Posted on 08/17/2016 7:09:34 AM PDT by Kaslin
If the issue was productivity improvements it it would be done as easily in American plants, which then wouldn’t be empty shells. But that isn’t the case. Entire industries are relocating outside the country leaving nothing behind. The issue, as Paul Craig Roberts has been saying, is global labor arbitrage.
Dont bother arguing with them either.
They are immune to facts like Williams’s.
>>Every time I see people waving these signs, I ask myself: Do I want to subsidize these people?
Manufacturing jobs are about more than trade and the bottom line. Manufacturing is a nation’s lifeblood in a war. It is a way to keep people working and off welfare.
Remember how our massive auto industry stepped up in WW2 to make everything from tanks to bombers. Our typewriter and sewing machine manufacturers made guns and bombsights. But a nation that can’t even build an airplane without outsourcing has no way to build a war machine...especially if the other side in the war consists of China and its satellites.
You are subsidizing “those people” already and they don’t contribute a thing. Subsidize them at work and at least they contribute something.
In any case what we DON’T enjoy now is equivalent numbers of Americans employed at “better”, more efficient, higher skilled jobs producing higher technology goods that the world would demand. My guess is that we probably would have if not for the interference of our own gummint in the markets.
I wish my daughter had a job in a factory making plastic scrub brushes. These used to be Merican jobs!
And he also included oil as a manufactured product. This alone terribly skews his numbers. Yes, fracking has massively increased productivity.
No, it did not cause our factories to close, but there it is in the equation.
The article is misleading.
Honest to God, I used to shoot with a guy that had an M-1 that was made by Rockola. He had another made by International Harvester. He said he couldn’t shoot that one because all it wanted to do was “raise crops.”
When I visit Germany, I notice factories almost everywhere I go. They are making the things we used to. The theorists here are killing our middle class. They look at a chart showing productivity and look at stack prices and conclude the economy is awesome.
The middle class never crosses their mind. It doesn’t exist, or need to.
Any statistician can cut the numbers any which way and all of us know about the technical changes etc, etc.
Trump isn't against trade and he isn't xenophobic but there are genuine questions concerning how beneficial the current deals are for the middle class (we know the corps love the status quo).
I wish my daughter had a job in a factory making plastic scrub brushes. These used to be Merican jobs!
If your daughter’s alternative was chronic unemployment she might not be too proud to take assembly line work. Usually those who disparage such work can’t imagine doing a job that they feel is beneath them.
Losing a job due to outsourcing or losing it to technological innovation produces the same result for an individual: He’s out of a job. The best thing that we can do is to have a robust economy such that he can find another job.
As long as the job that replaced the old job is in the USA, there is no problem, but when the new job is in Communist China.....thats a problem for U.S.
We already subsidize various areas in income more so than china as well. China doesn't try to stabilize the ME, China doesn't patrol the international water ways safe with a Navy like US.
I'd like to see the number when it comes to having a jobs here as opposed to outsourcing and paying other forms of welfare.
Finally, some of the largest proponents of 'free trade' are the ones usually immune to it in the form of academic tenure.
Joke about scrub brushes. But someone used to build and maintain the machinery. Someone used to mine coal. Someone used to make levis. Someone used to make Carrier air conditioners. Someone used to make Ford pickups. Someone used to process lumber, fish, raise crops in the San Joaquin valley. (the water was cut off, farming was killed, and Mexican farmers got the windfall)
These people who you laugh at bought houses, raised kids, and provided for a family with these jobs.
RAISE a tariff of 2000 dollars on cars imported. Keep the jobs and make 5 billion, and foreign countries pay for it.
instead of killing off 25 thousand American jobs.
Raise a tariff? What wrong with you? We are the party of Reagan!!
Wait....What? Reagan did what with motorcycles? Because it was important to him to save the jobs at Harley Davidson? And he put 100% tariff on some Japanese electronics in 1987?
Hmmmmmmmmm /s
Comparative advantage was David Ricardo's rationale for the standard free trade model. It assumed the immobility of many factors of production because in the early 1800s that was the background reality. But today we are confronted with absolute advantage in the form of a huge Asian labor surplus and not the comparative advantage of Ricardo's model.
Talk about projection.
The only results of free trade agreements is a sharp drop in quality of products, along with a static or increase in the price. Also add in the rampant inflation of domestic goods due to a weakened dollar, all with the cost of welfare on the remaining taxpayers due to the lost jobs, and the average person will not side with the free trade crowd.
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