Enough of the country knows about this forum enough and takes it seriously enough that *Eighty Percent of the country *has an opinion on what we think about the economy?
Wish I’d known we were that big. I’d have put on pants before I posted.
Which is what we’ve been trying to tell you. Nobody supports tariffs, certainly not 86% of Americans, 90% of Republicans, and definitely not 57% of high-earning Americans.
That’s why this is so amusing. Even in the “links” you post, economics talk about the effects of offshoring, and then qualify the statement by saying we shouldn’t have tariffs.
And again you show you don’t know what an H1B/TN visa is.
This is why we need a SARCASM smiley.
You’re so mean.
That is, if even 1% of them even knew about you, which they don’t, and would wish they didn’t if they did.
The poll he is talking about asked what people thought were the biggest factors contributing to the current economic downturn. Offshoring of jobs was at the top, with 68% strongly agreeing and 18% somewhat agreeing. Just google “wall street journal poll offshoring”.
Now, I don’t know if you can really count the “somewhat agree” folks as being opposed to offshoring. At best, they are “somewhat” opposed to it, whatever that means.
Still, 68% is well over 50%.
But that still doesn’t mean they are actually opposed to offshoring. Let’s do another poll and tell them that eliminated offshoring will raise prices by 15% (that’s probably very conservative) and see what they think.
They might as well have asked everyone if he wants a pony. All it proves is that most people are uninformed about economics. Is anyone surprised about that? Remember, these are the same people who want prayer in school, who think evolution is “just a theory” and who largely oppose efforts to deal with global warming. The same people who flock to WalMart to buy all the cheap stuff from China. When they start boycotting WalMart in order to force them sell locally manufactured goods, then I’ll believe the oppose offshoring.
Yep, this is the key. (Thanks for explaining the poll results.)
Plenty of people oppose offshoring as a general principle if they don’t have to think about the consequences. “Should American companies keep jobs here in the United States, or send them overseas to places like China and India?” Pretty easy answer, right, if you don’t have to do anything more than respond to a survey question.
And yet those same people are probably spending most of their money on goods that come in from those very same places. Plenty of Americans want jobs to stay here, in the abstract, but also want to be able to purchase DVD players for $30, and packets of 40 plastic coathangers for $1.99. They don’t like tech and warranty support from India, but they don’t want 40 bucks added to the price of their computer in order to keep the call centers in the United States.
But wait! If you act now, we’ll double your order. That’s 80 plastic coat hangers for $1.99. If you are unsatisfied, you can return them for a full refund. We’ll let you keep the Chinese laborer who made them as our gift.
ROTFLMAO what a load of wishful thinking.
People already understand the consequences of offshoring. They’re tired enough of it that politicians who support protectionism are winning elections over those who oppose it… whenever there is actually a clearly-presented choice between the two at the ballot box.
Nowadays you cannot lose by standing for protectionism. Nobody runs on a “I oppose protectionism” plank. Nobody. So your denials have no legs to stand on here.
Ummm, because they have no choice? That’s like saying most people commute to work instead of telecommuting. Again, you’re seriously grasping.
And Made-In-The-USA is gaining in popularity.
With arguments like this how is it that you can ask any American worker to take you seriously? I mean, really.
So, first you tell us that consumers have no choice in what they buy, and then you link to an article that gives multiple examples of stores that emphasize American-made products.
From your article:
So, which is it? Do Americans have a choice, or not? Do those 300,000 companies exist, or are they figments of the writer’s imagination?
No-one here is arguing that “Buy American” is necessarily a bad thing. If you want to spend your money on goods produced in the United States, go right ahead. I think there’s a decent argument to be made for supporting jobs at home, although, to be honest, i also have nothing against workers in China or India or Mexico being able to earn a living either. I have no more personal investment in a laborer working in Massachusetts or Mississippi than i do in a laborer working in Beijing or Mumbai or Juarez. The latter need to eat just as much as the former.
For me, a more important question than where the jobs are is the conditions under which the work is being undertaken. Admittedly, that’s often hard to know, especially when it comes to plants overseas. I’d prefer not to give my money to companies that pay sub-poverty wages and treat their workers like shit, and that applies whether the factory is here or overseas. The main advantage America has here is in having somewhat better workplace protections (OSHA, etc.) and consumer protections (FTC, FDA, etc.) than some other countries.
I think these types of protections are a good thing. The New York City Triangle Shirtwaist Fire was 100 years ago last Friday, and helped usher in some of these protections for workers. It is proper regulation and oversight that prevents things like this from happening.
But, getting back to your main argument: you can claim that people have no choice, but it siply isn’t true. The fact is that, for fairly good economic reasons, most people spend their money where it goes the furthest, and where it is most convenient. It’s not that people can’t buy American; for the most part, they choose not to.
Thats not to say there isn’t some movement going on but there has always been and always will be some fluidity to the job market. The areas where we are seeing entire vocations evaporate in the USA are vocations that are low skill outsourcable vocations.
We already pay a bunch of corporations to run prisons for our criminals. Perhaps we can send them to China (we would seriously save a TON of money).
[quote]
The H1B’s can come here and America’s unemployed can go there. Would that sound fair?{/quote]
I don’t know the solution to this problem but I do think that we have some people that have become almost unemployable at anything more than minimum wage who USED to make $40-$50/hour. When I graduated from college, engineers were making about $28,000, an assembly line worker with 5 years on the job was making a similar amount. This was probably a situation that could not last, and it didn’t. What we are seeing today is not the result of unions, its the result of globalization and unlike unions, you get rid of globalization.
The tax rate and medicare/medicaid has a far greater direct impact on our national debt.
I always thought that a weak currency meant more exports. The problem is when you have a trade deficit and your trading partner doesn’t let your currency get weak (this is the major issue we have with China’s trade practices, they’re propping up our currency and we’d like to see it get cheap so that the price of imports rise and the price of exports drop).
Offshoring is inevitable and it is manageable. We’ve been offshoring for decades. The problem right now IMHO is the PACE of offshoring.
When the heck were they ever a majority. They had theoretical results that would reliably manifest themselves in the real world if the real world operated on the same assumptions as their theoretical world.
80% think there is a problem, they don’t agree with your solutions, just the existence of a problem.
I thought your focus on the computer science (and especially the R&D) was because the counter argument to your concerns about offshoring was that we were offshoring the modern equivalent of the buggy whip making industry, jobs that we basically don’t want to keep anyways. You pointed out that we were offshoring jobs that were further and futher up the human capital and technology ladder. Not just that these jobs were being created overseas but that we were dismantling operations here and moving them overseas.
Its too bad we don’t have anything like that.
:p;):D:cool:
I know you’re just trying to make me feel better about posting pantsless, and it’s certainly sweet of you to do so. I’m just going to have to get my suit out of the closet and smarten myself up a bit if I’m going to be in front of the nation.
Though to be honest I should probably try to compose more intelligent posts, but that’s hard work. Less so than wearing a suit and posting crap.
Hey, prices wouldn’t necessarily be raised. We could institute, in addition to the punitive tariffs that Le Jackass wants, a price freeze. Prices wouldn’t go up! It worked under Nixon, didn’t it?
We should hire a bunch of asian Economics PhD students to argue with Jaq for us 
You know, I was in high school when that was going on. I do remember it.
Can you imagine if someone tried to impose price controls in this day and age? I almost feel like I remember a time when we were burning witches.