A life of pleasure, ease, and nothing unpleasant.
I guess that didn't work.
On the lighter side of the news, gas is headed towards 4 bucks a gallon in 2012.
How 'bout that "hope and change".
Outsourcing, Open Borders, and Free Trade didn’t work out very well.
This is why I say Cain was almost on it with his 9-9-9 tax plan. Instead of 9% fed tax rate though, it should be 9% Excise Tax for all imported goods.
Attempting free trade with unequal trading partners has done nothing to spur manufacturing growth here and that was what made up the greatest portion of high paying blue collar jobs.
Making stuff is sooo 1980’s. We don’t need that now, we have government largess.
As the owner of a small company still engaged in electronics manufacturing in the US, this is all true and makes me very upset and fearful. But, we carry on because we must carry on. We’ve morphed our business more into the manufacture of sensors for the oil exloration industry and the wastewater treatment industry. There is still an electronic component, but there is no margin in just populating boards any more.
We noticed the first decline after 9/11. 9/11 just brought our business to a halt. We were just recovering when Katrina took out 3 of our biggest customers.
I live in NY State and no one in their right mind would open a factory here. Gov’t regulation, environment, OSHA, taxes, tort lawyers, insurance - will kill you unless you are in the highest levels of manufacturing.
It took real competition from outside of the US before they started building cars that lasted more than 3 years, but ooops unions again and every year they picked a different manufacturer to strike and the others just followed along...Part of the blame also belongs to the manufactures they just said yep and kicked the money can down the road and raised the price of the car...
A small point, but I really dislike these web essays that require 20 clicks to read the entire thing.
What happened to our industrial base:
1 Big Labor
2 Big Labor
3 Big Labor
4 Big Labor
5 Big Labor
6 Big Labor
7 Big Labor
8 Big Labor
9 Big Labor
10 Big Labor
11 Big Labor
12 Big Labor
13 Big Labor
14 Big Labor
15 Big Labor
16 Big Labor
17 Big Labor
18 Big Labor
19 Big Labor
That about does it. There are probably a few others; but you get the idea.
The ones who expect the government to do something are the "protectionists." (Hint: protectionist is a pejorative word.)
Actually we "protectionists" were asking that the government to stop doing something.. encouraging off shoring through tax breaks, using the Export-Import Bank and the Overseas Private Investment Corp to guarantee corporations' adventures overseas, and many other ways I am sure.
It so depresses me. My son who got popped in Iraq was a promising mechanical engineering student. My young one is a budding machinist/welder. We’re from old German stock, so we value the trades. I’m a hack, but I can forge and heat treat something good enough to get by and enjoy woodworking as well. I can solder, braze or make a simple transistor circuit if I have to.
What the hell has happened to us? Do a search on Google Books for Popular Mechanics and look what kids were encouraged to do back in the day.
Most of the service business revenues come from customers who depend on one of the various levels of government for their incomes. Most people who are very active in politics (any political party) are dependent on incomes from government.
First post industrial nation?
I don’t think so...the England beat us to that by 30 years.
America is still pretty impressive in the ag sector, weapons, aerospace, and computer chips...for now.
I don't think that is true. We export more air in empty shipping containers than anything else.
There are less than a half dozen other occupied homes within a three mile radius of me (none within 3/4 of a mile), and there’s a local zoning ordinance (called a “law”) against manufacturing anything, no matter what or how small the scale, or doing any kind of automotive work. As for “main street” or empty industrial parks, forget that. The most common killer of new businesses is high flooring cost. ...also land use regs that make it unfeasible to build or grow anything.
Have fun. Enjoy the slide.
I’m sorry, but the “article” has about as much depth of economic analysis as Obama, and despite portraying the “job losses” as due to globalization, and in particular to China’s policy of keeping the yuan artificially undervalued, is really complaining, like Obama lamenting the displacement of bank tellers by ATMs, about job losses to technological advance. The U.S. is still the world’s largest manufacturer in terms of output, even if not in term of number of persons employed in manufacturing.
“Deindustrialization” by automation is an absurdity, but that is what is being claimed: because fewer people in percentage terms are employed in manufacturing, America is “deindustrialized”. Rubbish!
The logical end of the process is in sight: when everything can be made by 3D-printers, there will be no manufacturing jobs at all, but we will still manufacture lots of stuff. We can debate the virtues of the Luddite position of keeping needless manufacturing jobs in existence, and there may actually be some. I just found my old copy of Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve, and one of its points that was lost in the attempts to vilify him for racism was the problem of what society should do when all the jobs that stupid people can do are done by machines.
Most of the collapse in manufacturing has been post-2000.
Hmm, I wonder who was president from 2000 to 2008, presiding over this collapse. Anyone? Bueller?
>> The United States has become a nation that consumes everything in sight and yet produces increasingly little.
Leftwing bullcrap.