Losing America's Livelihood

The New American ^ | 1/26/04 | William Jasper

[ninenot]

Up to 14 million jobs … are at risk of being shipped overseas, two UC Berkeley economists said Wednesday in a research report.

— Contra Costa Times October 30, 2003

“We’re trying to move everything we can offshore,” HP [Hewlett-Packard] Services chief Ann Livermore told Wall Street analysts at a meeting Wednesday.

— Forbes, December 5, 2002

But as the US economy has slowly shifted toward service jobs, factory jobs have been steadily lost — in fact, in just the past 39 months, some 2.8 million have vanished.

— Christian Science Monitor December 11, 2003

Will America be a Third World country in 20 years?

— Paul Craig Roberts, columnist-economist, January 21, 2003

John Williams has been shrimping since 1960. Together with his wife, Kathleen, he operates three shrimp boats out of Tarpon Springs, Florida, north of Tampa Bay. He has weathered recessions, squalls and hurricanes. But he is now facing a tidal wave that has already buried thousands of his fellow shrimp fishermen. It is a tidal wave of foreign shrimp — nearly one billion pounds of it — crashing onto the U.S. market from Red China, Vietnam, Thailand, India and more than a dozen other countries.
Last year Williams’ outfit, Gulf Partners, Ltd., hauled in about one million pounds of shrimp. “We’ve produced about the same amount of product for the past several years,” he told The New American, “but the price we get has dropped dramatically. Our gross revenue has dropped more than 50 percent. But our operational costs haven’t gone down; in fact, they’ve gone up.” According to Williams, who is secretary-treasurer of the Southern Shrimp Alliance, an eight-state coalition of shrimpers, the value of U.S.-harvested shrimp was cut in half, from $1.25 billion in 2000 to $560 million in 2002. Employment at southern shrimp plants dropped 40 percent.
The plight of America’s shrimping industry is symptomatic of the dire consequences potentially awaiting every U.S. industry. It also starkly illustrates how suddenly an entire sector of our economy can be targeted and hollowed out, if not completely destroyed.
For generations, shrimping has provided a good livelihood for several hundred thousand Americans in Gulf Coast communities from Texas to Florida. Then, virtually overnight, foreign producers almost completely took over the U.S. market and now provide 88 percent of the shrimp consumed in the U.S. And it isn’t because the foreign shrimp industry is more efficient or produces a better quality product. The real tsunami hit U.S. shrimpers in 2002, when the European Union, Japan and Canada banned shrimp from China, Thailand and Vietnam because of detected residues of chloramphenicol, a potent, broad-spectrum antibiotic suspected of causing aplastic anemia and other blood conditions. China, Thailand and Vietnam unloaded their shrimp cargoes on the U.S. market instead, even though federal regulations prohibit use of chloramphenicol in food-producing animals and animal feed products.
Shrimp fishermen like John Williams are fuming. “Another year like this and there won’t be any domestic shrimp industry left to speak of,” Williams told The New American, noting that he recently saw a repossessed $800,000 shrimp boat sell for $100,000 at a bank auction. “This is just plain wrong when a whole industry of hardworking, taxpaying American citizens can be put out of business like this by foreign competitors subsidized by their governments.”
What Williams finds even more galling is that our government is subsidizing his foreign competitors, too! Yes, the same federal policymakers who have slapped domestic shrimp producers with onerous regulations, are not only helping his foreign shrimpers with incredible trade privileges, but actually aiding them with loans, grants and loan guarantees as well. Through assistance provided by the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Export-Import Bank and other foreign aid programs, “we’re not only giving them loans and subsidies, but advanced technology too,” Williams notes with exasperation.
In 2002 and 2003, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) introduced the Shrimp Importation Financing Fairness Act, which aimed to stop some of these policies that are aiding the destruction of our domestic shrimping industry. The Paul bill would declare a moratorium on federal regulations that are making U.S. shrimping non-competitive and end funding of federal programs and international institutions that provide financial aid to countries that are dumping their subsidized shrimp on our market.
Rep. Paul’s legislation names seven countries — Thailand, Vietnam, India, China, Ecuador, Indonesia, and Brazil — as the main dumping culprits. But paragraphs 8 and 9 of Section 2 are the real shockers in the bill. Most Americans would be stunned to learn what our political leaders are doing with our tax dollars. Those two paragraphs read:

(8) Since 1999 our Government has provided more than $1,800,000,000 in financing and insurance for these foreign countries through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and our Government’s current exposure relative to these countries through our Export-Import Bank totals some $14,800,000,000, bringing the total subsidy of these countries by the United States to over $16,500,000,000.
(9) Many of these countries are not market-oriented, and hence their participation in United States-supported international finance regimes amounts to a direct subsidy by American taxpayers in the shrimping sector of their international competitors.

That’s $16.5 billion. With help like that, is it any wonder that these countries are able to produce the glut of shrimp that is destroying our shrimping industry?

Different Industries, Same Story

What do Gulf Coast shrimp boat owners like John Williams have in common with tool and die makers in the Great Lakes region, sawmill owners in the Pacific Northwest, Midwest farmers, Texas ranchers, New England manufacturers, or California software engineers and computer consultants? The same thing that their business counterparts throughout the U.S. in virtually every industry share: the threat of extinction due to perverse government policies that penalize American producers and reward their foreign competitors. They are caught in a vise of regulatory policies that have driven their operating costs far above those of their foreign competitors, and U.S. trade policies that encourage foreign producers to dump their products on the American market. On top of that, the U.S. government pours billions of U.S. tax dollars into subsidies for their foreign competitors!
America’s tool and die industry is in danger of going the way of our shrimping industry. Why should that concern the vast majority of Americans who are not directly involved in this industry? Because it is essential to all manufacturing. The industrial machinery that is used to manufacture almost everything — from cell phones, toothbrushes and Barbie dolls to computer chips, medical diagnostic equipment and fighter jet engines — begins with tool and die makers. We cannot expect to sustain a modern society, let alone defend ourselves and maintain our prosperity and technological leadership, without them. But our tool and die industry is rapidly disappearing. In Michigan, about 34,000 tooling jobs have vanished in the last five years, according to state labor data. The National Tooling & Machining Association (NTMA) reports that about 30 percent of the country’s toolmakers have gone out of business since 2000 and many more are expected to follow.
“Guys that were earning $20 an hour two years ago making very high-precision tools are now stocking shelves at Wal-Mart,” said NTMA President Matt Coffey in a recent Detroit Free Press article on the plight of the tooling industry. Coffey estimates that there are fewer than 10,000 U.S. tooling companies today, down from roughly 14,000 a few years ago. Which could mean that 140,000 tooling jobs have disappeared nationally since 2000. This trend will prove disastrous for our country, if allowed to continue.
“One of the advantages our manufacturers always have had is that the toolmakers were here and were good,” Peter Morici, former chief economist for the U.S. International Trade Commission, told the Free Press. “It undermines the whole manufacturing base in the long term if they go away,” he noted. “When all these little toolmakers go away, they don’t re-open. Their sons do something else and that skill is lost. The decline of toolmaking is like the growth of a desert. Once it starts, it’s tough to stop from spreading.”
Mr. Morici’s comments echo the alarm expressed by Bob Davis, general manager of Modern Die Systems Inc. of Elwood, Indiana, in an interview with The New American last year (“Your Job May Be Next!” March 10, 2003). “Our government has set it up so that it is unprofitable to manufacture here in the U.S.,” he told this writer. Mr. Davis noted the tremendous disincentives to production posed by taxes, regulations, employee medical insurance, and labor union obstruction — the combined effects of which are driving many businesses into the ground, or out of the country. We are killing the goose that laid the golden egg. “Our country’s entire production capability will be stripped bare if this continues,” Davis said. “And with it will go all of the jobs and small and medium-sized independent businesses that are the bedrock of the American middle class.”

Shooting Ourselves in the Foot

America’s small- and medium-sized businesses traditionally have been a vital source of jobs, as well as a wellspring of creativity, invention and innovation that has propelled us to global economic and technological dominance. Limited government interference in the marketplace combined with a general acceptance of Christian morality was the key that unleashed the American entrepreneurial spirit and gave rise to our prosperity and the development of a large middle class. But the free enterprise system that made our economic miracle possible is being suffocated in a socialist swamp of regulatory red tape. U.S. regulatory costs — especially from regulations allegedly aimed at environmental and safety risks — are particularly hazardous to small and medium businesses.
The true extent of that hazard is amply exposed in an important study released in December 2003 by the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). The comprehensive NAM study significantly noted that “compliance costs for regulations can be regarded as the ‘silent killer’ of manufacturing competitiveness.” The report revealed that the regulatory, tax and mandate burden is adding at least a staggering 22.4 percent (nearly $5 per hour worked) to the cost of doing business in the U.S. relative to our major foreign competitors. To appreciate the magnitude of this burden, consider that these external costs imposed by government are more than twice the average direct labor costs of U.S. manufacturers, which are 11 percent.
NAM President Jerry Jasinowski noted that the NAM study documents that “we are essentially shooting ourselves in the foot competitively by making it too expensive to make products in America.” What’s more, the regulatory agencies have negated many of the impressive gains in production efficiency of the past decade. “Taken together,” notes Jasinowski, “external non-production costs have offset a large part of the 54 percent increase in productivity achieved since 1990.”
“U.S. manufacturing has demonstrated the ability to overcome pure wage differentials with trading partners through innovation, capital investment and productivity,” said James Berges, President of Emerson, a St. Louis-based manufacturer of industrial equipment. “But when the additional external costs described in this [NAM] paper are piled on, the task becomes unmanageable, even in the best companies.”
In fact, the piling on can be worse than unmanageable; it is often fatal. Thousands of small and medium businesses already have been slain by this silent killer and many more will succumb to its deadly effects. (See sidebar.)

Driving Jobs Offshore

Even large corporations cannot absorb the crushing U.S. regulatory burden for long without losing competitiveness vis-à-vis foreign producers. However, large corporations have options not readily available to many smaller businesses: They can more easily move their manufacturing and processing operations overseas, outsource many of their service sectors to cheaper foreign providers, and import cheaper foreign employees under various visa programs. And that is precisely what they are doing, in huge quantum jumps that defy any historic comparison.
America is in the midst of an enormous job outsourcing boom that gives every indication of accelerating. In addition to the continued massive hemorrhaging of America’s manufacturing and blue-collar jobs that began two decades ago, we now have a huge and growing crisis involving the flight of millions of hi-tech and white-collar jobs. If appropriate action is not taken to address the factors propelling this massive exodus, it is not an exaggeration to say that America is headed toward has-been status. A much-quoted study by Forrester Research Inc. last year predicted that at least 3.3 million white-collar jobs and $136 billion in wages will shift from the U.S. to low-cost countries by 2015.
An October 2003 report by researchers from the University of California-Berkeley’s Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics suggests that the Forrester predictions may be extremely conservative. According to the Berkeley researchers, as many as 14 million service jobs are at risk of outsourcing.
The authors of the Berkeley report, Ashok Deo Bardhan and Cynthia A. Kroll, note that “the recent boom in outsourcing is causing growing apprehension in the U.S. that this may well be the largest out-migration of non-manufacturing jobs in the history of the U.S. economy.” (Emphasis added.)
Many of these jobs are going to India. By tabulating reports in Indian newspapers and business journals for the month of July 2003 alone, Bardhan and Kroll reported that they found “25,000 to 30,000 new outsourcing related jobs announced by U.S. firms. In the same month, there were 2,087 mass layoff actions carried out by U.S. employers resulting in a loss of 226,435 jobs.”
“The jobs being created in India and elsewhere are in a wide range of service sectors,” say Bardhan and Kroll, “such as geographic information systems services for insurance companies, stock market research for financial firms, medical transcription services, legal online database research, and data analysis for consulting firms, in addition to customer service call centers, payroll and other back-office related activities.”
In addition to the millions of U.S. jobs that soon could be leaving for India, China, Russia and other offshore destinations, there is the added threat to American workers from imported labor. Hundreds of thousands of American information technology (IT) workers have lost their jobs in the past several years to foreign replacements through the L-1 and H-1B visa programs. American software engineers, computer designers, technicians, electrical engineers and other hi-tech employees are being replaced by workers from India, Pakistan, the Middle East and China.
No other country in the world has adopted such reckless and suicidal immigration policies. Incredibly, the Bush administration is advocating an amnesty for millions of illegal aliens that dwarfs the amnesty proposals of Bill Clinton. Moreover, President George Bush and many members of Congress enthusiastically favor more outsourcing, more L-1 and H1-B visas, and more immigration overall. At a December 15, 2003 press conference, President Bush stated: “I have constantly said that we need to have an immigration policy that helps match any willing employer with any willing employee.” (Emphasis added.) There is virtually an unlimited supply of willing employees worldwide who would be more than happy to immigrate to the U.S., but how is that going to help put Americans back to work?
It won’t, says Jan Frelick, who has experienced the outsourcing and foreign “temps” up close and personal. Mrs. Frelick worked for computer giant Hewlett-Packard in the San Francisco Bay area but transferred to HP’s facility in the Sacramento area in 1990. As computer security administrator for her division and a member of the division’s business control team, she had a ringside seat from which she watched HP outsource droves of jobs. “Then, on August 24, 2001,” Frelick told The New American, “it happened to me. I wasn’t ‘downsized’ — the term they deceptively use — I was replaced. So were almost all other employees in many units. The IT Support Desk, for instance, which previously was staffed completely by Americans, is now staffed by people from India.”

False Solutions, Toxic Antidotes

The cheery advocates of globalization blithely dismiss concerns about massive job losses, the wholesale gutting of our economy and the flight of entire industries from our shores. Their mantra-like response is that the huge exodus of jobs, manufacturing, and technology is actually a good thing representing the elimination of obsolete remnants of the “old economy,” to make way for the higher value, cutting-edge technologies and jobs of the new global economy. These glib advocates are dealing in voodoo economics and globaloney social science. The jobs and technology we are outsourcing do not have to do with genuinely obsolete technology like buggy whips and whale oil lamps, as the globalists assert. They have to do with the production of real wealth, real products and real services that are essential to sustaining a modern, prosperous society.
Where are the wonderful new jobs the globalists keep promising? Hundreds of thousands of skilled and experienced white collar and blue collar workers — engineers, computer programmers, toolmakers, accountants and technicians — are unemployed, or have been reduced to taking near-minimum-wage jobs. Political forces, not market forces, are driving these devastating changes. As we have noted above, it is perverse government policies that are responsible for making American companies uncompetitive, subsidizing our foreign competition, outsourcing jobs and flooding our job market with immigrants and “temporary” foreign workers. America has gone through economic downturns before and seen periods of high unemployment. But the economy has always rebounded and the jobs have returned as businesses have revved up production. However, that is not going to happen with the thousands of businesses and the millions of jobs we have been losing.
The Bush administration and its allies in Congress — Republican and Democrat — have given no indication of reversing our disastrous course. Indeed they are proposing supposed solutions that would prove to be even more calamitous. They are saddling U.S. businesses with even more oppressive mandates and regulatory overkill, while pushing for more job outsourcing, more temporary worker visas, far greater immigration quotas, an amnesty for illegal aliens and the removal of virtually all tariffs.
Moreover, the president has staked out 2004 to push for completion of the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement, a plan to merge the countries of the Western Hemisphere into a European Union-style common market. However, like the original European Common Market, the FTAA is much more than a trade pact. It has been designed to evolve into a supranational regional government, but in a much shorter time span than it took the Europeans to arrive at that stage. Like the EU, the FTAA’s central executive authority would be strongly socialistic and would gradually claim the power to overrule the national laws and constitutions of its member states. The FTAA Declarations, Plans of Action and Charter drafts call for regional “integration,” in accordance with the charters of the UN and the World Trade Organization. The FTAA would establish a bureaucracy of agencies to monitor, and eventually dictate, regional health, education, labor, environment, foreign aid, immigration and security policies. Like the EU, the FTAA is set up to acquire, gradually, full legislative, executive and judicial powers. As such, it is plainly a power grab disguised in the garb of a trade agreement.
The most frightening aspect of the proposed FTAA is the fact that its realization would spell the end to our national sovereignty and sweep aside constitutional impediments to the concentration of tyrannical power. But the more immediately felt effects would include a rapid dissolving of our borders and an enormous deluge of immigrants (both legal and illegal) from Latin America and the Caribbean. At the same time, billions of dollars of agricultural products, textiles, manufactured goods and other products will flood our markets devastating every industry sector in the same way that our domestic shrimp industry has been wrecked.
These so-called solutions are manifestly suicidal. If America is to be spared sinking into Third World status, we must completely reverse course. That means awakening and energizing a minority of the American public sufficient to compel Congress to: abolish the socialist regulatory monster that is destroying our country’s competitiveness; take back control of our borders and enforce sensible, reduced immigration; end all U.S. taxpayer subsidies to foreign competitors; and defeat the FTAA. It’s really very simple. Not easy, but simple.

[EagleMamaMT]

Read later.

[DannyTN]

"Each robot would be custom, even if the chassis is multipurpose."

No, I dissagree. If each robot is custom than it is nothing more than a machine.

There will be a variety of robots, but we need to get to where the robots are mass produced and have enough flexibility that they can be programmed for a variety of tasks.

Only then, once there are a large number of programmers working with similar robots, will robotic programming languages take off and develop the kind of indepth functionality that will really allow robots to be programmed for complex tasks using high level lanquages.

In other words we need to get away from the idea of a $500,000 custom designed and programed robot and get to a $15,000 multipurpose robot with a variety of interfaces and attachments. Only then will robotics really soar.

We also need to identify some of the largest unskilled worker sectors and target them for automation. Again this will result in labor dislocation but it is the type of market that can really drive robotics.

And I've said it before, I'll say it again. If we automate driving, it frees the elderly, our youth, parents of youth. It eliminates or drastically reduces automobile wrecks, automobile injuries, car insurance, injury lawyers, speeding tickets, etc. The boon to the economy of freed time would be immense. This too will cause labor dislocations, but real productivity after waste would soar.

[RightWhale]

Car driving is one good app and one being intensively developed. How about McDonalds? Surely robots could do as well as the average beginner they put at the first point of contact. And back in the kitchen area, hate to put a good cook out of work, but couldn't robots do all that?

[NYDave]

<<"We need to sensibly handle illegal immigration by eliminating it. We need to handle illegal dumping that destroys our industries with swift and proper elimination. If they can't sell the junk anywhere else, then why would we want it here? This stuff is not rocket science. Why are we still having our elected leaders playing God with people's lives? Oh, that's right. They can get away with it. It's time to put a stop to it.">>

You votin' for GW? He's one of the biggest proponents of open borders and the off-shoring of jobs. I wouldn't count on him to solve the problem.

[WilliamofCarmichael]

Whether you google, shrimp china sewage, or vegetables mexico sewage, the results are bad news.

From "Some Aspects of the Shrimp Farming Industry in China:" [start excerpt] The environment around shrimp farming areas was partly responsible for the shrimp farming recession in China. One reason is the pollution from industrial waste water and sewage.According to Jiang (1994a)about 6 billion t of waste water drains into Chinese coastal waters from 43 coastal cities each year,of which 4 billion t is industrial waste water and 2 billion t is domestic sewage.Unfortunately,many shrimp ponds are concentrated near estuaries where polluted water drains directly,and many shrimp farms suffer heavy losses from this pollution... . .[end excerpt]

And it's not just China. It's Asia.

You'd think some of those smart lawyers who float their yachts in Big Tobacco hundred dollar bills would go after Big NAFTA and Big WTO while there are enough .Americans left alive to have a "class action" lawsuit. They could name Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and Export-Import Bank as coconspirators

[GingisK]

The path is clear.

You are dreaming. The total package of space hardware includes electronics, software, exotic materials, mechanics, and thermaldynamics. Deep mathematics in each of these. The firms that normally handle such projects are all ready staffed with multiple talent in those areas and others I have not listed.

I know engineers in the other disciplines who are out of work. They already have the skills in which you imagine yourself to be a pioneer. The only way you can compete for your dream is to go to school and earn a few Phds and then work for $8000 per year. Perhaps you can take your dream to India and hire engineers for your company.

Under the present circumstances, you have nothing to offer above and beyond what American companies have already dropped into unemployment lines. You are kidding yourself if you think you can compete with the companies that are established in the areospace industry. They will be doing the engineering and production in India.

I know several folks who have attempted to start high tech companies. I have done the same. They all fail for the same reason these days: No funding. American technology is dying. Unless you and everyone else in this Nation successfully pressures Congress and the President to take some action to "level the playing field", nobody's dream will be realized. I can build robots from scratch. I own the metalworking machinery and CAD/CAM software for mechanics and electronics. I do produce the electronics for which I write the software, and I can certainly make the mechanical stuff. That and $0.75 will get me a cup of coffee. I already do what you hope to do. My hopes are all but destroyed by fellow Americans who don't give a good god-damn about American engineers. Do you really want to join the "New Society of the Outcast", the American Engineer?

Plumbing, hamburger turning, carpentry, and installing kitchen cabinets are the class of jobs that will be resistant to outsourcing. Of course, those jobs are reserved for Mexicans.

[DannyTN]

"Car driving is one good app and one being intensively developed. "

Good to hear. Other than military work on it I hadn't heard of much. But the same vision recognition skills for driving would help many areas of robotics.

McDonalds and other fast food restaurants are a great application. They certainly have enough workers to justify the research. Actually I was thinking McDonalds was already doing a lot of work in this area.

Cashiers would be another great application, because that crosses the line and picks up fast food, retail, grocery, etc. But I'm thinking something a lot more robust, than self serve ATM style checkout stands.

I think construction workers, miners, and similar labor intensive dangerous jobs would be another ideal app. (How hard would be to program six robots to stand around and watch one worker do something? just kidding)

[Middle Man]

"The United States has borne the major costs of free trade and is in the process of destroying its manufacturing industry. That's not new; it has been going on for 55 years.

"Manufacturing is being destroyed in the United States because it is AND HAS ALWAYS BEEN a bargaining chip in world diplomacy. In order to gain diplomatic chips we throw in the manufacturing chip as a giveaway." Pierre Rinfret

[Filibuster_60]

I think many people haven't fully grasped the implications of our country's loss of high-tech jobs. It's no longer a matter of letting the Third World catch up; it's now an issue of how long it'll be until they leapfrog us. Not only will an entire generation of well-educated Americans fail to raise their real standard of living, the next generation of Americans will produce far fewer scientists and engineers than their counterparts in China and India. What will this mean over the coming decades? It's perfectly conceivable to me that by 2050, Mandarin will be the most widely-used language in the global scientific community. Ethnically homogeneous China will supplant us as the world's superpower, with a full range of knowledge, management and productive self-sufficiency - and a far stronger national identity. What will we be left with? If current trends continue, we'll look a lot like Latin America: a well-off elite immersed within the mush of an ever-declining middle class and ever-growing lower caste. Even the lawyers will eventually run out of deep pockets to pick.

[DannyTN]

Another area that I think we could all get behind is automation of government workers.

Obviously traffic cops are already being automated with the intersection and roadside cameras. (I hate those, even though they haven't got me yet)

But all that paper processing, that goes on in government should be put on the internet at light speed, and some of it has been.

Another area, that I think should be automated, and could be easily, is education. Why on earth do we have 410,000 elementary teachers in this country, when computers taught my daughter to read a fifth grade level by the end of kindergarden. Education should be largely automated, all the way through college.

[RightWhale]

Right, I have been through all that. But robots are not the point; robots are a means. Multiple PhDs: odd concept. One PhD is the key to the universe; how many keys to the universe does a person need?.

[E. Pluribus Unum]

Or an American engineer, generally not a member of a union.

Where have you been for the last fifty years?

Engineering is a CYCLICAL industry.

I remember in the '60s when Life Magazine published the photo of PhD engineer stocking grocery shelves. And look at Silicon Valley! The economy/real estate market there has gone up and down like a yo-yo for fifty years.

Your whining does not impress me.

You don't know your exit orifice from a hole in the ground.

[GingisK]

...we'll look a lot like Latin America...

This seems like the ultimate result to me. It is really difficult to get people to understand this. They are under the impression that the high-tech layoffs are just html page designers. It just doesn't soak in that they are talking about the people who designed all of the high-tech goodies, including the areospace hardware. What is the incentive for getting into engineering these days?

Makes me think there really is a "global governance" plan. From what I read, the first objective is to interlock the economies of nations so that so single one can hoard high-tech military weapons. Other dependencies would then make disrupting global trade national suicide. The US must be a third world country so that it does not consume more than its fair share of world resources. Yep, I'd say the plan is moving along nicely.

[RightWhale]

all that paper processing, that goes on in government should be put on the internet at light speed

A lot of it has been. It's rare that one has to go down to the gov't office to get a form or a plat or to research a piece of real estate. The number of employees has been reduced in that area. But that isn't robotics, it's just digitizing paper records. Office procedures have also been streamlined considerably since the info the bureaucrats need every day is right on their desk in fairly good format for search and compiling. Half the researchers now do ten times the work. It's still not robotics, just GIS and database and spreadsheet organization. Without the digital revolution this gov't would cost 10 times as much and still wouldn't be at all productive, speaking of productivity in the modern way when nobody actually produces anything anymore.

[GingisK]

One PhD is the key to the universe; how many keys to the universe does a person need?.

Wow! You are very naive. Most likely very young. How many high technology disciplines are there? There are experts in each discipline who don't know squat about the others. A mathematician is not a chemist is not a mechanical engineer, is not a biologist is not a metallurgist, and so on. How will you choose your experts when you don't know how to assess the expertise? If nobody goes for engineering degrees in the US, where will you find them?

As I pointed out previously, aerospace development requires experts in multiple disciplines. You don't even know what all of those might be. How will you assemble a team? How will you pay them? How will you entice them to work for you? Money is the key. How would you plan to get money? Why would an investor provide this to you rather than someone who already has a team or at least already knows how to assemble one?

Try starting your own nation and printing your own currency.

[RightWhale]

How will you choose your experts . . . ?

I don't hire experts, I hire motivated people. What I normally do is give the applicant a very simple test to see if they are blowing smoke altogether and talk with them for a short time. Degrees don't mean much except they can complete a project.

[DannyTN]

Agreed, those are forms of automation not robotics. And while many areas of government have been automated, I think there are many that have not been. But there are many areas of automation that don't require robotics. And the market seems to be doing a good job of pursuing these. I think robotics could use a push.

I still think the key to the robotic age, is making the robotics standard enough that everyone can afford one and everyone who wants to can program them.

And then if robotics can be made intelligent enough to do low level worker jobs, from farm economies to cleaning personnel (there is an automated janitor that has been developed), then what do we do? Do we all become entertainers in the dream society?

If the free market can not put the labor to work fast enough, I hate to say it, but government may need to identify and fund key areas of research in order to keep the workforce busy. That means higher taxes and a higher percent of income going to the government, but if we are all getting rich of a completely automated economy, is that so bad?

Normally I'd abhor government interference, and wealth redistribution, but if the labor dislocations become bad enough, I think government should step in. But they should do so in a way that government can disengage as the free market discovers additional opportunities to employ labor. Disengagement has never been government's strong suit, but I don't see any alternative.

[spacewarp]

Actually, no. I'm not voting for W. I'm voting either Constitution Party or Libertarian.

[Walkin Man]

Moreover, the president has staked out 2004 to push for completion of the so-called Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement, a plan to merge the countries of the Western Hemisphere into a European Union-style common market. However, like the original European Common Market, the FTAA is much more than a trade pact. It has been designed to evolve into a supranational regional government, but in a much shorter time span than it took the Europeans to arrive at that stage. Like the EU, the FTAA’s central executive authority would be strongly socialistic and would gradually claim the power to overrule the national laws and constitutions of its member states.

If this is true, our so-called conservative President has broken the oath he took on inauguration day with his hand on the Bible!

He swore before God and man to defend and protect the Constitution of the United States and now is actively working to destroy it!

This is an outrage!

[EagleMamaMT]

"China-shrimp-sewage".

I love crawfish, but in this neck of the woods, the only ones available are imported from China. I wouldn't touch them with a 10-foot pole because of the sewage issue. They have a much greater chance of being contaminated with raw sewage than even shrimp does, due to the fact that crawfish can be raised in rice paddies. I love a good crawfish etouffe, but I like it seasoned with red pepper - not human waste.