OT - Jobs Lost

He was declared a toxic waste dump, and then he was consumed by spontaneous combustion.

Ed Huntress

Well, thanks to the furor over Bush's National Guard status 30 years ago, this economic story got pretty well buried. For the average voter, if the media isn't constantly beating the drum about it, it doesn't exist as an issue.

Gary

Jacking up import duties to cover the deficit would bring some jobs back. I really like the idea of outsourcing the bureaucracy to the lowest bidder.

Don't bet on it. They may finish it here.

Regards,

Marv

Bray Haven wrote:

Simple - if a company wants to outsource, it must pay for the privilege. It must buy a per person outsource license that will go into a general fund for retraining the people outsourced out of a job. If the cost of the license is high enough, outsourcing will stop.

If I am not mistaken, several European countries have a similar scheme.

Regards,

Marv

Gunner wrote:

Great, that would make the company less competitive with overseas cos and/or raise the prices on those already hurt by the job loss. Nah :o) Greg Sefton

That has been my concern for some time. If we ever do go to war with China we will have to fight it with what we have on hand because they will have all the machinery and skills over there.

It really irritates me that they passed a law that imported food is not required to be labeled as such. God only knows what a burger from Bombay would have in it - surely not sacred cattle meat. Some of these places use pesticides banned in the US, and it is the big corporate food interests who want to hide where this food comes from to deprive the American consumer of the freedom of an informed choice.

The alternative, Greg, is enacting legislation that

*requires* all US companies to take advantage of offshore labor rates by firing all the US workers and shifting ALL of their operations to china or india. Because that's what compaies are experiencing now - not as government mandated law, but by marketplace laws. The instant one company makes the move, the increased profits it will see puts every other competitor out in the cold. So the effect zippers.

Such a rule would level the playing field, because the company that stayed behind and didn't benefit from the labor break will not have pay the penalty. Hence encentive to keep jobs in the US.

Jim

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Ha ha, then you'll hear the screaming and foot stamping start.

This would cause the biggest hornets nest you ever saw, the lawsuits would go on for years. I can just see the headlines:

"How dare they!"

"Anti-business legislation!"

"Meddling beaurocrats!"

"Downfall of civilzation as we know it!"

"We want our campaign contributions back!!"

It would do the job though.

Jim

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The media play whatever the spin-meisters provide them. Who invented the term "WMD" anyway? There will be plenty of drum-beating in the upcoming campaing I am sure of that.

Granted the 'oops' story got relegated to the business section of the times, but the story about the faked internet photos of kerry and fonda were in the A section. Likewise the story about that the whacko who was convicted of assault, who's on the 'soldiers left beind' crusade.

Jim

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Greetings and Salutations....

On 15 Feb 2004 09:06:29 -0800, jim rozen wrote:

It would do SOMETHING, but, I suspect it would not do what we want. It seems like the big problem today is that, as I have mentioned before, companies no longer exist to create a product to fill a need, but rather to suck as much cash from our pockets as possible, for their stockholders. Making a good product, or dealing with competition that keeps prices low, or, keeping Americans working no longer seems terribly important (and I did realize that was never the PRIME reason for companies to exist). Another thing that concerns me is that we seem to forget that a company (like the government) ONLY has money that it has acquired from consumers - and that would be you and me. Because of the above point, if a company's expenses are greatly increased by a tariff of some sort, prices will jump. Companies will NOT want to do anything that cuts the expected profits for their stockholders, lest the sheeple scatter and dump their stock, causing the company to tank. So...up go the prices WE have to pay... I suspect that in the long run, this problem will go away, or at least evolve, as those nations we currently get painfully cheap labor rates from are required to RAISE those rates when their citizens start getting restless about the fact that they are making boatloads of items that they cannot afford to buy. Most folks want a better, more comfortable life, and will start pushing to get a bigger piece of the pie when they see it. I believe it was WW1 that generated the song with the verse "how are you going to keep them down on the farm when they've seen gay Paree?" (memory is fuzzy on that, but that is the thought). Humanity's greed is unbounded, and, I suspect will cause the long-term revolutionary change even in China's government. It tried to stick its head up in the Tiananmen Square uprising of June, 1989, and, while it was squashed then, like an infected cut that has skinned over, but not healed, the pressure to burst loose is growing. It is tough to know what the correct answer to all this is, but, anytime we have a world where there is such a huge gap between wage rates, we are going to see jobs migrate away from high wage areas TO low wage areas. A 10x or so difference in costs - for the SAME skill set - is really hard for management to ignore or argue against. Regards Dave Mundt

Privilege? Now thats a socialist concept if Ive ever heard one..but I digress...

Tell your congress critter to offer up a bill. Lets see who wont vote for it.

Gunner

"To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. To be incapable of committing mayhem is not the mark of the civilized, merely the domesticated." - Trefor Thomas

Bear with me, now. Just a hypothetical situation. We are not involved in any hostilities with China. Let's say a particular piece of military equipment uses a LCD display. And the equipment begins to show high DOA failures in the field. The manufacturer of the equipment traces the problem to a chip in the LCD subassembly. Made in China. Anyone want to give a prediction of the response of the Chinese chip vendor? How many domestic manufacturers of LCD displays are left? Three.

Kevin Gallimore

Gunner, I dont have a dog in this fight but I can come up with a few things that will have to happen before we can regain our manufacturing base. Machine shops will have to become profitable again. Property taxes, SS taxes, inventory taxes, hospitalization insurance, retirement funds for employees, unemployment insurance, liability insurance, tort insurance, cost of complying with gov paperwork, licenses, fees for this and fees for that have overwhelmed the average machine shop. And, I expect, the manufacturing plant making consumer goods. If taxes were reduced/eliminated, government "make-work" eliminated, insurance partially subsidized, tort protection provided and other things done to make it a more friendly environment for the machine shop/manufacture, maybe it could be turned around. But, ain`t gonna happen unless we do have a war or some other dire emergency.

W

No, you DON'T in this case. You have actually hit the nail exactly, perfectly, square on the head!!

The over-riding question is, "exactly how much should govenment regulate corporations?"

The answer depends on the exact nature of the regulation, right?

No I'd bet a bunch that you would say it's bad for MegaPigCorp to be allowed to strip mine anywhere they want, dump pollution in public water supplies, and kill a third of their workers every day. That's why there are some good regulations written into laws that govern corporate behavior.

The proposal at hand is:

To what degree are corporations responsible for keeping jobs in the US, even if it means foregoing some profit?

You asked the pointed question, "what can the government do to achieve this goal of keeping US jobs alive?" And one answer is to enact regulation that makes it UNprofitable for companies to ship work overseas. You could say, hey, *anything* that takes away a company's right to do as they damn well please, is "commie."

But we've already decided as a country that companies do

*not* have carte blanche to do certain activities, and are reasonably subject to laws and rules. This would be just one more rule.

Sure they're gonna stamp their feet and whine and blubber about the big 'ol bad gummint. That's their job!

Jim

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There's another way - simply figure out how to export all *those* things to china!

Jim

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"jim rozen" wrote

Corporations, yes. But some _individuals_ obviously just do it as a hobby :-)

-- Tony P.

Then why do you use those BS statements post after post after posts etc