Posted on 12/06/2005 10:10:44 PM PST by CarrotAndStick
you will subsidize that worker through your tax dollars - buying their health care, paying for their pensions, paying for their government employment - to replace what they can no longer afford from their (now offshored) private sector job.
LOL!!! Excellent post.
No, it is not. You are exactly right.
It has worker shortage. In fact, an opposite problem to what the heavy industry has. The solution in the short run requires importing immigrants or exporting jobs, period. Long run solution would be to increase the domestic workforce size through more promotion of technical education to kids.
all service jobs. food service, retail sales, financial services, real estate, health care, education, government, travel and leisure services, personal services, etc.
you cannot build an economy on those jobs, plus government, teachers, lawyers, and debt.
tell me this - if these offshored technology and manufacturing industries are "buggywhips" - why are India and China falling all over themselves to get them? are they stupid?
its worker shortage brought about by no one in the US seeing the field as something they want to go into as a career.
the leading force behind this - parents who are currently employed in US tech, who see what is going on, and are piling their own kids into other college programs as fast as they can.
tech is not maturing as an industry as it should - cheap offshore labor is the reason. normally, to improve productivity in the face of high labor costs, businesses invest in automation. but when cheap labor is available, this investment does not take place. lettuce picking is a good example - why doesn't anyone invest to develop an automated lettuce picker? why bother, when mexican migrants are available at $40 per day. why aren't US companies investing in fully automated call center technology, with natural language capabilities? why bother, when call desk jockeys in India are available for $15K a year.
for the US, its the worst of both worlds - no investment in the new technologies for IT automation, and the existing jobs we do have are sent offshore. the only people making out are US executives and their investment bankers.
You are making good points. There are two different problems the US is facing with respect to workforce/jobs/corporations:
1) Manufacturing industry is being killed off by regulation
* This industry has excessive workforce and too much cost
Solution: Kill unions and deregulate
2) Education system and the culture of education is leaving a big hole in technology workforce
* Companies are either importing immigrants or exporting jobs to solve this problem
Solution: Increase awareness about technology education and the overall importance of education
Sure, in both scenarios there are some companies that abuse the system. I am not justifying such practices.
there is nothing wrong with the US higher education system for technology. its currently loaded with foreign nationals getting their educations here. there are plenty of smart US kids, they are instead entering law schools and going into finance and business because they feel that is where the career opportunities are.
Well, you are then arguing against the concept of countries investing in other countries. Like I said in my original post, if you add up the $$$ and jobs, more jobs were added in the US by foreign countries investing in the US than were created by US companies investing outside of US (I am comparing equal worth/productivity and not just person for person hiring).
And it's wealth redistribution schemes like those and the taxes that come with them that chase businesses away to begin with.
And, that leaves a workforce gap that needs to be filled, which is being met by either foreign students coming here or foreign workers.
We are on the same page. :-)
Bingo.
Kind of like when we funded the Northern Alliance against Al Queda, right? An excessive comparison, but you catch the drift..
You are aware that this is a Conservative forum, right?
Read John Stossel's Give Me A Break, specifically Chapter 5, "Scaring Ourselves To Death", more specifically pages 83-84. After all the scare tactics, the very expensive cleanup and the bulldozing of dozens of homes, they learned later that there was no increase in cancer deaths at Love Canal, before, during, or after the clean up. In other words, the toxic dump had no effect on cancer deaths or incidences from those carcinogens.
The movie "Erin Brockovich"? The one about all the people around the power plant dying and getting sick because of chromium seeping into the drinking water? Well, even though the company paid $300,000,000 to settle that suit there was never any evidence that anyone was ever harmed by the power plant in question or any other similar ones. Chromium can be dangerous if inhaled in very high quantities, much higher than one would ever get from that plant, there is no evidence that drinking chromium is dangerous.
The same with DDT. Why did the left insist on getting rid of DDT and watch millions die from malaria each year because of it? DDT is a rather benign chemical that requires massive amounts to be injected to be harmful. Those amounts were never achieved even after years of use. All the evidence of eagles eggs getting thinner from eating fish from lakes and streams, etc., were outright lies. Why?
Three Mile Island, Teddy Kennedy's pet scare monster? No one ever harmed by that small problem which was blown into a catastrophe..
Yes, it is all scare tactics by the left. That is not to say that all corporations are angels. They are not, but municipalities were traditionally worse polluters than businesses. Until not too long ago most municipalities, including New York City, dumped their raw sewerage into a stream or lake. With New York it was the East River. Somehow, nature recovered and handled all that.
I know this, if foreign countries continue to ignore the environmental impact of there factories it will eventually affect us directly and then we would have to impose some form of penalty, like tariffs on there goods to get them to clean up. That is not naive thinking.
Yes it is. We need look no further than the Kyoto Treaty. It imposed severe penalties on industrialized countries, the ones who do the best job of controlling pollution, but exempted "developing" countries. Among the "developing" countries were Russia, China, Indonesia, and India. They are among the world's worst polluters. Remember Chernobyl? Compare that to Three Mile Island.
Why all this discrepancy? The left trying to demonize the West and the USA most of all.
What do you think would happen if we threatened any of those countries with sanctions or tariffs if they didn't clean up their acts. They would laugh at us and they and the left in this country would claim we are the world's worst polluters, which we definitely are not.
I've read the history, something you obviously have not!
I studied history before it was rewritten into a bunch of leftist lies. I assume you are a student or recent grad. You seem immersed in the rewritten version.
We had close to pure capitalism just after the industrial revolution but because of corporate abuses, a few of which we just discussed, regulations had to be imposed. You will never see pure capitalism again because it failed in the past.
It depends on when you think the industrial revolution began. I agree that child labor laws, etc., are good and perhaps even necessary. After all, we still have slavery going on today and not just in Africa. Some of it is happening right here. Evil will always be among us and people are subject to its clutches.
However, although unions at one time were viewed as good and necessary, they were always part of the Marxists push top take over the U.S.
No all "abuses" are real. Many are trumped up by the left. The free market will remedy many things the unions try to force on us and distort the market in the process.
That is enough for now.
This is part of the whole problem, the overall 'economy' is essentially judged according to how well, or poorly, business is doing. This of course means the hundreds of thousands of American workers whose jobs have been outsourced become meaningless statistics when business is good. Corporate greed has always been around to one degree or another, but corporate lust for the 'bottom line' is now devouring our own people.
The more we get entangled in this global web of "free trade" and "outsourcing" the more the world becomes a dog-eat-dog nightmare for people just trying to live and raise a family. This scenario in turn brings out the worst in man, the evil side that fights for survival. It is already turning Americans against the wide-open immigration through our Southern border, because people are tired of watching the government give away our wealth to foreignors at the expense of the financial security of our own citizens.
I honestly see it all going to hell in a handbasket, or should I say 'going to hell in a global toilet?
hehehehehehehe
We are suffering global warming in California. Temperatures are close to freezing in the Bay Area, and it is all the fault of global warming caused by Bush's Air Force One travel.
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"Inexpensive" electronics and plastic gadgets from China last about as long as it takes for you to go to the ATM and draw out more money to replace the cheesy, broken product with. We do not gain from manufacturing nothing and importing garbage from China. You seem to think we need global trade to survive and prosper, but history shows the reverse is true.
We became a super-power during and after WWII, when American manufacturing was at its peak. We became reliant on Asian and other foreign manufacturers and products because we became too greedy to pay our own workers what they were worth, and saw a bigger 'bottom line' in using slave labor overseas. We lost our world leadership in producing and manufacturing the best products on earth to our own greed and stupidity.
As the German and Japanese auto manufacturers have so clearly proven, when you make the best quality products you outsell everyone else. Cadillac and Lincoln luxury cars continue to get badly hurt by Lexus, Mercedes Benz, BMW, Volvo, because these foreign competitors make far superior quality cars. The same thing goes for American mid-level cars, they get hammered by Toyota, Subaru and Nissan because they won't produce cars of equal quality.
If globalism is so 'good' for America, then why are we getting our behinds kicked by all our foreign competitors, weather in consumer electronics, automobiles, motorcycles, whatever; and why do we run up frightenly high trade deficits with them? All global trade, as it has become today, has done for America is bring us low priced gadgets and things that we don't need, like Nintendo, televisions, stereos, electric can openers. Meanwhile, the prices of things we need for survival continue to skyrocket out of sight. We're just not paying attention to what really matters.
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