Question For Republicans (Israel, layoffs, elect, retired)
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That's the trouble with any sort of free trade. It's easy to spot the jobs that have been lost and all but impossible to pin down the jobs that have been gained. This leads a lot of people into misconceptions over the whole idea.
It's not hard at all. And, anyone who at this point in time would deny the horrendous effects NAFTA and GATT have had on US manufacturing jobs, and the economy overall, is either an idiot or a liar. The exact results we've seen were predicted by the opponents of these trade treaties, while the predictions of positive effects made by it's supporters have materialized only in gains to corporate profits at the expense of jobs, and the negative impact such massive job loss has had in the US economy.
Levi Strauss is a perfect example of the effect ... this company which began in the late 1800's started closing plants in the US, and continuing to move almost all manufacturing operations off shore between 1997-2002. At the time, they were one of the worlds top apparel manufacturing companies. Levi Strauss is just one of many examples which coincided with the lifting of import restrictions under GATT, allowing US manufacturers to move off shore while continuing to enjoy unencumbered sales in US markets.
The ridiculous claims by economists like Laura Tyson, then economic advisor to the Clinton administration (and now, Obama's) who pushed the GATT treaty with such declarations that companies would be less likely to move off shore because of GATT's opening of foreign markets (which she claimed was the primary motive for such actions, and not motivated by cheap foreign labor) is an insult to anyone with an ounce of intelligence.
The fact is .. it doesn't take an economist or a rocket scientist to understand that when labor makes up an average of 25% of overall manufacturing costs, corporations being granted access to overseas slave labor at a rate of 47 to 1 make HUGE, OVERNIGHT, INSTANTANEOUS GAINS, and would be foolish to pay US workers $11/hour when they can get subsidized Asian slaves to do it for .25/hour. And you cannot blame high pay rates for US workers as the culprit here ... unless you suggest that US Workers need to work for .25/hour.
US trade tariffs and restrictions were the only hedge against a flood of cheap slave labor made products for which GATT opened, which drove one of two results ... either manufacturing moved off shore to utilize that cheap labor, or were driven out of business .. both outcomes resulting in loss of US jobs.
Of course, the double talkers will always shift the conversation to the relative strength or weakness of the dollar in relation to that of the corresponding foreign currencies as the driving force in trade imbalances, but that is a smokescreen, since countries have always manipulated and pegged their currencies to their best advantage.
Aside all of the complex "explanations" given, and the propaganda de jour, it still boils down to common sense that even an idiot should understand. If I, ABC Corp can have a product manufactured in Asia for .50 each piece ... and a comparable product made in the USA would cost me $2.35 .. where will I have that product manufactured?
I actually do deal with this personally, since we have a jewelry business, making hand crafted jewelry ourselves, which must compete with other retailers that simply import cheap Asian made garbage that they sell for half the cost, at twice our margin.
Their's is a business of import and retail, while ours is a business of artistic creation and sales ... not exactly apples to apples .. as ours is of much higher quality and value, though we find ourselves in a contracting economy with everyone looking for Walmart bargains.
The same situation holds true for most US made products across the board, thanks to globalization, and it's exploitation of captive labor markets overseas.
Well, the complete fiscal failure of Republicans over the past 30 years is a pretty well known phenomenon. Supply-side doesn't actually work. Laissez-faire doesn't actually work. Nothing much that Republicans espouse actually works, and they prove it every time they manage to get themselves elected. They're out there campaigning right now on a platform of not doing anything at all themselves and opposing everything that anybody else tries to do, and that's actually one of the least threatening platforms that they've managed to come up with in years...
More Saggy liberal spin-
Fact-
1. All presidents since WW2 have increased the debt
2. The highest debt increases have occurred under republican presidents and DEMOCRATIC SENTATE AND CONGRESS
3. The senate and congress controls the purse- not the president
Solution from this data- Never have ANY democratic senators or congressmen, and never have ANY republican presidents.
2. The highest debt increases have occurred under republican presidents and DEMOCRATIC SENTATE AND CONGRESS
.
Seven out of eight times the Democrat's gave Reagan less than he asked for and he ended up quadrupling the national debt from less than $1 trillion to $4.4 trillion.
Bill Clinton had a Republican majority but he still raised taxes mostly on the wealthy and to date has the best fiscal picture during my lifetime which stretches back to the mid 1930's.
You folks are amazing. You just don't understand that the debt quadrupled and then doubled again after Republican tax cuts with half of the benefits going to the upper 1% of taxpayers.
You also don't seem to understand that trickle down never did trickle.
lol...you spent two hours on a post for city-data?
beats just sitting and watching TV. The OP knows where to get the info, and maybe, just maybe he can shut up a few of these holier than thou Republicans who think all the tax cuts really did us good. That might be worth it.
Take it to some tea parties on some nice big signs
Seven out of eight times the Democrat's gave Reagan less than he asked for and he ended up quadrupling the national debt from less than $1 trillion to $4.4 trillion.
Bill Clinton had a Republican majority but he still raised taxes mostly on the wealthy and to date has the best fiscal picture during my lifetime which stretches back to the mid 1930's.
You folks are amazing. You just don't understand that the debt quadrupled and then doubled again after Republican tax cuts with half of the benefits going to the upper 1% of taxpayers.
You also don't seem to understand that trickle down never did trickle.
Again, let's repeat for those who do not seem to be paying attention
1. ALL presidents since WW2 have INCREASED the debt
2. The senate and congress control spending, not the president
3. The largest increases in debt have occurred under DEMOCRATIC senate and congress with REPUBLICAN president.
The blame-
EVERYONE
The "highest" blame-
DEMOCRATIC SENATE AND CONGRESS AND REPUBLICAN PRESIDENT
If we are talking about debt, I have a simple solution-
STOP SPENDING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The problem is not the revenue stream, it is the effluent phase. Everyday that the senate and congress work, $8 billion is added to the debt. EVERYDAY! When the government is "shut down", we lose only $100 million everyday. Let the government shut down and save a ton of money until these drunk sailors can cut spending!
Then why haven't you done it? The reason why is that the jobs gained from trade liberalization are widely dispersed. There's ten here, twenty-eight over there, sixteen down the road a piece. They pop up at thousands of different sites owned by thousands of different companies and they don't come with any official stamp "This Job Created by Globalization" on them. Individually, they're hard to see and they're hard to find. On the flip side, plant closings are easy to spot. Whole clumps of jobs can be seen as lost all at one time. And of course they come with all the usual stories of a whole way of life being lost as a once prosperous town sinks into economic decay as the result of globalization. So you soak that stuff up, but don't bother to look any further. As the result, your views of anything even marginally related to GATT/WTO and NAFTA are unduly colored by extrapolation from false and incomplete information.
Per your Levi Strauss story, let's look at manufacturing for a bit. Real US wages in manufacturing increased by 14.4% in the decade after NAFTA. In the decade before, they had increased by 6.5%. But all those jobs lost, you say? Yes, it's quite true that the US has lost manufacturing jobs since the mid 1990's. It's also true that ALL of the world's top twelve manufacturing economies have lost manufacturing jobs over that time period, while actual manufacturing output has soared. China in that time period has lost more manufacturing jobs than the US has, while the actual US loss of jobs has only been just about average for the Top Twelve. It is also true that the US remains by far the world's largest manufacturing economy, producing about 24% of all the output of those twelve largest manufacturing countries. Second-place China has just about ten times the number of manufacturing workers as we do, and they would still need to increase their output by one-third in order to match us. Simply put, manufacturing as a source of employment is shrinking not just here, but everywhere around the world, just as agriculture once did perhaps now a century or more ago. You'll need to wrap your head around that sort of thing before you're going to have any clear picture of what's actually going on.
Tariffs, quotas, subsidies and other such restrictions on trade do one thing. They raise the real cost of goods and services to all consumers. This depresses aggregate demand, and decreasing demand means fewer jobs. You think you'd rather pay $60 for a pair of US-made jeans than $40 for a pair of slave-made Chinese jeans and that tariffs will ultimately let you do that. But that's not what happens. On the day the tariff goes into effect, you simply pay $60 for the same pair of slave-made Chinese jeans that you could have bought the day before for $40. You'll have to wait for there to be any US-made jeans available. How long will it take? Well, ask youself how many companies are likely to sell some bonds that they'll be paying off for 20 years in order to raise the capital needed to acquire or build and equip a jeans-making plant based on the gamble that nobody is going to tinker with the tariff in the meantime. Tariffs are notoriously short-lived. The people hurt by the tariff (the manufacturers of the things you would have bought with the extra $20 you sunk into that new pair of Chinese jeans) start lobbying the government over how the tariff is killing them and all their US jobs, and poof, the tariff disappears. And any jeans-manufacturing operation launched on the basis of the tariff being in place is basically wiped out. Businesses don't trust tariffs, hence they may not react to them in the way that your "it's not hard at all" approach might suggest.
Trade imbalances result from the combination of a whole bunch of factors, but it is naive to believe that any country can successfully peg and maniuplate its currency. The increasing impossibility of the task was what brought about the death of fixed exchange rates to begin with as everyone simply went on the float and washed their hands of the whole mess. China is the only major economy that has seriously tried to maintain a peg since, and their ability to do so even in their heavily regulated world grows smaller every day.
Companies don't make location decisions based on labor costs. They don't make such decisions based on taxes. They make those decisions based on profitabilty, which is again a combination of dozens of factors. Education level and reliability of the local workforce. Political stability in the region. Proximity to efficient transportation networks. Reliability of access to suppliers. Ability to protect intellectual property. The list goes on and on. Nobody moves from one corner of the world to another without looking at the situation from every possible angle. A+B=C does not apply.
The information about your personal situation suggests that you are indeed producing a luxury good for sale into an upscale niche market that has been adversely affected by the economic downturn. Luxury goods and upscale niche markets are known to be susceptible to disproportionately adverse effects during economic downturns. NAFTA and the WTO have nothing to do with this. It's been going on for centuries.
More Saggy liberal spin-
Fact-
1. All presidents since WW2 have increased the debt
2. The highest debt increases have occurred under republican presidents and DEMOCRATIC SENTATE AND CONGRESS
3. The senate and congress controls the purse- not the president
Solution from this data- Never have ANY democratic senators or congressmen, and never have ANY republican presidents. That would perfectly fine by me.
More irrelevant gibberish. Debt is expected to increase over time. More quickly than usual in times of crisis. The mere fact that debt went up is inconsequential. The question is how fast and for what reasons or purposes. The growth of debt should have accelerated in response to WWII and in response to the greatest economic calamity since the Great Depression. What crises could excuse Reagan and W of their debt-making? Sandanistas and WMD's??? Sorry...not quite the same order of magnitude. These two guys simply screwed things up, particularly W, who pitched ten years worth of hard-fought budget work right out the window because Grover Norquist told him to. And a projected 10-year surplus of $5+ trillion dollars along with it. Any clue how much worse off the country is today for Bush's nearly $10 trillion worsening of its financial condition? Think words like hugely, colosssally and tragically. That'll put you on the right path.
Then why haven't you done it? The reason why is that the jobs gained from trade liberalization are widely dispersed. There's ten here, twenty-eight over there, sixteen down the road a piece. They pop up at thousands of different sites owned by thousands of different companies and they don't come with any official stamp "This Job Created by Globalization" on them. Individually, they're hard to see and they're hard to find. On the flip side, plant closings are easy to spot. Whole clumps of jobs can be seen as lost all at one time. And of course they come with all the usual stories of a whole way of life being lost as a once prosperous town sinks into economic decay as the result of globalization. So you soak that stuff up, but don't bother to look any further. As the result, your views of anything even marginally related to GATT/WTO and NAFTA are unduly colored by extrapolation from false and incomplete information.
Per your Levi Strauss story, let's look at manufacturing for a bit. Real US wages in manufacturing increased by 14.4% in the decade after NAFTA. In the decade before, they had increased by 6.5%. But all those jobs lost, you say? Yes, it's quite true that the US has lost manufacturing jobs since the mid 1990's. It's also true that ALL of the world's top twelve manufacturing economies have lost manufacturing jobs over that time period, while actual manufacturing output has soared. China in that time period has lost more manufacturing jobs than the US has, while the actual US loss of jobs has only been just about average for the Top Twelve. It is also true that the US remains by far the world's largest manufacturing economy, producing about 24% of all the output of those twelve largest manufacturing countries. Second-place China has just about ten times the number of manufacturing workers as we do, and they would still need to increase their output by one-third in order to match us. Simply put, manufacturing as a source of employment is shrinking not just here, but everywhere around the world, just as agriculture once did perhaps now a century or more ago. You'll need to wrap your head around that sort of thing before you're going to have any clear picture of what's actually going on.
Tariffs, quotas, subsidies and other such restrictions on trade do one thing. They raise the real cost of goods and services to all consumers. This depresses aggregate demand, and decreasing demand means fewer jobs. You think you'd rather pay $60 for a pair of US-made jeans than $40 for a pair of slave-made Chinese jeans and that tariffs will ultimately let you do that. But that's not what happens. On the day the tariff goes into effect, you simply pay $60 for the same pair of slave-made Chinese jeans that you could have bought the day before for $40. You'll have to wait for there to be any US-made jeans available. How long will it take? Well, ask youself how many companies are likely to sell some bonds that they'll be paying off for 20 years in order to raise the capital needed to acquire or build and equip a jeans-making plant based on the gamble that nobody is going to tinker with the tariff in the meantime. Tariffs are notoriously short-lived. The people hurt by the tariff (the manufacturers of the things you would have bought with the extra $20 you sunk into that new pair of Chinese jeans) start lobbying the government over how the tariff is killing them and all their US jobs, and poof, the tariff disappears. And any jeans-manufacturing operation launched on the basis of the tariff being in place is basically wiped out. Businesses don't trust tariffs, hence they may not react to them in the way that your "it's not hard at all" approach might suggest.
Trade imbalances result from the combination of a whole bunch of factors, but it is naive to believe that any country can successfully peg and maniuplate its currency. The increasing impossibility of the task was what brought about the death of fixed exchange rates to begin with as everyone simply went on the float and washed their hands of the whole mess. China is the only major economy that has seriously tried to maintain a peg since, and their ability to do so even in their heavily regulated world grows smaller every day.
Companies don't make location decisions based on labor costs. They don't make such decisions based on taxes. They make those decisions based on profitabilty, which is again a combination of dozens of factors. Education level and reliability of the local workforce. Political stability in the region. Proximity to efficient transportation networks. Reliability of access to suppliers. Ability to protect intellectual property. The list goes on and on. Nobody moves from one corner of the world to another without looking at the situation from every possible angle. A+B=C does not apply.
The information about your personal situation suggests that you are indeed producing a luxury good for sale into an upscale niche market that has been adversely affected by the economic downturn. Luxury goods and upscale niche markets are known to be susceptible to disproportionately adverse effects during economic downturns. NAFTA and the WTO have nothing to do with this. It's been going on for centuries.
I find it difficult to believe that someone who can weave a verbiage web like you just did had the time if they happened to be gainfully employed. What happened...did you fall victim to the massive layoffs at the end of the Bush Apocalypse?
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