Posted on 01/11/2014 5:46:53 AM PST by killermosquito
The problem with the economy is that it used to take 100 people 8 hours to create a widget. Now a 100 widgets can be created by 5 people in 1 hour. We have too many people to create the number of widgets that are needed so widget manufacturers don't need to hire more people.
Unfortunately, widget manufacturers have discovered that people in other countries can make widgets too. And they can ship those widgets here at less cost than the cost of paying 5 people to create a 100 widgets in an hour. The widgets aren't made as well as they used to be but no one seems to mind since the widgets cost less to buy.
Sadly, the widget retailers are beginning to learn that they can no longer hire people to sell widgets because people can buy widgets while surfing the web from the comfort of their Lazyboys.
Our only hope is that our children can learn to repair widgets or Lazyboys and that the cost of each doesn't become so low that people decide to discard their widgets and Lazyboys rather than buy new ones in which case all of our children will work in the waste removal industry.
The answer is to think up new widgets to be made so that the excess production capacity can stay busy.
The potential economic boost from widgets is that we could build and sell widget shelves, widget display cases, and specialized widget cleaning cloths (that give older widgets that Like New Glow). The down side is that no one really needs those any more than they need a Chia or a pet rock. We’ve met all our real economic needs for a trivial capital and labor cost, and the rest is wants - optional.
I would enjoy a pretty brass and glass widget display case, but many of the unemployed are already meeting their economic desires without working at all. Why should they get a job making those cases, selling those cases, and delivering those cases, when they can have everything they personally want without working at all? Government already gives many people plenty of loot, and they can fill in gaps such as Airhead Obama Shoes under the table. Why should they work for the pushy manager at WidgCases unlimited, the guy who gets irritable if they are late when they don’t feel like showing up? Why should they take a manufacturing job at Glass&BrassOutYourA when that work will just make their arms and back sore for no more money than the right combination of SNAP, EBT, and other subsidies?
It’s hard to fill those extra jobs for nonessential goods and services, when many of the unemployed don’t actually want to work, and the ones who do are hard to identify among those pretending to look for work while praying they won’t get stuck with a job. Employers know there are decent, qualified people out there, but it’s exhausting trying to figure out who they are.
I agree but I think they know exactly what they are doing in a massive power grab.
Well, we can say woe are us, go live under a bridge, be thankful someone is making widgets and hope there is someone not living under a bridge who will give us a widget for free.
Or, we can go where they make widgets and ask if we can work with them to make them.
And, we can push government into the ocean so it stops being an obstacle to us coming out from under the bridge to invent the most efficient way to get those widgets to others or working for one of those inventors. Maybe we can also think up more uses for widgets.
There are lots of issues in a complex economy. Right now our biggest goes beyond issue and straight to problem. It is a gaggle of clowns that are supposed to be leaders. They have spent many years providing incentives to live under that bridge and preventing the most efficient manufacture, distribution and use of widgets. Then when someone actually gets around them to make a living here with widgets, they ban them.
It's impossible to plow those clowns out of town fast enough.
You can't make people dispose of their wheels or their domestic animals or their trucks just so that more manpower is needed
What humans have always had to do is adapt to the movement of progress and new inventions.
If a robot replaces you at your factory job, you had better learn how to build robots (i.e. learn how to write code).
Washington, DC and incompetent political leadership.
Repubs and Demos did away with tarriffs long ago because of their lobbying for overseas companies.
The problem with your solution is that making widgets takes energy. And there’s few ways of producing energy that don’t produce CO2. Starting a widget factory with the new CO2 regulations that are in the regulatory pipeline would likely be unprofitable.
I have news for you.
You do not have a clue.
For a quick example, take the invention of the auto or the airplane.
You would with your logic conclude that those technologies have ruined the transportation industry. Fewer inns for weary travelers, fewer farmers making hay and grain, fewer people required to move goods from source to destination....
Yet look at all of the industries both have created.
And the hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Now the real reason for our sick economy:
Our employment situation and in fact our entire economy has been ruined by our progressive government.
One of the latest examples is the forced closing of the huge lead smelter in Herculaneum.
Lead is not used only in bullets. One of the largest users of lead is the battery industry.
So either lead will be imported from overseas or battery manufacturers will be forced to move overseas.
I know, the tree huggers think all of those items will be made from recycled lead. How stupid. Where do they think recycled lead originates? And to use only recycled lead assumes that we are stuck where we are in capacity, that is that we will not have expansion.
Another example is the government policy toward coal.
Go down the list:
Textiles
Furniture
Computers
Shoes
Auto parts
On and on and on.
Some industry has been strong armed out of the country, but most have been eased out with over regulation, so gradual and insidious that they don’t even realize how it happened.
Sure, we have some industry left...but obumbler is not through.
The cure is for the government to reduce the EPA to its original intent, trash the IRS and replace it with a sales tax, close the NLRB, go back to the tariff system, repeal Dodd-Frank, obumbler care....
You get the picture.
While I approve of import tariffs, as a replacement for the income tax, the problem is not cheap labor. The problem of cheap labor is it creates an imbalance in the ‘nessesity is the mother of invention’ factor. If you can get 5 Mexican’s to do 1 american’s job he wont do, there is no market for the next ‘cotton gin’ that’s an american job that he want’s to do, built it in a factory by John Deer.
The problem is not efficiency, the problem is taxes & regulation.
Our insane tax laws, especially income tax, force a businessman to spend ever more time dealing with taxes & not widgets. Over regulation eats up more of his time & money satisfying overzealous bureaucrats. The fear of crossing regulatory thresholds such as 50 employees in Obamacare limits an employer's efforts to grow the business. Ridiculous discrimination laws force employers to hire & retain bad employees.
The attraction of offshore manufacturing is not limited to cheap labor. Foreign workers usually have a far better work ethic - they come to work to work & not socialize. They don't skip work for the beach. Those that can't do the job are easily replaced.
When you make widgets cheaper with fewer people more people can afford to buy them and you sell more widgets raising the employ level from the low.
Now add someone has to make the custom built widget making machine and more people are employed. Building custom widget makers pays good too.
Now bring 100 new kinds of widgets to market and employment sky rockets.
But, let the government, at all levels, take over half the money out of the economy and people no longer can buy new widgets and widget makers do not have the money to bring new widgets to market.
This is the part you missed...
1. Force inefficiencies into the system (this is the very essence of many union work rules).
2. Reduce wages so that it's cheaper to hire someone than to automate a process.
There are two reasons why people don't know how to fix things these days: (1) the world is too complex to know how to fix everything you use in your daily life, and (2) the work you do requires you to know how to work with some things, but not others.
Let's look at your example. In a desert, the guy who knows how to repair the ice maker may be more valuable than the one who sells the ice, but if the ice maker gets bitten by a rattlesnake then the medical doctor who doesn't have a clue about ice or ice makers is the most valuable man of all.
Import duties don’t do anything to make America more competitive.
“I think I have figured out the problem.”
I don’t think so.
Bring back American jobs from China.
Just saying.
Go in any store. Pick up any item. Look at where it was made.
That is your problem, right there.
House is burning, and you tell us that the problem is fire. Thanks.
Except before there was an income tax there were import duties. The Progressives of 100 years ago instituted an income tax to replace tariffs. You should know the truth. When you defend Free Trade (which really means no tariffs) you are defending a progressive idea, I prefer to call it a nightmare....
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