Posted on 10/28/2010 6:37:50 PM PDT by blam
I don't follow your logic... For very, VERY low cost products the cost of capital equipment in the US is too high; it's still cheaper to do it with lots of little fingers moving quickly. But modernization is sweeping through China, and even those jobs are starting to move to Vietnam and Laos as the cost of labor is even cheaper.
The cost of shipping is a LOT less to send from China to the US! For example, consider a 2-3 day express delivery of a letter. From the US, it costs me about $45 via the USPS (cheaper than UPS or Fedex). From Shanghai, it costs me 60 RMB - about $9. Same delivery time, same paperwork, same package, just direction is different.
Labor costs are an issue for some things, but it's mainly structural in effect - unions, benefits, OSHA requirements and the like.
For manufacturing - an industry I work in - automation is the hue and cry and it absolutely decimated the US workforce, and is starting to do the same here in China, too. It's the number one worry for the Chinese Government - things are moving so fast they'll never have their "golden 50s/60s" of manufacturing. It'll jump straight from the 20s-30s-40s of emergent agricultural right to modern manufacturing of the 90s and 2000s, and never let a huge manufacturing workforce become entrenched for a generation or two.
The only soldiers I know who bitch about robots and automated systems are the ones that have to repair them, or hump them back to base when they break!
Transnationals are either above the law or making it to suit them.
Average citizens only own the right to revoke their corporate status in America, which is what we should do.
However, that would require a congress not bought off by these corrupt SOBs.
You are so correct. Sad isn’t it. Far too many of our people still don’t get it. Well. We and the world will get over this also.
I think Ross was in it to get Clinton elected. Recall he was looking like he could win the election. And suddenly a Cuban Hit Squad was going to attack his daughters wedding. I smell a rat here.
“I think Ross was in it to get Clinton elected.”
It certainly seemed that way at the time; when he tried to redeem himself by endorsing W in 2000, the media tried to suppress any impact by releasing W’s DWI story. He won anyway, and in return the world found out about Jesse Jackson’s “love child”...
I had forgotten about that.
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