Posted on 06/06/2010 8:59:15 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
This is a perfect illustration of the dilemma concerning all economic and financial decisions that must be made. We have successfully been maneuvered into a damned if you do and damned if you don't position mainly by incompetence and inaction over the last 30 years.
He's doing okay until he adds #5 and #6. Why would you compare a liability that's payable over decades to a GDP number that's one year? And if he does that, to show how bad off we are, he needs to add the same liability number to the debt numbers of the PIIGs.
Try again.
“If we want to try and bring back manufacturing to this country we’re going to need some dollar depreciation.”
It will take more than the collapse of the dollar to bring back manufacturing in this country. A factory is a high capital cost investment that requires a long term view to justify the expense. A century ago, JP Morgan (the person) and other Wall Street investors funded factories, ships, railroads and other high cost, long term capital investments that allowed this country to become the strongest industrial nation on the planet. It was that industrial might that saved western civilization in WWII. Had the US industrial base not existed, it is likely the Third Reich and Japan would be ruling the world today.
Unfortunately, the Wall Street banks and investment houses today are populated by speculators with investment time horizons of nanoseconds. Today’s bankers will lend hundreds of thousands of dollars to high credit risk low income people to buy a house with an inflated price but will not consider a loan to a small business for a $50,000 machine tool with the potential to create products of value for several decades. The mortgage loan to the low credit score individual without the income to make the payments is considered less risky than the loan to the small businessman who always pays his/her bills on time. This distortion is due to government policy. Until we change government tax and trade policies to favor long term investment in productive manufacturing assets, we will continue to fritter our national savings away and fail to create the infrastructure required for a strong middle class.
I respectfully disagree.
Government workers make twice what private sectoir workers make.
And the benefits and pensions are astronomical.
By cutting entitlements, the federal budget and eliminating whole departments and programs altogether and reducing the size and scope of the federal bureaucracy and channeling the savings into more productive areas would boost the economy, not threaten it.
Not really. It’s easy for someone who hasn’t studied to ratchet off that talking point but it isn’t true.
Most government offices are filled with clerical staff that make in the 30k-40k range. I’m not saying that there aren’t those who advance far beyond that but most of your office employees in a federal office will be in that range.
Plus, federal workers essentially make a lifetime commitment to the government and forgo higher private sector wages in exchange for the better benefits, insurance and pension. If you try and take that away from them the streets of every city with a federal courthouse will look like Athens because there are more families then you realize now depending on the stable income of the family member who has the federal job.
I don’t recall Reagan laying that many people off in 1981. What he did was cut the top tax rates that began to start spurring economic investment.
But, I also don’t need to remind you that the recession continued through 1981 and 1982 and by early 1983 unemployment was worse then it ever was under Carter and Reagan looked like a dead duck.
Reagan got a second term because when it started picking up in late 83 it picked up fast and furious and he had the distinct advantage of getting Fritz Mondale as his opponent in ‘84.
I’m not saying CUT ALL FEDERAL WORKERS.
I AM SAYING CUT OUT THE ONES THAT ARE NOT PRODUCTIVE. CLEAN HOUSE. I USED TO WORK FOR THE FEDS. I KNOW WHAT GOES ON. ONE THIRD OF ALL FEDERAL WORKERS DO ALL THE WORK AND THE OTHER TWO THIRDS SKATE BY BY DOING THE BARE MINIMUM AND NO MORE. THEY KNOW WHO THEY ARE AND THEIR CO WORKERS KNOW TOO. IT IS RATHER THE UNIONS AND THEIR BOSSES THAT PROTECT THEM FROM BEING FIRED OR LAID OFF. THAT IS WHAT THE FEDERAL BUREAUCRACY IS ALL ABOUT. THERE IS A LOT OF WASTE FRAUD AND ABUSE IN THE FEDERAL BUDGET THAT COULD BE CUT WITHOUT BATTING AN EYELASH.
Similarly, the Canon 1D MK IV camera is $1000 more than it's predecessor, the Mark III. Canon strives to make the new version of a camera match the old version in price. Canon and Nikon are in a blood war for the high end professional camera market, and keep each other honest on price.
The clowns in Washington are printing money as fast as they can (or adding numbers to the database) and the Arabs and N. Koreans are counterfeiting money.
They can control the rate of exchange, but foreign manufacturers will raise the price of products, regardless of what the governments dictate.
Not any more. The average federal worker's salary is now $71,000, compared with $40,000 in the private sector. And that's before benefits.
In the last 18 months the number of federal workers making more than $100,000 went from 14% to 19%.
Federal pay is completely out of control.
Is that mean or is that average?
I’ll give you an example. Here is firm A
300 workers make $35,000 a year. They are overseen by $100,000 making managers and there’s 100 of them (I know that ratio is less than realistic but I’m making a point here)
Now, the 100 managers make $10,000,000 combined and the workers they oversee make $10,500,000 combined and you get a total payroll of $20,500,000. Now, take that and divide it by 400 and you come up with $51,520.
Now, no one in that firm is making $51,520 but thats the average salary because that’s how you calculate a salary.
A far better guide of what salaries really are would be to find the mean but to compute the mean would require every salary stub in America and would be far more difficult to accomplish. No one wants to do that work. It’s easier to get the broad based average.
There are many overpaid federal workers but most of them are those who have some kind of advanced degree and who’s degree was the main qualifier for their job. I have had neighbors who were federal workers and I’ve had some business associates with federal worker wives.
For every 1 federal worker making $150,000 a year you have 5 office ladies at GS-5 making around $40,000. And an interest note, if you run up those numbers you come up with an average of $70,000.
Averages are a great statistic to use in many areas, but incomes for sector workers has always been known to be a bad one. Like with attorneys. Yes, the average salary for attorneys is around $100,000 but that’s only because you have a lot of 2 mil + attorneys canceling out all the shingle guys who struggle to bring in 60k in a year and apply that same rubric to any profession including medicine.
A far better determinant is mean salary but somehow I doubt any of us will do the work to determine the mean.
Eventually the idea would be that this would make foreign products untenable in the American market driving foreign producers to either produce in America to continue accessing our market or it would drive domestic interests to start bringing back manufacturing.
Most people seem to think we don’t have manufacturing capacity. We have a lot of equipment in old manufacturing plants just dying to be used if their was demand. Our manufacturing sector is dead because we simply can’t be profitable doing it.
A depreciated dollar could reverse that trend.
Median annual salary: Federal: $66,591, Private: $55,000, Difference: $11,091.
From BLS statistics. Federal Pay Ahead of Private Industry (USA Today)
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