IBM, Other Multinationals "Detaching" From the US 812
theodp writes "If you're brilliant, work really hard, and earn a world-class doctorate from a US university, IBM has a job for you at one of its US research sites — as a 'complementary worker' (as this 1996 piece defined the then-emerging term). But be prepared to ship out to India or China after you've soaked up knowledge for 13 months as a 'long-term supplemental worker.' Newsweek sketches some of the bigger picture, reporting that IBM, HP, Accenture, and others are finding it profitable to detach from the United States (even patenting the process). 'IBM is one of the multinationals that propelled America to the apex of its power, and it is now emblematic of the process of creative destruction pushing America to a new, less dominant, and less comfortable position.'"
And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of blaming them for leaving, why don't we stop chasing them away?
Who's chasing them? (Score:2, Insightful)
We have the lowest effective corporate tax rates in the world for a developed nation. That still isn't enough I guess. American justice, American greed. Maybe if we stopped doing stupid shit like invading Iraq and keepng bases all over the world we could reduce that tax rate even further! But they'd still leave for a cheaper place.
So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Patriotism is a highly overrated trait in anything/anybody. If it's better to leave, why stay?
Re:And the solution...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes because this all started the day Obama took office. Before that it was all peaches and sunshine.
Stop watching Fox News ffs.
M*U*L*T*I*N*A*T*I*O*N*A*L*S (Score:5, Insightful)
They are multinational corporations... what kind of national loyalty are we expecting from them?
They behave exactly as legislation allows them to behave. If you don't like it, change the legislation.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
Better Idea: (Score:3, Insightful)
Reduce the tax rate but eliminate loopholes.
Or, we could close up all those expensive shit-stirring military bases, stop the failed wars (oh Korea and Vietnam, I wish we had learned from you..) and cancel social security, medicare and medicaid.
Corporations are Greedy (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And the solution...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Every country grows up by companies not giving employees much. Then everything becomes dependant on those employees and they start demanding things, starting unions, wanting protection and business gets expensive so businesses move.
Once everyone is on the same level of wealth companies can't move around or at least have less reason to. So that means either westerners need to start accepting less or ensure that poorer countries become less poor.
This whole mentality that everything should be dirt cheap but wages should be high isn't helping either. Both the US and UK seem to have a thing again immigrants taking jobs but don't want to pay wages that locals will accept.
You can't have it both ways and no matter what you think, the higher ups will always be paid more even if you the little guy does the actual work. You have to remember the higher ups are responsible for a lot and it's a risky job. They can even go to jail for something the little guy did without his knowledge.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking idiot! This has been happening for the last decade, before Obama even came into the picture. The problem is greedy short term investors who drive companies to short term profits over long term profitability and quality. That's what unregulated capitalism does it drives towards the lowest common denominator - fastest profit with the highest cost at the lowest possible quality until a company implodes and can be sold off piece meal in order to put even more profits in the hands of the investors.
Re:M*U*L*T*I*N*A*T*I*O*N*A*L*S (Score:5, Insightful)
they're not stupid! (Score:1, Insightful)
The future is China, not the USA, and IBM knows it. So do GM and other multinationals.
Why on earth would they remain chained to a sinking ship? That makes no sense. American labour is more expensive. They're heavily regulated. The supply of highly educated people in the USA is drying up, because all the people with advanced engineering degrees are from China and India.
This is not a surprise. It's the actions of a rational entity acting in its own self interest. The USA is rapidly decreasing in international importance, so *of course* they are trying to shift elsewhere.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Re:who cares what IBM do (Score:1, Insightful)
Its the law of the jungle (Score:5, Insightful)
The Egyptians complained about the English "stealing" their cotton spinning and weaving business. The English complained about the Yankee New Englanders, who complained about the Southerners, who complained about the Mexicans, who complained about the Malaysians who are complaining about the Chinese and Indians.
When I say "complained", I mean passed laws and regulations, imposed sanctions, taxes and duties, fought wars, battled smuggling, and whined.
In the long run, the laws of econonics ALWAYS win. The US should fix the causes, not the symptoms.
Re:Better Idea: (Score:1, Insightful)
"...and cancel social security, medicare and medicaid."
Yeah, because eliminating the last bit of any notion that we actually live in a society of more than "I got mine, now you worry about yourself with no hope if you fail" is just exactly what we need right now.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:4, Insightful)
Ummm.... what about the second highest corporate tax rate in the world [taxfoundation.org] ? It sits at about 39%. I think that just might have something to do with wanting to leave.
Corporate taxes are a joke. They just get passed on to the consumer anyway, and they make businesses less competitive internationally. But it is politically rewarding to go after the big evil corporations and for them to pay their way.
Really, and end to corporate taxes is a big reason why I strongly support the FairTax [fairtax.org] . It would no longer hide the taxes we pay, and special interests would not be able to carve out exceptions for themselves life they do all the time now.
Isn't Chinese Law (Score:3, Insightful)
that any factory or venture in China must be at least 51% domestically owned, such that they always will have the power?
Can't help but think that all these companies are building up their own competition... when China decides the dollar isn't that great anymore and that they've sucked out all the knowledge needed of the US and other 1st world countries to be on par with them.
Not that US companies alone can be blamed, the US consumer, with their rush to the cheapest priced options, by and large, contributed to this cycle.
Solution is You and Me (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama is consistently talking about "American jobs" as if the jobs are rightfully American. His political stance is well known to be re-distributionist. Start earning, and stop whining for a handout.
The big problem is our immigration system (Score:4, Insightful)
The best thing we could do if we don't want IBM and other companies going abroad is what John Doerr and Thomas Friedman have suggested [nytimes.com]:
Because it's often difficult or impossible to import international engineers and scientists with valuable or unusual skills to the United States, the logical alternative is to go to where they are. Want this kind of behavior on the part of IBM and others to, if not stop altogether, then at least to slow? Implement Friedman's suggestion. Otherwise, don't implicitly (or, in the case of many commenters on this thread, explicitly) complain when companies react to the conditions that politicians, and by extension voters, have placed on them.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to remember the higher ups are responsible for a lot and it's a risky job.
Where did this myth come from that you get to be a higher up if you can just take the risk? 99% are "higher ups" because of birth right. The other 1% are held out there as tokens of the philosophy "if only you work hard enough for us higher-ups, you can make it too".
Ask any poor guy with an inkling of sense and he'll gladly accept this "big bad risk" you speak of to make a truckload of money. I'd do it. Where is my executive position at Goldman Sachs?
Nope. They aren't handing those positions out to people just because they want to take risks. You need to *KNOW* somebody, or better yet, be related to somebody. Otherwise, they could just hit any casino in Vegas to fill their empty executive positions.
I'm not saying you can't make it in capitalist America if you try hard enough, but it sure does help if you choose your parents wisely. And the willingness to accept risk is not the reason people get to be higher ups.
Do what Canada did in 1965. (Score:3, Insightful)
In 1965 Canada brought into law the "Auto Pact" ahref=http://www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca/english/economy/1965canada_us_auto_pact.htmlrel=url2html-14781 [slashdot.org]http://www.canadianeconomy.gc.ca/english/economy/1965canada_us_auto_pact.html>
It basically states that for every car bought in Canada, one car must be built in Canada.
(In 2001 it was abolished because it infringed on NAFTA.)
This policy works for everybody except the greedy CEO's. Any manufacturing industry could be converted to this setup.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, it will take a /long time/. I've known conservatives to pull "but Clinton!" even in the final year of Bush's term. It's about equally retarded no matter which side is doing it... though I'm still pissed that Bush got away with what he did.
Re:Do what Canada did in 1965. (Score:4, Insightful)
This policy works for everybody except the greedy CEO's. Any manufacturing industry could be converted to this setup.
No, such a policy works for no-one other than greedy auto workers; everyone else has to pay higher prices for lower-quality cars, since without competition the auto companies will just sell expensive crap.
achievable? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the stuff that's "chasing them away" is the same stuff that still nominally keeps the American people from being totally subjugated and destitute like the Chinese and Indians are.
What makes you think that's achievable? Americans are competing with Chinese and Indians. What possible reason would there be for anybody to pay more to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker?
Companies aren't going to stop leaving the US until we are so broken by their flight that we are forced to become fascist.
Companies don't care about fascism. We just need to become cheaper, or we need to help Chinese and Indians become rich.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Isn't the real fix... (Score:4, Insightful)
Isn't the real fix that we improve the countries they are outsourcing to until the economy there demands the same as US salaries? At that point geography becomes the benefit instead of dollars and they want to hire the guy closer to "home."
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:1, Insightful)
If you REALLY want to keep jobs in America, the key is to help raise the standard of living in other countries to be similar to that of the United States. This is of course hard, but it is eventually going to happen. Then outsourcing will stop, just because it will be more expensive to hire a programmer on the other side of the globe than to hire one in your office. Manufacturing will begin to return to America as well. The upside to this is that in the mean time, while they are learning to improve their productivity and standard of living, we are able to buy things made from them cheaply. Each side has its own benefits.
Whats Next? - Multinationals Use Us (Score:3, Insightful)
So after they move out what will keep them doing to the US what they do to other countries - exploit countries resources for profit. As we were the home to these greedy groups we have been pretty much insulated as they didn't rock their own boat. But if they are based outside of the US, kinda cleans off that slate and opens us up as a whole new market to exploit, don't you think?
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:4, Insightful)
Large corporations are not good citizens and care little about the welfare of the nations that created them. I've heard them described as sociopathic is nature,
What definition of "good citizen" would that be? Someone who turns down a high paying job abroad and works on a low paying job in his country of birth? Why is that good? Do you know anybody who actually behaves that way?
Plenty of people leave their home nations because they get a better paying job or a higher quality of life elsewhere. America has benefited tremendously from that because so many exceptionally skilled people have come to the US from other nations.
Of course, as the US becomes less attractive to individuals and US immigration becomes ever more tighter, corporations are leaving as well. It's simple, rational behavior, and both corporations and individuals behave accordingly.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:1, Insightful)
"The fact is that Obama is a redistributionist who claims that jobs are owed and not earned."
Do you mean that people who are wealthy have a right to keep that wealth as God intended? All wealth stems from theft either now or in earlier eras. You aren't going to win this argument on the fundamentals so drop the pretense of caring about basic rights and discuss this pragmatically.
Who'd you STEAL from then in order to get access to the computer you used to make your post?
Idiot.
"ClosedMind" would be more approprate than "ClosedSource".
Re:Who's chasing them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually corporations owe the public a lot.
Incorporation's primary purpose is to shield those who make the profit from the consequences of their company's actions. If this legal shield is ever removed we can start talking about everybody being on their own but it's absurd under current law.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Denmark has a program called Flexicurity which is a popular example of this. Under that system, once you lose your job, you can get unemployment benefits as long as you are actively looking for another job. Or, if you prefer, you can go back to school, get some new skills, during which time the government will also help you out. This has worked out really well for the Danes: it allows companies to easily fire people they don't need, and allows people who are out of a job to easily find another one (or retrain for another one). It is a flexible, secure workforce.
It isn't always a matter of whether it is 'earned' or 'owed.' Sometimes we can change things to make the path to productivity as easy as possible for our citizens. If we can help them out, why not?
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:5, Insightful)
So you are saying that jobs are fleeing from the US to China because the US is becoming "redistributionist"?
You might want to investigate the political and economic system of China before you hold them up as an alternative to Obama's "socialism".
What is driving "offshoring" is not taxes, it's pure free-market forces. Labor is more expensive here than it is there, so companies attempt to cut costs by moving the labor there. Companies don't increase presence in China because the US raises taxes 5%. They move to China because they can hire a college educated engineer there for $15k a year.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of blaming them for leaving, why don't we stop chasing them away?
How about instead of letting them run off, we impose heavy import tariffs that negate (and then some) any savings? That's what other countries to to keep jobs and wealth in their nation (and it's what we used to do until Ronald Reagan came along).
This is the fundamental flaw with "free market" capitalism, and this worshipping at the altar of absolute individual (as if a corporation is a human, deserving of human rights!) freedom. It worked for a short while, because there was a lot of room for domestic growth. But once that ran out, those monsters that we unleashed which served us well now must go on and find growth that they can no longer find here.
20 years ago, the Conservative mantra was "buy 'made in America'", now it's "outsource, baby. outsource".
The Democrats may not be a whole lot better on this, but at least they *are* better, and one of Obama's promises was to punish companies which move jobs overseas. Hopefully we can get the healthcare issue taken care of so we can move onto this. Although, looking at how the Republicans have gotten people to take up arms in protest of giving them healthcare, I don't think they'll have any problem convincing the peanut gallery that keeping jobs in America means slave labor camps or some such nonsense.
Re:Stop Running Trade Deficits (Score:3, Insightful)
We totally shouldn't have government regulation. Except for the fact that pure capitalism tends to exploit children [unicef.org], exploit workers [economicexpert.com] or both [tcetoday.com].
I'm all for free trade and as little government intervention as possible, too. But capitalism is all about short term gain regardless of the impact on the people or the environment. It's human nature that's got us screwed.
It's the main reason the ideas of The Long Now Foundation [longnow.org] are so interesting.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:2, Insightful)
If this is true, why not simplify the tax code to get rid of the "exceptions, credits, and deductions", and then lower the rate to 22%. Then we could have a much easier time advertising our competitiveness, and we could eliminate some of the compliance costs and deadweight loss in the tax code.
Time to detach from china and india (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the fact that corporations such as this, especially in a time of economic hardship, are basically harming american workers and showing such contempt for the USA, to be greatly offensive and angers me to no end. i think its time that we detach from china and india which has basically decimated Americas economy and who have stolen our jobs. I think its clearly time that we need to stop allowing these companies to abuse the USA looking at it as only a market to sell their overpriced chinese crap, and start creating jobs here again. Globalisation is such a big scam its ridiculous, its destroying this countyr and allows these greedy companies to basically exploit slave labor in china. The US should and can, and must for its survival, implement a tariff on imports of cars, textiles, furniture, IT services, customer service calls to India and China, etc, and so on. When we have 15% unemployment in reality and people struggling to find work the notion of any company moving jobs somewhere else really should cause a revolt from americans and demands to implement tariffs. Its time to get past this irrational hysteria about tariffs. Tariffs are good and can help this countries economy rebound. There is nothing wrong with it since it simply allows americans to make products for other americans. Think about it, why cant the chinese make things for other chinese, and americans make things for other americans. it would be better for the chinese of the products that chinese workers stayed in china to benefit to the people there. It would be better for americans to create more jobs in the US making products for use by americans. The only people that globalisation benefits is the wealthy rich elite corporations who important products made by employees in slave labor camps in china making a few cents an hour, living in filthy dormitories, who are treated in the most inhumane way, beaten, and even not allowed to use the restroom, with litany of human rights abuses, the products these slaves make are then sold off at a 100% markup in the US and the wealthy elite take the profit. Both the american and the chinese worker are the losers. Globalisation is what has allowed as well corporations to basically dictate to countries basically how they will treat workers and the environment and rewards countries which allow their environment and workers to be ruthlessly exploited by massive global corporations. This is a system where massive global corporations get their way and make the laws through making countries compete against each other to see who can allow their employees to be treated in the most inhumane way. Through the global consolidation and globalisation the corporations are able to control markets resources, jobs, and so on in many different countries and operate as sort of transnational governments. Through this we are seeing a new world order emerge where the governments of countries are simply puppets of a powerful fascist global corporate order who controls wealth, resources, jobs, markets, capital, etc.
If we value our freedom, we need to implement tariffs which would give our own worker welfare laws, our own democratic state, some force and allow us to implement unions without the corporations threatening to move jobs to other countries. If you want to be treated like a decently like a human being, to have a good life and to be paid decently for decent work, we desperately need to implement broader democratic unions which allow employees a democratic vioce where they can act as a safeguard against mistreatment and slave wages. Unions are essential to our economic recovery and for stopping the destruction of the middle class. The unions built the middle class in the USA and ironically created a middle class that had the spending power which made companies like IBM so successful. Unions are essential for workers to have decent wage since it more often than not is the tendancy of corporations to pay workers as little as they can, leading to a vast impoverished state in the economy. Its just shocking and disgusting tha
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Corporate taxes are a joke. They just get passed on to the consumer anyway, and they make businesses less competitive internationally. But it is politically rewarding to go after the big evil corporations and for them to pay their way.
Bullshit.
Are you telling me it's taxes are just enough that Sony has to â299 for the PS3 in the EU and $299 in the US and that it has nothing to do with the euro being worth more therefore allowing them to make a bigger profit for no additional work?
Or why MS may be raising the price of the of the 360 arcade in the UK depsite the fact manufactuer costs are probably lower as is inflation? I'm sure it has nothing to do with the increase on the pound over the dollar and therefore a small rise means a larger rise in profits. http://www.edge-online.com/news/xbox-360-arcade-getting-a-price-increase [edge-online.com]
The fact is nothing will ever be good enough for corporations as long as it's cheaper elsewhere. Even if they paid no tax in the US, if the over all cost was cheaper in India they'd go there.
What they ought to do is allow companies to go where ever they want but the directors have to live where the majority of their employees live.
Re:Stop Running Trade Deficits (Score:3, Insightful)
Good point. Their labor is often cheaper because they poorly regulate:
* Pollution
* Safety
* Child-labor
* Working hours
* Paycheck laws
* Etc.
Should our goal be to compete with slaves, or end (de-facto) slavory?
Re:Who's chasing them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Better Idea: (Score:2, Insightful)
Almost. We liberals typically ask that the government take (I'm not buying your morally loaded, question-begging word "steal") OUR money (since most liberals any /.er will ever speak to are well off) to subsidize OTHERS' pension and health care. I'm pretty sure that does not fall under the normal definition of "selfish".
Re:The big problem is our immigration system (Score:5, Insightful)
I think this idea of a lack of engineers with "valuable and unusual skills" in the US is more myth than reality.
The primary value that the H-1B program has for companies is economic. If you convert these workers to citizens, you'll have to pay them competitive wages and they'll be free to change jobs. Not much economic value there.
It's funny how people complain that illegal immigrants are cutting to the front of the immigration line but there's always a place for athletes, actors, and celebrities to go to the front. Of course, there really isn't a line anyway.
Re:Isn't Chinese Law (Score:3, Insightful)
China is a fool's bet right now. Unless a person has lived there or worked directly with a Chinese company for more than a year, they are simply not qualified to assess the benefits of Chinese economics. It's many many years behind where most people think it is. And that deception is intentional. It's amazing how many get repeatedly burned looking for the magic billion-man market.
Re:Isn't Chinese Law (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't blame the consumer. I blame the people who wrote the trade laws that allow for slave labor to have equal playing field. Those trade laws completely destroy the fundamental American principle of freedom.
I blame the trade laws which basically guarantee that if you build a product in a responsible manner, it's not going to succeed, because the people who ignore environmental and safety standards can build it cheaper.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually the amount we're spending per student is going up. So the real question is how are we going to create a more competent populace when all we do is keep throwing money at the problem?
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
This also ignores the tax compliance costs built into our current system. The deductions are not automatic, they have to be carefully planned for in most cases. How much time is spent each year by corporations considering the tax implications of a particular business move? And then how much overhead is there to doing the necessary paperwork to prove tax compliance in the event of an audit? It is an astounding amount of waste, and leads to companies wanting to do business where taxes are lower and simpler to pay than in the U.S.
Also, while deductions do bring the tax rate down, there is also the state and local taxes that business are hit with, and those associated compliance costs.
We have a horrible, horrible tax system. These issues also affect individuals as well as businesses, I'm just focusing on corporate taxes because of the silliness of the thinking that corporations pay any tax whatsoever. Their taxes and compliance costs are built into the price of goods that we buy and that they export to other countries.
It's just a hunch but (Score:2, Insightful)
I'm pretty sure the land that my California home sits on hasn't enjoyed a history of unbroken legal sales since biblical times. Do you really think there's any usable land on Earth that hasn't been stolen at least once?
Re:who cares what IBM do (Score:1, Insightful)
Sure... that was the case before the existence of the multinationals... Their power and influence is used to destroy the framework in which they were created and could go beyond national borders, to become multinational entities.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
Fucking idiot! This has been happening for the last decade, before Obama even came into the picture. The problem is greedy short term investors who drive companies to short term profits over long term profitability and quality. That's what unregulated capitalism does it drives towards the lowest common denominator - fastest profit with the highest cost at the lowest possible quality until a company implodes and can be sold off piece meal in order to put even more profits in the hands of the investors.
I differ, to do business in the US is now too legally complex and too tax expensive. INS is too meddlesome, keeping the good people out... why tolerate it any more? Just like my investments, most of my trades on the NYSE are in companies with a healthy offshore content as with even more liberalism and associate loss of freedoms and more increases in taxation promised there is no way US is going to lead a recovery.
Now if you believe the recession/depression is over, go ahead, the evidence says not with 550,000 job loss in a traditionally good month of July says different.
Americans can compete, but the environment of more bigger expensive dominating government is a load too big to do it. Get the moneys off the workers backs, and recovery will occur. That includes making corporate welfare to banks and GM a federal criminal offense as it should be. Nothing in the constitution says people coast to coast should be subsidizing banks and corporations.
Get the parasites and corruption out of the system and prosperity will return.
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:5, Insightful)
Laws that protect us from this kind of behavior add costs that push companies to these countries.
And here we find the weakness in capitalism — the tyranny of the masses, who want cheaper and cheaper DVD players and disposable razors, and don't care how many twelve year olds have to work in sweatshops to deliver them. (Me too. I'm trying to be better, but my habits are very bad. Like most of us.)
Re:The truth isn't just relative (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, but it's to try to reduce the effects of previous administrations policies, namely an economic meltdown.
Or do you believe Bush would have behaved significantly different (eg, they would let GM, other banks, etc.. fail)?
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:4, Insightful)
It's touching that you care so much about your brothers and sisters in the global village - as an American you can rest assured that they couldn't give a fuck less about you. The "citizen of the world" mindset is a predominantly White American/European peculiarity that I imagine is the result of both relatively long term economic prosperity, the underlying Christian ideology that America was founded on, and the rise in power of predominately left-wing philosophies that came to the forefront post 1960.
Unfortunately, take away one of these elements, and the house of cards collapses. Outside of the Western world there are essentially two things that matter: Nation and Race. When you are competing with people whose belief structures center around those concepts (and you will compete with them, as bringing up the standard of living in those nations to that of the West is impossible given the Earth's finite resources), having the "citizen of the world" mindset is effective suicide. Interestingly, every time there is an economic downturn in the developed world those nasty nationalistic ideas seem to be rediscovered: for example the recent election of members of the UK's BNP to the EU parliament and the uproar that went along with it. Why should this be so? In the developing world, every political party is a nationalist party, essentially by definition. The 21st century as I see it will hardly be a century of the fruition of the "global citizen" ideal, but because of declining resources the first element of the house of cards, economic prosperity, will start to be dismantled. The defining characteristic of the 21st century will be the rise of ethnopolitics and hypernationalism.
Your civilized infrastructure.... (Score:2, Insightful)
...is falling apart, daily. Entire states are broke, even our richest state California is broke. They are having to close down a lot of infrastructure, give public employees furloughs, dump prisoners, consolidate prisons, etc, and it keeps getting worse. Local hospitals and local school systems are broke all over the nation *now* and it is getting worse. Thousands of local governments are broke or near broke. Millions of people are facing foreclosure and one estimate is half of all homes will be "underwater" in terms of what they owe as opposed to what they will really be worth within a few years now. Daily we hear about more and more jobs going poof, just like in this article. States and local governments get taxes to pay for your civilized infrastructure, and we have half a million jobs a month going poof. People who can't afford their house note are not going to be paying local property tax, and if they lose their job, not be paying any state or federal tax either.
Your quote, then, in my opinion, "We are never going to drop to their level of poverty because we have things like running water, a strong infrastructure, and plentiful high quality housing. These are things that won't go away, just because of outsourcing."..is *wishful thinking* to the extreme, because there's nothing whatsoever stopping all this civilization we have developed for generations now here from further deteriorating as long as we are losing 100 jobs to one gained, whatever the lopsided figure is, and government tax payer jobs are not the answer there either.
Government jobs cost the nation wealth, they don't create wealth. We need real civilian sector middle class wealth creation jobs, not mc jobs or telephone sanitizing "service" jobs or government busywork bureaucracy jobs (or all those ludicrous "homeland insecurity" paramilitary jobs), and those are the type of jobs we have been losing, the wealth creation jobs. You have to have wealth creation jobs, period. Lose them, your civilization will collapse.
And it can and most likely will get a lot worse here than it is now, and it is precisely from the last couple of decades of heavy offshoring for fast cheap labor arbitrage designed to make wall street richer and everyone else poorer (in this nation).
Your attitude (anyone you) changes fast once you lose your home and job, etc. It stops being theory.
Not sure how far you are willing to drop down in lifestyle, but to match a lot of the developing world, you should be using a privy out back, be walking a few miles to the town well and carrying the water back, raising a lot of your own food immediately around your house, etc. Plus working 16 hour shifts in some dismal and highly dangerous factory for a few bucks a day..but still be forced to pay all US costs.
That's what you are saying, so I'll counter it and say it can't be done in the US, hence why I said wishful thinking.
I know I live as cheap and mean as possible here, probably a lot closer to developing world status that most people on this board, my income is slightly less than ten grand a *year*, and I couldn't live on 5 bucks a day, it just isn't possible unless you are out living totally wild and scrounging your food mostly. Any sort of shelter with electricity and running water, etc costs a lot more than that. I think I am at the bare minimum now, and we grow a lot of our own food, drive ancient vehicles and those only once a week, spend zip money on entertainment or restaurants, etc. Cheap, not third world, but second world status and you STILL need to have some decent cash coming in to exist here.
No job..then what, what do you tell people who just lost their middle class job to offshoring? "Tough crap, sucks to be you friend, just magically exist somehow...just think how cheap the goods at walmart are though!!"
Really, what are you willing to say to someone *in person*, face to face, who lost their job to offshoring, haven't found another job
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:2, Insightful)
The fact is that Obama is a redistributionist
Man, I love coming to Slashdot for facts!
Other important facts:
I haven't quite worked out how to explain the fact that most of his redistribution so far has been from the poor to the rich (especially lots and lots of bankers), but I'm pretty sure that's somehow Marxist too.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Personally I have never understood why people are so convinced the solution to everything is the "free-market".
Because it is simple and morally destitute. If an economy is formed by actors that are completely rational, free and efficient, then everyone who is poor and destitute obviously had it coming.
Also see panglossianism [wikipedia.org], and the long-standing tradition of certain [wikipedia.org] popular [wikipedia.org] philosophers [wikipedia.org] to cater to the prejudices, and salve the aching consciences, of the rich and powerful, and to let them know that, yes, everything is A-OK with you in charge.
Re:The big problem is our immigration system (Score:4, Insightful)
"Because it's often difficult or impossible to import international engineers and scientists with valuable or unusual skills to the United States, the logical alternative is to go to where they are."
Do you really seriously believe this? Can you give even one example of such a case?
You don't set up shop in India because you want a couple of great Indian workers. You set up there because you can get lots of engineers-in-a-box CHEAPLY. You may also want to do business in the region (or already do).
There are no shortage of qualified people (or those willing to be trained) in the US. There is a shortage of qualified people who will work cheaply. In general, large companies don't hire great people, they hire cogs in a machine.
It's about the money.
They never really 'detach' ... (Score:4, Insightful)
These companies never 'detach' from the capital and credit markets that they need to stay in business. They enjoy access to free and fair markets supported by the U. S. Constitution. Investors and lenders to such companies depend on financial and accounting standards along with required public disclosures of financial information. When someone threatens to steal their IP or violate a contract they are a party to, they expect access to a fair and impartial court system backed by a stable political system. Let's see them 'detach' from those things...not likely. Being located in the United States is an enormous advantage for these companies and they know it. They just don't want us to know it.
This has EVERYTHING to do with money (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
The myth of course is based in reality. There are many risks along the way to becoming successful. How many people do you know who stay in their current job because they are afraid of what might happen if they take a shot at a higher level job?
How many successes came about as the result of betting the farm (figuratively) on some idea? People that were willing to risk everything they owned because they believed in themselves?
Re:Solution is not You. (Score:3, Insightful)
I see, so when I am the best at building widgets, and you buy one of my widgets because
it is good quality and worth the price to you, this is theft?
Oh, I get it, I should *give* you the widget just because I have many and you have none. Even If I had
to buy materials and spend time to make the widget, I am evil, mean and nasty to not just give you one.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:5, Insightful)
The idea that "import taxes will fix everything" is bogus magical thinking, because "jobs" aren't what makes a country rich. Wealth, ultimately, is something that you have (or possibly something that you experience) and the US imports a lot of Things from overseas and there ends up being more stuff for everyone. Forcing Americans to pay top dollar (or pay penalties) for American labor and American factories for their shampoo and their cars and their Ikea furniture does not mean that people in America will end up with more cars and shampoo and Ikea furniture.
Economic studies have shown that your typical $50k/yr manufacturing job "saved" by tariffs costs the rest of the economy over $100,000-$200,000/yr. That's no way to make your country wealthy. And in the intermediate-to-long run it probably won't mean half as many jobs as it means "robots".
And in the case of IBM employees, don't try to sell me baloney that says they're being "exploited" like a sweatshop. Mmf.
Re:You get what you pay for. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:3, Insightful)
It is a flexible, secure workforce.
The flip side of a "secure" workforce is that people don't feel as much need to perform well at their current job.
If we can help them out, why not?
Because it's very difficult to isolate and help only those who need it without changing the overall incentives in the economy. A general unemployment benefit means that you're helping millionaires and poor people alike. We want the upper middle class to rely on saving for themselves and being as productive as they can; we only want to step in when someone is down and out.
At least in the US, I think that a safety net policy would work best if it was very well targeted (using some kind of means test), and strongly encouraged people to rise above the program as quickly as possible. I just don't think socialism works well in the US. Even if you think it works well somewhere else, it would be a disaster in the US.
US Northerners and England (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:3, Insightful)
Um, most citizens are not good citizens then. And if a corporation shifting their focus to foreign markets is somehow unpatriotic, do you feel the same about individuals doing the same?
I have left my country of birth - the country where I I grew up and got my education - to work and live in a different country. I still like my old home, and I still "do business" there, but my work is certainly mainly benefiting my current country.
Am I being unpatriotic? If so, are foreign students staying in the US to work and live also being unpatriotic?
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:2, Insightful)
This has nothing to do with either Obama, Bush, Reagan, Bush II, Clinton, Carter, Nixon, or anybody even remotely recent. This goes back to the Truman administration, and perhaps even earlier.
The problem is the globalist attitude that has pervaded the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Senate that is willing to put up with massive trade deficits, budget deficits, bloated military spending on the federal level, and a belief in the social engineering of society through the use of highly complex taxation and regulation codes. You have to go back to the Calviin Coolidge to find a substantially different political philosophy on how the government should be operated. Reagan tried, but many of the programs he would have killed were so firmly entrenched that he could only pay lip service to the ideas of smaller government at best.
This said, I think that Obama has taken these natural tendencies in looking to the government for the "answer" to all of society's ills that he is driving the final nail in the coffin of American business. It has been a long time coming, but the destruction of private initiative is nearly at hand on a much more exhaustive level.
The difference between Obama and Bush: Everybody claimed that "W" Bush wanted to take over as a dictator. Obama actually is succeeding.... Brown shirts and all.
Re:Its the law of the jungle (Score:5, Insightful)
"The US should fix the causes, not the symptoms."
I'm pretty sure that entails:
- Reducing the wages of most workers to the vicinity of a dollar an hour, maybe $10 an hour if you are highly educated and skilled, and maybe get work weeks up to around 70 hours with no vacations and no overtime pay.
- Eliminate all taxes on corporations and reduce taxes on the wealthy below 15% which is where it already is on capital gains and billionaire hedge fund managers. They also don't want to pay any payroll taxes or health insurance. Taxing workers making a subsistence wage in to the ground is still OK as long as they don't pay any of it.
- They want their taxes eliminated but they still want the government and tax payers to give them billions of dollars in government contracts, bail outs, low interest loans, free money from the Fed, subsidies, etc.
- They want schools that drill their workers intensively for about 16 years in math, science, computers and obedience. Don't bother with arts, independent thinking or creativity... kind of like "No Child Left Behind" on steroids.
- They would probably favor a totalitarian regime as long as its pro multinational, basically Fascist leaning as long as the party is their friend and makes them lots of money. Two ideal examples of perfect governments for multinationals are the new China and 1930's Germany. And yes IBM did love the Nazi's in the 1930's too. They want their workers thoroughly cowed, subservient, afraid and most definitely not organized.
The best fix for these American idiot CEO's, out to make a quick bug with no regard to long term consequences, is to strip them of their citizenship, and deport to them to their new corporate headquarters in China and India. I think once they get to live in China full time, with no ticket home to the U.S., and get to endure the repression, censorship, corruption like a real Chinese citizen, they will change their tune. They will especially realize their mistake when they get on the wrong side of a party boss or a company owned by powerful party members. Right now China is nice to them and is kissing their asses while they turn over all their capital, jobs, IP and market access. Chances are once they have all those and have their own version of IBM, owned by powerful party bosses, like Lenovo, they will completely destroy IBM and every other western corporation who sold their long term survival down the river for a few years of cheap labor, illusory access to China's markets and short term profit.
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:1, Insightful)
some here (mainly the corporate apologists, but some socialists too) talk like this existence is some kind of reward; that I should feel privileged if someone wants me to do their scut work for the lowest pay possible while I struggle to make ends meet, while their lobbyists wear away my liberties, which in turn affects my performance at work.. (around and around and around..) sorry, china/india may be the future for GM or GE or IBM, but their cultures are shit. it is not the way I want to live, being some hapless peon living in my own shit while having to kiss ass and break my back so the boss doesn't have to 'save face' (china loves to play this game).
if the system can't work with the avg amount of productivity an average individual can put out CONSISTENTLY (ie without being unhealthy), then there is a problem. just because YOU can do it along with the countless slaves (yes, that's what they are) in india or china, does not mean everyone else who hasn't been able to is lazy. if these companies want to leave, let them, but don't let them sell their products back to us. of course, even if we did allow it, we wouldn't be able to afford their products anyway, with the wages we'd be earning working...where exactly? walmart? CVS? oh right, we're supposed to pack our bags and move to the totalitarian state of our choosing, otherwise we're just lazy slobs, right? this is the brave new era?
Explain again why this generation of college students should even bother..or how about those in their early/mid 30s now? what's in it for them? what are they supposed to do? I'd love to see the ivory tower tards answer this in a way that doesn't imply 'make the ultimate sacrifice for the good of $ideal || $corporation.'
Re:And the solution...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
>>The Democrats may not be a whole lot better on this, but at least they *are* better, and one of Obama's promises was to punish companies which move jobs overseas.
Are you serial?
Obama's plan was to tax American corporations for outsourcing, which would have the effect of them moving overseas entirely. It's one of the most fucktarded ideas ever conceived.
Re:achievable? (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way you can become cheap enough to compete with India and China is if you completely ditch all the achievements of the labor movement throughout the last century - 8-hour workday, etc. At that point, your quality of life will pretty much match theirs as well for the majority of population. Clearly, this isn't the answer.
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:3, Insightful)
Hmmm this is interesting, you basically called every non-western country both racist and nationalist. I'm not sure how you got modded up for that when it is such obvious flamebait. I mean, have you even met many people of a non-western ethnicity? They aren't as bad as you seem to think. Try visiting some of these other countries sometime, most people are actually really nice.
I have seen a few third world countries (heck, I'm practically from one myself). GP is spot on - nationalism is par for the course outside the West. Racism, less prominent, but still there. "Help your own before anyone else" is part of that mentality, and I've noticed that it often correlates with quality of life - the lower that is, the more likely this approach is to be practiced. A Somali proverb sums it up nicely:
Me and my clan against the world.
Me and my family against my clan.
Me and my brother against my family.
Me against my brother.
This doesn't contradict your statement that "most people are actually really nice". As it often happens, they are - so long as you keep away from some topics.
As Christ said so simply, "Love thine enemies." Whether you believe in Christ or not, it doesn't matter, that is a good and effective strategy.
Early Christians, which actually applied said strategy, don't strike me as a particularly inspiring example. The strategy served them well to reach their goals (which is to get to heaven as soon as possible, ensuring your place there via martyrdom), but I would rather ensure my enemies' place in hell while staying on this plane of existence, thank you very much.
At the same time, Christianity only rose as a truly prominent religion when it allowed itself to be adopted as a state religion, and started to rely on state violence to spread and secure its well-being.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:5, Insightful)
"The fact is that Obama is a redistributionist who claims that jobs are owed and not earned."
The fact is some of America's greatest prosperity was during the 50's and 60's. Tax rates for the rich ran in the 70-90% range. That was when America was as redistributionist as it could get and America did great. So your Fox News/CNBC/Wall Street Journal propaganda rings hollow. I love it how they screen "class warfare" now that the Democrats are back in charge. They conveniently gloss over there has been class warfare for the last 30 years, but it was the rich waging it and they won, big time. They only use the term "class warfare" when the middle class is trying to claw some of it back.
The progressive tax system started getting dismantled under Reagan and George W. finished the job. The more it was dismantled the sicker America got. For example billionaire hedge fund managers now get taxed at 15%, working people its closer to 40%. By the time W. was finished America was actually redistributionist again, except it was redistributing all the wealth to the top 1%. Income inequality now is the worst its been since the roaring 20's which is is coincidentally the last time we had a crash like the current one.
So your claim America is "redistributionist" and that this is the problem is completely and utterly false.
It simply isn't healthy to have all the wealth concentrated in the hands of a small number of people. You need affluent, happy workers who buy things to have a balanced economy. Rich people don't buy stuff(other than yachts and mansions). Americans have continued on the buying binge been for the 30 years even though their wages are stagnant, but its mostly been through massive debt accumulation and now the party is over. You will see how much it really sucks to have 1% rich and 99% broke now that the housing bubble has burst.
Re: Chasing them away? (Score:2, Insightful)
Palestine was under British control,
Just about the entire middle east was under British control. Oh and "palestine" meant the Roman Province called "philistine", meaning Israel, Lebanon, most of Syria, and sizeable parts of Iraq, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
And IBM may have helped with the holocaust, but the project they signed on for was the administration of the national health care system of Nazi Germany. Of course that was the project that turned into the holocaust later. I know it's important for "tolerant socialists" to believe that Hitler was conceived in a black mass by 2 goats fucking eachother in hellfire, but in reality this was an unremarkable guy, who started out working hard and trying to help his country. Later he went into politics and pushed a form of centralized economy that used to be called "socialism" (as opposed to (bolsjevik) communism) and is today known as "fascism". The component of the ideology that lead to supremacism and the holocaust, eugenics, can be found in any history book under socialism.
Until late 1941, Hitler was known as the man who made socialism acceptable and possible in America, or more affectionately the "Champion of the poor". He was nominated for the Nobel peace prize, and was the recipient of numerous press prizes on promoting peace, fairness and, especially, equality.
End free-trade with non-free countries now (Score:2, Insightful)
End free trade with non-free countries, or try communism! buy Chinese!
-edfardos
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:3, Insightful)
As a moderate example, consider our fight with Japan at the end of world war two. After we beat Japan, we could have taken all their resources, enslaved them, and raped their women. It is what they did, and they fully expected us to. But we didn't, we turned around and helped them rebuild. It was a loving gesture, though not an entirely pure love, and it completely changed the Japanese from being our enemies to being our friends. If the love had been more pure, the effect would have been even more clear.
The greatest power is through influencing other people. One man can do so much by himself, but if he can command an army of others, then his power increases dramatically. You can convince other people to follow you for money, or from fear of death, but the most powerful way to influence others is through love.
That said, truly loving others is not easy.
Re:Corporations are Greedy (Score:2, Insightful)
You haven't travelled far. And to be honest, there are quite a few countries that are considered parts of the western world that are also of this "non-western" mindset. Even simply southern Europe already has no shortage of countries with essentially only ethnically centered parties.
You're probably a typical liberal. You either haven't travelled, or haven't left the hotel. After all, getting actual answers from people requires knowing the language, so at the very least very good french is required. And even with french you have to keep in mind that the more religious types outside of france will simply refuse to speak french, so you are basically only talking to secular-government minded people (which are fortunately over 80% even in the worst places I've ever visited)
The grandparent post is right that, barring tiny exceptions, all north-african political parties are ethnically AND religiously centered. I haven't visited Asia yet, so I don't know. I do doubt it's much different there. And quite frankly, even in Europe every last country has a sizeable ethnically centered party, and a sizeable religiously focused party, even if the religious aspect is currently mostly downplayed. At the very least one per country. They "are hated" they are "racist", but there isn't a single european country where ethnically-centered parties don't command at least 20% of the vote, and more typically 30-40%. If the religion-focused party would join with the ethnically focused party, which is a VERY unlikely prospect, they would command large majorities everywhere in Europe.
America is a special case because it's got only 2 parties. In reality the racists and ethnically centered idiots are divided amongst both parties. Those "own people first" idiots are overwhelmingly socialists, so they are somewhat deterred from the republican party even if that party is more America-centric than the democrats. And other loony racist groups cannot put themselves over the gun issue, and thus vote republican, probably not for reasons that actual republicans would like to know about.
Re:achievable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Another possible reason is love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it, aka patriotism.
Sure, but Americans obviously don't want to make the sacrifices. If they did, they would do one of two things: either devalue the American dollar, or impose import duties.
And if foreigners are patriotic, then they will buy fewer American goods, and they certainly won't buy American-made goods at their current inflated prices.
Re:achievable? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why do you think your $75000 salary is buying what it is buying? It's because India and China have cheap exports. If you are forced to buy American, or if those nations come up to US standards, that $75000 salary would be the equivalent of, say $40000. So, the reason you can earn those $75000 and still have all those "achievements of the labor movement" is because the US has exported the bad working conditions to India and China.
But there is a simple solution to all this: substantially devalue the US dollar. If the US dollar gets devalued by a factor of 2-3, US exports become much more attractive to foreigners, and Chinese and Indian imports become much less attractive to Americans.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
The idea that "import taxes will fix everything" is bogus magical thinking, because "jobs" aren't what makes a country rich.
Wealth is 100% resources and what people do with those resources. If you mine iron ore, it has a set value. If you ship that iron to China to have it refined and turned into steel, then ship it back to the US, we have to pay more for it than we sold it for, and that is wealth being transferred out of the country. If the iron had stayed in the US, it would have cost more to refine, but at least all that wealth would have stayed here.
Economic studies have shown that your typical $50k/yr manufacturing job "saved" by tariffs costs the rest of the economy over $100,000-$200,000/yr.
The "economy" isn't fungible. Using your numbers, those $50k/year jobs help a lot of people, while that $100k-$200k helps only a few.
And it gets worse. If you siphon that $50k to create $200k in the short term, you end up with an economy without a foundation. How long do you think those $200k "boosts" to the economy are going to last if people aren't working?
This insistence on geometric economic growth is going to end like *all* geometric scenarios end.
Re:achievable? (Score:4, Insightful)
> to an American worker than to a Chinese or Indian worker?
In terms of the manufacturing sector, if they can make the same stuff, then there's really no such motive, ultimately.
Well, to a small extent there is, to cover things like shipping costs (it's slightly better to produce widgets near to where they're going to be sold) and a bit of inertia (relocating a plant costs money, so it's worth a bit more to hire workers where the plant is as opposed to somewhere else, at least in the short term). But these factors only cover a relatively small wage differential.
Why do you think the US economy has been, for half a century or so, gradually moving away from most kinds of manufacturing?
Some kinds of services can be outsourced to the third world nearly as easily as manufacturing, but others really can't, or at least not to the same effect. Advertising, for example, needs to be handled by people who know the target market and culture. Design work requires a certain level of education, so even if you hire your engineers in India or China, they're still going to make a good deal more than the poverty-stricken masses you could hire to run manufacturing lines. (In fact, for a lot of that stuff you'd mostly be hiring the kind of people who could probably get H1B visas and work in the US if they were so inclined. That's going to drive wage expectations in a certain direction.) Medical professionals have to be hired in the places where people spend a lot of money on medical care, and the US is fairly high on the list there. And so on.
> Companies don't care about fascism.
Actually, they kind of do. On the whole, they're not generally real happy about it, although they prefer it to populism (hello, Latin America) or outright communism (Eastern Europe, I'm looking at you).
> We just need to become cheaper,
The market is sorting that out.
Granted, it would be sorted out faster if the government would stop trying to delay the inevitable (particularly, the shift away from a manufacturing-based economy). I mean, come on, do you really WANT to work in a factory? Let it go, already. There are more worthwhile (and more profitable) things you could be doing with your time.
> or we need to help Chinese and Indians become rich.
Define "become rich".
Because, if you mean "become rich compared to where they were a few decades ago", that's already happened, and continues to happen. The per capita standard of living in China today is much higher than in China fifty years ago, and the same is true in India.
Of course, it's true in the US as well: fifty years ago, the average US household had one car, one radio, one record player, one rotary phone, no camera, no computer, no shelf full of movies, very few electric kitchen appliances, and only about a 50/50 chance of having a television. Today the average household has slightly more than one car per person over age 15, 2-3 radios per person, multiple CD players, multiple cellphones, several cameras, internet access, a shelf full of DVDs, a counter (or cupboard) full of kitchen appliances, cable and/or satellite television, and a bunch of other junk we don't actually need.
(It is at this point not difficult to imagine our society reaching the point where attempting to maintain a household at the standard of living that was average in the fifties might put you in danger of having your children taken away by child services. Make it a hundred years instead of fifty and we're probably there now: the lack of indoor plumbing would just about do it, quite aside from everything else.)
So if you mean "help Chinese and Indians become rich(er) relative to Americans", then that's a different thing. But I don't see how that would create a "reason
And, of course, "richer" in th
Re:Who's chasing them? (Score:3, Insightful)
How can you be modded informative when you
1) Spell it Goldman sax. Come on, even Kenny G. is wincing at that one.
2) Say they went bankrupt. That's wrong, wrong, wrong.
IBM is a global business (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The truth isn't just relative (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you serious? Obama's placing the cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on budget is some sort of devious conspiracy while NOT placing the war on the budget was some sort of principled stand by Bush? I thought Bush didn't put the cost of the wars on the budget because Rumsfeld convinced him that we'd pay for it all with Iraqi oil revenue.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:2, Insightful)
There is a lot of truth in that post. Look at taxes. I learned the first year after high school that working to hard was foolish. My boss built custom homes - high quality homes, short of extravagent. We worked hard all summer long, to have shells up to finish off throughout the winter. If I worked 53 hours, I got a real nice paycheck thanks to overtime. If I worked 54 to 59 hours, I broke even - meaning, I saw only a few cents or a couple dollars increase in my paycheck. Working over 60 hours meant that I lost money. Yes, my take home check was SMALLER than it would have been working 50 hours. And, thanks to being single, I got squat back at the end of the year.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:achievable? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are absolutely correct, but there is an important side note here. Even if my salary would only be the equivalent of $40,000, it would still provide me with a much higher standard of living than either India or China.
But Americans don't seem to be willing to go back to that kind of living standard--otherwise, we'd vote for politicians that devaluate the dollar and embrace protectionism.
That's not surprising either: as long as unemployment stays around 10%, the current tradeoff doesn't cause too much social upheaval and it works out better for the majority. Some degree of inequality is built into our political system.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:2, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Money mobility caused this (Score:3, Insightful)
Neo-conservative != fascist
See if you can recognize the following characteristics in today's Fox News/Jeff Beck/Rush Limbaugh followers in the following list (note especially point #3 in regard to the parent post):
Re:Isn't Chinese Law (Score:1, Insightful)
Your insightful moderation is well earned. I've heard plenty of people point out that the current concept of free trade provides incentive for companies to move production to the company that allows it to exploit its workers and environment the most. However, I've never before seen it followed to the logical conclusion that an ethical competitor is almost doomed to failure in most competitive markets.
Basically, I've always thought the best argument against globalization was that we would be hypocritical in encouraging foreign workers and natural resources to be managed in ways that we feel are too undignified or irresponsible for our own workers or resources. However, I think your point that our behavior not only encourages this, but actually guarantees they will be the only business practices in a competitive market is even more compelling.
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:2, Insightful)
l've so often but rarely see any proof of such cuts in funding.. would YOU please cite what school and town you're referring to?
Specific budgets pre and post cuts to prove your point. Otherwise. retract your assertion,
penandpaper02 (Score:2, Insightful)
As a fellow economic genius I have a few thoughts:
1.) Buying cheaper is more expensive.
We the consumers are as much to blame as the large corporations. The point is we are willing to buy the cheaper product to save ourselves money. There's nothing inherently wrong with this however we are thinking in the individual sense and not looking beyond the purchase and asking questions such as "How can they make this so much cheaper?" We just want cheap crap we can throw away later so we can buy more cheap crap (repeat over and over) which actually costs us more in the long run and fills those companies pockets.
2.) You need a babysitter?
We want the Uncle Sam to totally control how these companies operate however we fail to realize that we have the purchasing power. You don't need to be protected from buying from China or elsewhere. Make the decision on what to buy from where and whom. If nothing fits what your looking for then here's a thought: Stop buying shit. What could take months to years in the political arena can be accomplished instantly by you making a decision while your in the store. What happened to personal responsibility?
3.) The Chinese work hard.
Yea, I said it. The average Lee over there is no different than over here. He or she is just trying to support their family and put some food on the table. Would you let your family go hungry for someone else in another country? Deep down I doubt it because I know I wouldn't. Thus I can't fault them for it. If you want to turn your anger somewhere turn it at the guys lining their pockets with fat bonuses and those employees putting in the bare minimum and expecting premium wage.
4.) Our students need to not be stoopid.
I work and attend a college (no, I'm not the janitor). Everyday I hear students complain about how hard they have to study or how they can't wait to get shit faced. Yea, that's the way to go. Go ahead and burn some brain cells that won't come back.
They study to pass tests but not to learn the material. They complain about teachers trying to "over teach" them. We're so obsessed with having a society with individuals that have degrees that the quality of the person (by quality I mean someone who actually is willing to work hard to learn the material) getting it reduces its true significance. And a degree is only a meaning. That piece of paper doesn't make you more intelligent, it just means you know how to study for a test and do homework. Anyone can memorize things. What matters is your passion for learning, and your ability to take those memorized facts and use them in an abstract manner to solve problems that don't have answers yet. Your goal shouldn't be graduation but graduation as an effect of you mastering the material.
Why the rant? Because these same students who hate to learn and don't have a passion for knowledge take this same approach in the work field but have some sense of entitlement about them. When they can't do the job and get fired they blame the gov, the minimum wage guy from China, and everyone's momma. I would think our present situation would make students want to buckle down and give China something to be envious of but I still see students complain about how long their class was. Maybe China does deserve it more...
Re:Its the law of the jungle (Score:5, Insightful)
"my Chinese friends have never thought it's as bad as you seem to believe"
Most people living in Fascist states don't mind them until they fall on them like a ton of bricks, and at that point you aren't likely to be chit chatting with them. Fascist states are usually very good at producing jobs and economic progress so as long as you aren't on the wrong side of the party most people are fine with them. Most people don't care if they are free as long as they are making a good living, I do... Most Germans loved the Nazi's in the 30's using the same rationale.
You couldn't pay me enough to live in China. As flawed as the U.S. is, at least its not a Fascist police state yet.
"if our workforce is capable then they'll be hired for those sorts of jobs instead."
Not by CEO's looking for the cheapest labor they can get that can more or less do the work. They are looking to maximize their bottom lines to make good numbers for quarters, and one of the easiest ways to do that is to slash labor expenses. The quality of the work may suffer some, but you can throw more bodies at things so the cheap labor market always wins with bean counters. With the cost of living in Western Europe and the U.S. workers there simply can't compete until places like China stop manipulating their currency and their cost of living achieves parity with the West.
Tariffs and trade barriers have been used by countries for centuries to compensate for the fact that other countries have lower cost of living and cheaper labor. It took some rocket scientist free traders in the U.S. to completely dismantle them, while all the countries they are competing against still have them in spades. Markets in Japan, China, Korea and India are still not free, they erect all kinds of barriers to prevent Western corporations from competing on a level field there. The U.S. is practicing unilateral economic disarmament and our economy is going down in flames as a result. I might be OK with free trade if every country we compete with was as free as we are, they aren't.
Re:"Mumbo-jumbo"!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh please, economics is NOT is science in the same way as physics and chemistry. It does not have hard and testable hypotheses. Its predictions are always approximate, and are seemingly rarely falsified, largely due to their vagueness. Most economic theories are inwards looking and self-referential. The theories are logical based on a certain set of assumptions, but those base assumptions are mere speculation.
I like to look at economics as a useful tool. It may have some preductive utility, not unlike technical stock analysis. But it certainly shouldn't be used as the main guiding force by which to operate a society. I believe that the fundamental flaw of economics is that it seeks to make predictions about phenomenon that are largely psychological. In the end, market behavior is based on psychology, on desires, on fears, on needs. To assume that we can reduce such a massively complicated thing as fear to a simple set of equations is ludicrous.
Re:Time to detach from china and india (Score:3, Insightful)
The ironic thing is those two industries the tariffs were designed to protect lost their traditional markets due to the tariff protection and greed. The nasty thing is the tiger is now grasped firmly by the tail. The badly run, protected and complacent US sugar industry for example is doomed to vanish the day that cheaper imported sugar is allowed in. None of this is about low wage countries since Australia competes as well as anyone.
Re:And the solution...? (Score:3, Insightful)
People who use Leibniz to justify free-marketism are no better than the Nazis who tried to justify themselves using Nietzsche.
And it was Godwin, not Leibniz, who stretched optimism to ridiculous lengths.
There, I've double-Godwinned the thread. Time to move on. :)
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:2, Insightful)
This is actually the 'old style' socialism you are complaining about. State of the art socialism is about empowering individuals and helping them become productive members of society, wherever you can.
You should invent a catchy name for this 'new style' socialism that doesn't have any downsides at all.
May I suggest 'Socialism of the 21st century'
Denmark has a program called Flexicurity which is a popular example of this. Under that system, once you lose your job, you can get unemployment benefits as long as you are actively looking for another job. Or, if you prefer, you can go back to school, get some new skills, during which time the government will also help you out. This has worked out really well for the Danes: it allows companies to easily fire people they don't need, and allows people who are out of a job to easily find another one (or retrain for another one). It is a flexible, secure workforce.
Tax revenues in Denmark are 50% of GDP, as compared to 28% if GDP in the United States.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_revenue_as_percentage_of_GDP [wikipedia.org]
Don't get me wrong - a lot of things in Scandinavia are done well. Still pretending that their model doesn't have a downside is dishonest. It also seems unlikely that Americans will support doubling the size of the already massive Federal Government, which is really what the tax revenue figures are measuring. Finally even if they did it's not clear that even if they did the US Federal government would perform as well as a Scandinavian one.
I suspect that Scandinavian social models only work in small countries with a cultural homogenous population. This guy from Denmark agrees
http://www.migrationinformation.org/Profiles/display.cfm?ID=485 [migrationinformation.org]
Traditionally, Denmark has not regarded itself as a country of immigration. This is due to its relatively homogeneous population of 5.4 million, a strong sense of national identity, and the fact that, until recently, immigration flows were moderate. Most immigrants in Denmark came from other Nordic or Western countries, and the country experienced more emigration than immigration.
In addition, the welfare state was designed on the basis of a culturally similar citizenry, and the Danish economy has successfully adapted to a variety of international challenges by taking advantage of institutions built around a powerful sense of civic solidarity.
Since the end of the guest-worker program was in the early 1970s, however, a growing numbers of immigrants, mainly refugees and family dependents of refugees and former "guest workers," has challenged the status quo.
Particularly the generous welfare system works because only a small minority choose to free load on the system by living on benefits - if that minority is small enough they can be subsidised by the rest. That's not going to be the case if you extended the same model to a larger, more diverse country like the US, or even if you allow people in who don't fit in culturally as has happened with immigrants to Denmark.
Note the problem here is not with the immigrants per se. I knew a guy from Armenia whose family moved first to Sweden and then to the US. His mother said that "when you walk down the street in Sweden people looked at you like you were a monkey. In America Armenians are regarded as being white and that is all that matters". I suspect this is partly an economic issue. Most recent immigrants to Scandinavia end up on welfare and stay there. In the US welfare is less generous and so they have to work. Still that affects people's perception of immigrants being hardworking.
Essentially the Scandinavian welfare system is creating social discord. It's not hard to imagine that Americans would behave similarly if they paid mu
Re:And the solution...? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Solution is You and Me (Score:3, Insightful)
You're proceeding from a false assumption. Tax rates had nothing to do with American prosperity in the '50s and '60s. We were prosperous because most of the first world's industrial base had been destroyed during WW II, and people all over the world had to rely on American products as they rebuilt their own industries. High marginal tax rates had nothing to do with that prosperity, and in fact probably hindered it to some degree.
Besides which, people paid taxes at those rates in the same way corporations pay high corporate taxes today, which is to say they didn't. Tax receipts are the important figure, not tax rates. The Economist had an article years ago (which I can't find on the web, unfortunately) which said rich people pay no more than about 25% taxes in aggregate. And that's not just Americans, either, it's pretty constant worldwide. It's true in Europe, and even in Japan where the top bracket is on the order of 90% (at least it was at the time the article was written). Wealthy people don't make money at jobs the way you and I do - they invest what they have in order to generate profits. But investments involve a risk/reward calculation. As you raise taxes more investments fall into the "not worth the risk" category because the reward is reduced. Those are the same investments which will generate the most profit (and thus, the most tax revenue) if they work out.
So you don't actually get more money by having sky-high marginal tax rates, because people are making changes in the way they invest their money. In the case of the US, as you raise taxes the capital eventually moves into double-tax-free munis. The rich people pay fewer taxes, and the economy falters because nobody is investing in enterprises which will create jobs. When tax rates were lowered in the early '80s tax receipts actually went up as people moved their money out of double-tax-free munis and into riskier investments. At the same time growth, which is what actually lifts people out of poverty, started to pick up.
High marginal tax rates were lowered because people had come to realize they are a bad idea for everyone. I have to believe the idea is back in vogue because we have a lot of people who are too young to remember the last time around. Oh well, that's life, I guess. If you don't talk to your parents you do the same stupid shit they did.
Re:Money mobility caused this (Score:3, Insightful)
First off, the assertion that the New Deal propelled America into a period of rapid economic growth is ridiculous - the economy remained in a depression until the onset of WWII.
If you look carefully at the data the economy ebbed and flowed as Congress tampered with the New Deal. When in New Deal policies were going strong, the economy improved, when Congress resolve weakened and moved away from expansionary policies the economy took a downturn. Would the great depression come to a swift end without WWII? perhaps not, but clearly it was ameliorated by the New Deal and worsened by whenever anti-New Deal actions took place.
William Gibson saw this coming 20+ yrs ago (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:And the solution...? (Score:1, Insightful)
Had a look at China lately?
Doing anything in China gives legally complex a totally new meaning.
The right level of corruption to the right persons at the right time in the right way.
You might be facing life in jail or even death sentence if you fail.
Of course you can just say no to corruption, but you might end up in jail again if you say it to loudly....
How to multinationals handle this? They hire "agent companies" (partners in crime) to handle "sensitive issues" like export, import, buying/selling property, and so on.
How "agents" works? You pay them and they do magic. Stiff prices for things that looks cheap is the norm. Where the money goes? Do not ask to much or face jail.