What does it matter what low-level low salary job the unskilled and uneducated take? Why is job working in Walmart or McDonalds any more or less demeaning than working a mindless factory job? I worked all manner of crappy jobs when I was a teenager. Warehouses. Factories. Retail stores in the mall. Fast Food. Mail room. The one thing these jobs all have in common is that nearly any person can do them and they all don’t pay very well.
All protectionism would do is raise the prices of products those people would buy effectively cutting their salary.
The problem with discussing economics with people who don’t know much about it is that what is “intuitive” to them based on their experience is often wrong.
Yeah, when they decide they want to buy Hawaii or maybe California. Ohh, maybe they’ll buy Texas, see there’s always a silver lining.
More like a shove.
I think its a combination of the remaining controls with the introduction of capitalism. Unplanned economies do not become as export oriented as China has become, they tend to focus at least somewhat on the domestic market (and perhaps even importing stuff from other countries).
Didn’t you just say that if an illegal alien is willing to do your job for less then you are overpaid to begin with?
And you would understand the concern better if you would only read through what people write. Noone says that illegal aliens send every penny they make out of the country. Someone said that illegal aliens don’t hurt the economy because they spend the money they make here. Someone pointed out that this wasn’t true because they send a lot of their money back home (I haven’t seen a cite for this but based on anecdotal evidence, there is a significant portion of the illegal immigration population that do not intend to set down roots here, when you see a house with 20 single illegal alien males here for construction jobs, they are sending a lot of that income back home,where they intend to return when the jobs dry up).
Now I guess you could say the same thing about imports and people are making the argument against imports as well.
The currency issue and the trade issue are fairly closely linked, don’t you think?
Not really, no. Importing goods, after all, requires labour.
The reason debt is an issue is because China has nothing else to do with the dollars they get for selling us stuff other than buy US treasuries because US goods being exported to China suffer an almost insurmountable disadvantage because of the currency peg.
I think you are confusing monetary policy with the currency peg. Monetary policy is usually used to increase or decrease the money supply which accelerates or decelerates economic activity. The currency peg is designed to make Chinese stuff cheap in America and American stuff expensive in China. The purpose of the currency peg is to create an imbalance of trade in excess of what we would have if the currency was free floating.
Why not? Why do they ever have to buy anything manufactured in America? Why can’t they simply lend us money and let the interest compound, a lot of other countries have systematically stockpiled US dollars for decades without ever seeing a drawdown in US dollars that they hold.
I’m not saying we should close our borders and kick out the foreigners but too many people (many of whom generally have no faith in the free market) seem to thin the free market will take care of any imbalances. In the long long loooong run, it might but not before the there has been a geoeconomic shift. At that point the Chinese may not be spending their US dollars to go sightseeing in NYC, they may be coming here to buy our resources in teh same way that we go to Africa to buy their resources.
I’m aware of the fact China doesn’t play fair with its currency; that said, this has a lot of negative implications for China’s economy, too. It doesn’t benefit China for the U.S. to be poor. Regrettably, China’s not a free and open country and I’d agree that our trading relationships need to be carefully managed, but that’s not an indictment of free trade as a general policy. The U.S. does most of its trade with countries other than China; it would be very stupid indeed to adopt a generally protectionist approach to punish one trade partner.
In the chart on that page, it shows the Payout to CEO’s in the US vs everywhere else around 350X.
Or how about this guy in China that heads the largest bank in the world.
Reuters) - You wouldn’t know it by his pay stubs, but Jiang Jianqing heads the world’s largest bank.
The question is, how do we get those CEO’s insourced over here to the USA. Just think of how much more efficient and less expense it would be. 40 Million dollars is a huge expense. The shareholders would be happy as well, getting rid of such a large expense as that.
But the truth is that those large corporations are in bed with our government and the the board of directors in bed with the CEO have no intention of giving up the gravy train while everyone else has to sacrifice and is expendable and has to settle for less.
So if it truly is all about Global Markets, Free Trade and capitalism, then why don’t see a lot of CEO’s being replaced by CEO’s from overseas, in record numbers as is happening with everyone else’s job?
Do they see themselves running an honest enterprise through the global markets, are is it more like survival of the fittest, and greed take all?
**Top Billionaire Hedge Funder Sees Himself As a Hyena Devouring Wildebeests
**
Goldman Sachs CEO Blankfein say’s firm is doing God’s Work
I liken Goldman Sachs to a parasite that feeds its host in order to keep it alive, not much different than the parasite in the movie Alien that attaches itself to the victim and keeps it alive while it slowly kills it.
Sure, there would be pain if a lot of these investment banks collapse, but theirs would be more so. In the long run, it would allow for a different system where the majority are not being held hostage via Financial Terrorism like the one we have now.
For now, the situation continues to be the same and we may soon here threats again of “Bail us out or else.”
I fully agree. If you could get an Indian to come over and put her in charge of a major U.S. company as CEO and have her do **exactly as good a job **as the previous CEO while making far less money, that makes it pretty likely the previous CEO was overpaid.
What CEOs make in OTHER countries, however, isn’t at all related to what I said, just as what an Indian accountant would make in Delhi isn’t relevant to what he’d make in Denver.
Perhaps the U.S. isn’t as good at controlling executive pay and needs to do something about that. Perhaps U.S. investors should be paying more attention to how their corporations are run.
For the right effect, you need to stick your fingers in your ears and say “LA LA LA”.
Meanwhile, wrap your head around the fact that this is the first time since the Great Depression that global banking almost completely shut down. It is different from previous recessions. You’ve heard the phrase that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold… to extend the analogy, the US banking system had a major heart attack and is in the middle of a quintuple-bypass operation. Of course, there will be a recovery eventually, but it won’t be in a hurry, and it won’t be without some significant repercussions that have yet to unfold.
But hey, since every recession in your own personal memory turned out fine, maybe you’ve got an edge on all the economists and finance experts who are pointing out how this time is totally different from everything since the Depression.
The scary thing is, given that even at 40, you’ll face a lot of age discrimination, and the instability of jobs today, do you have until age 35 or so to find a job you’ll have to be lucky enough to work at for the rest of your life if you want to survive financially? How many people EVER did that in the past 20 years or so?
Here we were talking about illegal aliens taking contruction jobs, not call centers or outsourcing of manufacturing jobs to China, we were talking about the impact of illegal aliens on the domestic job market. You said that if your job is so low tech that an illegal alien could do it for half the price then youa re overpaid. well my point was that thsi is true of EVERY fucking profession in the united states.
No of course its not an indictment of free trade generally but it is an indictment of what we have going on right now in the NAME of free trade.
Don’t fool yourself, stock options have become more important than the customer. Where the interest of stock option holders align with teh interests of the shareholders, great otherwise, screw the shareholders.
I still remember when we limited the deductibility of salaries in excess of a million dollars. All these consulting firms strated peddling stock incetnive pay which was supposed to replace the lost income while at the same time aligning the interests of management and shareholders. Eventually this evolved into compensation schemes where stock options became as good as the old cash salary PLUS bonuses for stock performance.