[FourPeas]

Betsy stepped in it. Big time. Although I agree with her underlying ideas, this was not the way to convey them.

[Willie Green]

That Bimbo just wants more Americans to be financially desperate to get sucked into her Amway multi-level marketing scams.

[Cicero]

It's the media pimps who came up with that headline that the workers are getting paid too much. Sure, that's the worst possible way to phrase it, and that's why they did.

What she said is that wages and work rules in the state are uncompetitive. And it's true.

[mvpel]

"The fact that we had a manufacturing economy which paid people good wages is responsible for our middle class," Hollowell said. "They allowed people to send their kids to college, make improvements on their homes, save for their retirement. That's the American dream. This just underscores how remote the Republican leadership is from ordinary people. ... It means the Republican Party in general just doesn't get it."

Looks to me more like the Dems don't "get it" - the operative word there is "had" - "HAD a manufacturing economy."

Just like California couldn't force me to stay there to pay their absurd 8.25% sales tax and 9.3% income tax to fund their white-elephant rail systems and fill their $30 billion Democrat-dug fiscal hole, Michigan can't force businesses to stay there to be sucked dry by taxes, regulation, and employement lawyers.

The reason the manufacturing jobs paid people good wages is because the businesses were making even more money on their labor. This is a cardinal sin among Democrats, of course.

[TruthShallSetYouFree]

"I hate to tell Betsy DeVos this, but high wages are not a bad thing," Hollowell said. "They're good, and we need more of them."

High wages per se are not a bad thing or a good thing. Paying somebody fifty bucks an hour to push a broom at McDonald's is great for the broom pusher, but a payroll based on those wages would result in ten dollar hamburgers and a fast bankruptcy.

On the other hand, paying the same fifty bucks an hour to a software engineer who brings in incremental revenue to his employer above and beyond his salary is good for both employer and employee. The solution is for people to get education and/or training so that their empirical worth can be reflected in their salary. There ain't no free lunch.

[laker_dad]

Never get involved with a pyramid scheme... unless, of course you start it...

[Captain Peter Blood]

I suspect that there is a lot to what DeVos is saying.
Although most of us can see why manufacturing has gone overseas, low wages, benefits etc., there is some truth in that a number of industries in business here, i.e. the auto and steel industries, have wages and benefits that are high by any standards.
Throw in the that these are very heavily unionized industries and it's easy to see why it's hard to compete with overseas entities.
Someone else here can probably tell us, but I would guess that Steel industry wages with benefits run close to $100 an hour. Auto companies in the same ballpark.
With those kind of built in costs I can see how hard it would be to compete in the global marketplace.
I have no ready solutions for this unless workers are willing to take less money and/or benefits in exchange for more profit sharing and/or bonuses and truly share in either the success or failure of the enterprise.
All of you feel free to jump in at any time on this.

[cynicom]

Andrew Mellon long ago said there was no need to pay workers very much as they would just spend it and would not know how to manage it.

Course old Andrew would have gone back to child labor if he could have gotten away with it.