Posted on 03/28/2013 6:14:19 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The capital requirements of the machines for starting up a new manufacturing operation may be formidable, but they are not insurmountable.
The main problem however is the cost of regulations, labor, and direct & indirect taxes, which disadvantage us.
The biggest and most key of them being India and China’s enormous labor price advantage.
This will have to equalize with respect to the economic costs of their own political system & market.
Good point. I’ll see what I can find.
All together now, “unexpectedly.”
This may be a combination of Sequester hiring fears and the snow storms hitting the middle of the country with lack of construction.
All hail Walmart and cheap Chinese merchandise.
One big problem is that the nature of work has changed, with far more automation and a need for more complex education to do the job. More jobs requiring computer literacy which the older workers are not as well trained for. Fewer jobs requiring physical labor and more people physically unable to actually do them. I think that explains a lot of the decline in Labor Participation Rate. It also is one reason that the illegal immigrant population has dropped from 12 million to 11 million.
I heard an interesting interview on public radio with a women who was studying use of Supplemental SS for the handicapped. She found about 1/3 of the population in her study area was using SSS. This may have included being above a certain age as I missed the beginning of the program. Most of the people had a bad back, diabetes, or obesity which prevented them from being able to stand at a checkout counter, work in a McDonalds, etc., or they lacked the education to do a sit down office job.
See my comment #86 for more on the disability issue from an actual study.
That manufacturing jobs graph is surprisingly linear.
Based upon what I’m seeing from my acquaintances, the labor participation rate is dropping dramatically because of things like long-term unemployment making people simply unable to get back into the job market on one hand, long-term unemployment insurance making people unwilling to get back into the job market when they’ve made the adjustments to be able to live on unemployment, things like another almost 8,000,000 people signed up for disability in the last five years compared to about 3 million before that, and even more people moving in together.
The biggest reason that I see that the stock market is “soaring”, is because it’s typical competitors for monies such as bonds, all have essentially zero growth in a 2% inflation environment, so the only place for all of the money that would normally be distributed among several types of investments have to go is the stock market. And with the inflation, keeping your money out of the investments means continuously losing significant amounts of money.
The Indians begin to get into the market in the 80s after they dumped Socialism - at least hard-core socialism. The Chinese in the mid 90s and early oughts, when they begin integrating capitalism into their economics.
Yeah there is a chart somewhere that shows the states where government “benefits” are more than the median salaries in those states. It’s pretty shocking. I personally know several people who stay on “benefits” instead of trying to get a job.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.