Replies

[Me] China's supply of prison slave-labor and Malthusian masses of rural poor will afford Chinese businesses a wage advantage for as far as the eye can see. Or do you disagree?

[You, replying] Slave labor is one of the most inefficient forms of production on the planet. Makes for lousy production.

Do you mean poor quality? That wasn't the American experience with slave labor. Historians of slavery have showed that artisanship didn't appear to suffer in the hands of slaves, and the Tredegar Iron Works in Richmond, armorers to the Confederacy, employed hundreds of slaves in the production of war materiel.

There is more to business costs than obtaining labor.

Sure, but labor that is paid a tiny fraction of anyone else's labor is a big cost advantage. Other factors would have to be awfully unequal to erase it -- and with other countries offsetting our tax structure, including any tinkering you want to do, that isn't likely to happen. The wage advantage will persist; you haven't accounted for it at all.

[You, changing the subject back to taxes and attempting to evade the point about wage advantages] The tax system being one of the big offenders. Any action we take to improve the efficiency and encourage manufacturing in the US should be done.

So it's all about subsidizing business with tax exemptions.

Including taxing imports as highly as we do our own domestic production.....Time to change the pardigm a bit and start focusing on assure our manufacturing receives first billing instead of giving them every reason in the world to skip town looking for greener pastures.

Your demand to be treated as a sacred cow isn't exactly knocking me dead. Just why does your citizenship superordinate mine, again, in that your activities deserve tax exemption and mine don't? You won't pay NRST on your supplies and raw materials or labor -- but I'll pay it on everything I use. You're introducing a tax and social gradus here based on your self-definition as a manufacturing businessman, and treating yourself to special exemptions.

Or, as I put it a while ago,

The "fair tax" is nothing but a tax-free operating environment for already-rich businessmen.

[Your retort] Never new a poor man to pay a good wage. Rich busineman do.

How about, "poor men can't pay good wages, rich businessmen can -- but don't"?

After all, the secret to "trickle down" is not to trickle at all, right? That's why businesses pay fat retainers to management and HR consulting outfits to make sure their cost controls and benefits are the leanest, their wages the meanest, and their workforce the tiniest per top-line dollar in town. Right?

[Me] They'll be able easily to afford their own sales-tax bills because their businesses will leverage them against the increases.

[You] What increases.

The increases in their sales-tax expense on personal purchases. They'll be so rich they won't care, once their businesses get that giant tax break.

The retail sales tax is paid by the end consumer not the business, any business.

Yes, we agree about that -- which is why businesses want to stop paying corporate income and payroll taxes and obtain changes in tax law that would make individuals 100% responsible instead, and them 0% responsible for the federal budget.

And state.

And local.

Right down the line -- you want to make business tax-free, zero tax, none, nada. Such a deal.

In fact all any business can do (provided they expect to stay out of bankruptcy) is pass on costs to the individual consumer in higher prices....

Unless the market won't let them, as has frequently been the case recently as in e.g. airline tickets.

..... employees in lower wages.....

If they can, they do that anyway. They don't need a reason, or an excuse. Just a means.

..... and smaller retirement benefits......

Don't make me laugh -- years of record profits, and they're slashing retirement benefits anyway, despite being better able to afford them than ever! What a joke!

...... and investors in lower returns on investment.

Not when the market discounts the stock to expectations on P/E.

All are individual Americans, all have a stake in a healthy manufacturing infra-structure that supports our standard of living.

That's correct, but as we've also seen from reading the papers, management seems to be getting the lion's share of the value of increases in productivity, no? Shareholders are participating -- and employees are paying for it in job loss and benefit and pay decreases (in real terms).

Which gets back to my original question you never answered.

Did savings go to zero because taxes went up, as you keep suggesting without proving -- putting up correlation after correlation without actually proving your correlations --

or did savings go to zero because wages fell in real dollars???

All I want is an answer.