Posted on 02/01/2003 11:27:51 PM PST by FightingForFreedom
Wages will not equalize between U.S. and foreign countries for a very long time, if ever. The problem is supply differences. The 100 million or so American workers are vastly outnumbered by the potential number of Chinese, Indian, and other developing nation's manufacturing and knowledge workers. The standard of living differential is also too great. The balancing act for U.S. and multi-national businesses that are outsourcing our jobs is to make sure they don't kill the golden goose (the American consumer) before they've generated an even bigger goose to take to slaughter in China, India, and other targeted markets. Remember, producing cheaply means nothing if there's nobody to buy the products. And no one has been as well-trained as the American consumer to buy, buy, buy, no matter how much in debt one becomes! As a software engineer, I've seen this problem coming for at least 5 years now, but it was well masked by the artificial high-tech bubble through March 2000. I'm not sure that there is an answer at this point -- the genie is out of the bag, so to speak. Once one company in an industry has convinced the govt to open a market in one undesirable country or other, all other companies with which it competes are forced to do the same. Bottling up the genie is notoriously difficult.
One of my great grandfathers had to farm by horse/mule. He didn't have much quality time with his family during the growing season.
No one is "anti-trade" - - many are anti-NAFTA, anti-GATT, anti-WTO, etc. They simply believe in "fair-trade." A system whereby we export factories and good jobs, and import cheap goods and cheap immigrant labor, is hardly "fair."
Sadly, and unfortunately, Pat was the only 2000 candidate to raise the issue.
The problem with your statement is that this situation doesn't exist in a "freedom-oriented" situation. Quite the opposite - employment freedom is being diminished. While corporations are "free" to move their factories to India, American workers are "not free" to search for a job in India.
Multinational corporations are experts at slowly boiling American frogs in water...
BUMP
Completely short-sighted. Do you suppose that the standard of living in China, Mexico, and India are fixed? Do you have any idea what the GDP growth in China is and, furthermore, is predicted to be in the coming decade?
We are not, for the most part, competing with low-wage competitors. We've given them the markets and take advantage of the labor costs. Once China discovers its Henry Ford and more people in China can afford the widgets they create in their realms, then that advantage will begin to erode.
The beginnings are already evident. One only need look at where China is investing. Roads, buildings, power, wiring -- all of the infrastructure required to become a giant. This is not your grandfather's China. This is a China hell-bent on becoming the premier economic force in the world. I wouldn't bet against them over a 5 decade timeline.
Glad to hear you have a good paying job now. You were rewarded for your effort.
I don't buy into the notion that the economic pie is of a fixed size. The problem is when one looses a job, is finding a replacement. You either go where the jobs are, or you create a NEW one. I also don't buy into the America haters arguement that our consumption is taking away resources from third world counties. Those resources were useless until they had a purpose.
What makes no sense about this goal of bringing so many wages down to $5.15 an hour is that then they qualify for food stamps, CHIPS and many other welfare benefits. What's they point of having more and more families half on welfare but working? That's not self-sufficiency.
I think nopardons and 1tin_soldier would attest to that :~)
How much of that was paid in cash? People might have 3 televisions and feel they are very well off but in the past people could buy a house in 15 years, pay few taxes on it, buy a car in 2 years, many now have 5 year loans just on their cars. I don't see someone with a new car sitting in their driveway as being a wealthy person unless I know it's completely paid-for. People living in the red are not wealthy. We've redefined wealth to mean how many things you're paying for but it doesn't mean financial solvency at all anymore.
We were promised many good things from NAFTA and they didn't happen. Friday they began a big protest against NAFTA in Mexico because it's destroying many people in that country ---which is contrary to what we were told it would do. The stock market certainly doesn't show any benefits from all this globalism, our taxes haven't fallen because globalism helped so many get off welfare, Americans in many parts of the country are seeing falling wages ---which wasn't the promise they made.
The Chinese are slowly coming around to our way of thinking. I don't have a problem with the Chinese modernizing or any other country for that matter.
Companies are already solving the cultural and QA problems, and as a result programming costs are going to go down.
Have you thought ahead to what happens when all of the people in management in those companies have retired or been "let go"? Where will they find people who know anything about software development to manage their offshore development efforts?
Long term, you're talking about exporting an entire industry, along with the intellectual capital which runs it. That has implications for national security, among other things. Are you going to offshore your high-tech weapons development to China?
By the way, what exactly do you hyper free-traders think Americans ought to do for a living? We can't all run companies profiting by importing goods and services produced by $6,000-per-year slave labor in Asia. Somebody has to buy those goods and services. What should the rest of us do? We can't all be lawyers, insurance salesmen, and accountants. Fast food? Yeah, you're going to have to really hold down those programming costs to make your stuff affordable to people trying to support a family on McDonalds wages.
Maybe (think about this) if the government made it easier to employ Americans by reducing some of the regulatory and tax burdens, we might have a better climate for keeping Americans employed.
Spammer.
We don't have a "global competitive market". We have, in the US, an increasingly uncompetitive market. We're trying to compete with third-world countries where there are no environmental or workplace regulations (to name only two) to speak of, while keeping our own in place.
That can't work. Something's gotta give. In the absence of protectionism, what gives is that the jobs go overseas. Our standard of living drops as a penalty for our bad business climate; the standard of living in third-world countries rises.
I've explained this on this forum several times but instead of researching any subject people rely on the rhetoric of others they trust for their opinions.
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