case.
“...automation has decreased the number of people needed...”
Yes a contributing factor me thinks, but there is also the onerous taxation by government Fed, State, and local at every step of production from raw materials to manufacture, to all transportation, to sale that needs to be addressed, and reduced, or eliminated that would make us competitive with foreign manufacturers.
Rather than look to tariffs, or blame automation we need to create smaller government that doesn’t require so much Leftist style taxation to support.
“Shrink the Fed” should be a battle cry as was “Sink the Bismark”, because the Fed is where we can cut the most taxation from.
This is true, lowering taxation would also have a boosting effect.
Another thing the tariff promoters don’t seem to realize is this: What do you think is going to happen if we raise tariffs on imported goods? Other countries will take offense and raise tariffs on AMERICAN goods, thereby destroying our export sales as well. And we can’t have a thriving economy without exports, it just doesn’t work in this day and age.
Exorbitant tariffs to prop up domestic producers? Nonsense. While manufacturing employment has been crashing (just as agricultural employment crashed in the last century to its current level of < 2% of total employment) manufacturing output has NOT crashed, but is simply being done with fewer workers, focused on products where China and other external producers do not have the upper hand in lower production costs.
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/table1_2.htm
http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/g17/ipdisk/ip_sa.txt
Current and future workers will need to find new ways to earn their daily bread, but artificial trade barriers that rip off consumers will not assist that process.
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