Posted on 05/01/2002 8:25:35 PM PDT by Mini-14
I think all parts of the country are affected by NAFTA. But some of them are affected for the better and others for the worse. Overall, free-trade theory says, and the stats back it up, that the effects for the better outweigh the effects for the worse by a wide margin.
I don't see the evidence of that at all. We're in a recession, Mexico is in a recession, the entire border area is now being considered an economic disaster in need of huge amounts of federal money. Social program spending is higher than ever. In spite of jobs leaving this country at a very high rate, unskilled immigrants are flooding over the border and wages are dropping in many job categories. The national debt rose in the 90's and more people foreclosed on homes than ever before.
Not being in the tech industry (believe it or not, not everyone is) I have no idea what you're talking about, I don't even know what "IT" stands for, BUT, I do know It's ideas like yours that create companies, jobs and careers.
It's layed off people with ideas and intellect like you that are capable of creating their own work rather than whine about being layed off...Which might explain why you don't have time. You're possibly already busy creating for someone else.
You: "I don't see why you feel the need to villify someone just because they hold different opinions (opinions that happen to be very free-market oriented, by the way). But to answer, I have worked in the computer industry for 25 years, doing everything from coding to running tech support to managing a good-sized consulting business. There are many systems that I have written out there doing productive work, some of which have been doing it for many years."
Sorry Joe, I shouldn't have gotten personal about this and I have no doubt you make a great contribution. I am a software engineer who was coding Windows applications and leading projects for the past fourteen years, my last employer went bankrupt and I have been out of work for several months. It's not much of an excuse but I am one of those engineers who was making a six figure income and now find myself and my family trying to live on unemployment compensation of $478 a week.
Once again, please accept my apology for my ill considered remarks.
It's Ok, I have friends in the same boat. I went through such a period myself in the late 1980s. No work in my area, no matter how good you were. After eight months of looking, I took a job doing Unix, which I've never cared for.
But two years later the industry began to come back, and by 1995, salaries for developers were rising 15-20% per year. That boom lasted six or seven years. The key to getting by in this industry is to realize that today's big money may be gone tomorrow, so save, save, save, and don't get dependent on the high income. Hard advice to follow at this point, I know.
And Nafta is to blame for all of this? Wow, powerful legislation.
What about per capita income for the same period. Adjusted for inflation, of course.
The US average is around 6% now, isn't it? And these weenies are complaining about 2% unemployment? Sheesh.
We had a similar experince here where I work. For several years they couldn't even hire a single person(Manufacturing company in Silicon Valley, wages were not even close to the going rate and the working conditions are very blue collar), turn over was high. Now, we are fully staffed and every single person that left has called back in the last year looking for work.
I had several chances to leave but I entrenched myself in some mission critical stuff and expect to hang on through this downturn.
If history show anything, there will be another computer boom. Somewhere, some geeks are currently creating the next thing, and we'll be off and running again.
As I said in another reply, it's very hard to get any reliable numbers for such a measure. We hear the horror stories of decreasing incomes, but hard measures of living standards (percentage of people who own their own homes, have a car, a telephone, VCR, etc., plus things like average home size) have had a steady increase as long as numbers have been recorded. See here for one example of a report. (I've seen an updated version of this that says basically the same thing, but I believe I saw it in print and I can't find it on the web.)
The numbers you want would depend heavily on government statistics. Do you trust those numbers? I don't. Neither do these people.
In short, while some incomes go up and others go down, every objective measure says the trend is toward better living standards, even when increasing taxes, etc. are taken into account. So I take all these studies on incomes with a huge grain of salt. They can't even come up with a decent measure of inflation! It is well know that the CPI has some serious flaws because it does not take technological evolution into account very well.
This 2% number is obviously false.
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