Whoa whoa whoa, let’s not be crazy here.
It’s equally true in Canada. Same problem, really; there isn’t much skilled labor available.
If you want to work, get a trade. The jobs are out there.
The notion that companies are hiring foreign workers on H-1B to save money is just flat out wrong. Just the process of obtaining an H-1B work visa costs around $12k, requires the employer to essentiallly put up a bond representing several months salary, and at the end of the visa period (three years maximum) has to be renewed at the same costs or they lose the investment in training and experience. The reason tech companies are hiring workers on H-1B visas isn’t cost; it is because there are too few qualified docmestic workers. A simple perusal of science and engineering graduates (more than half are foreign nationals) or talking with someone in the position as a hiring manager at a tech company will readily show this. In the case of companies who cannot hire foreign workers (e.g. defense, aerospace) finding suitably talented labor at reasonable salary is a progressively greater struggle.
Simplistic solutions to counteract bullshit problems is no way to conduct or advocate for employment policy. But it sure sounds great to talk about how all the foreigners taking our jobs away from hardworking Americans (they’re note) are the reason our economy is tanking (it isn’t).
Stranger
I just did a Google search and this site says that the average salary for H1B Visa holders is $86,164. So this is hardly “cheap immigrant labour”.
As the point of this thread is not to discuss whether or not those who are suffering under the economic conditions found in rural america should be obligated to do something about it themselves (there are other threads on that, and I feel I have made my position known on those), and rather, what we can do, as a society and government to bring the jobs to them, this is the only post that really addresses the issue. Thank you.
Your idea is horrible, and abhorrent, and, now that I think about it, exactly what they will do. It really is the only way to relocate jobs to the people, rather than relocating people to the jobs.
Rekindle the drug war, start locking up dissidents, short cut the justice system, we could get our incarcerated populous up to provide steady jobs to all those not so incarcerated.
Now that the general populous also has something to be gained from having a larger incarcerated population, it would then make sense to support more draconian measures, locking up more and more people, as that is the only economy that would be growing at that time.
Anybody else have a better idea? (Please)
Which creates a feedback loop by which at every iteration those who have the means and gumption to get ahead are the ones that leave, and you end up with big swaths of country and even cities depopulated save for those actually ***stuck ***there. Heck, it’s what happened to inner cities one lifetime ago with the move to suburbia.
Which is doubly necessary because said infrastructure, besides being needed so the old towns don’t simply fall apart, has to be in place for *whatever *form of economic activity can be hoped to be drawn to those locations.
At the limits:
Human- and horse-powered agriculture is inherently low population density. To feed any given populace you *must *spread them very thinly across the ground. In pre-industrial nations (both worldwide in the 1600s and still today in some far-flung corners of the Earth) this style of agriculture represents the vast majority of the total economy.
That reality is what set our current (or 1900-era) patterns of population in the US. And to a lesser degree Europe.
Contrast with:
A post-manufacturing services and IP economy powered by fossil fuels and some fraction of automation is the polar opposite. Other than for food growth, empty space is economically useless. The economic value of a human now increases with increasing population density; not decreases as it did in the Olden Dayes just 100ish years ago. The increase is not linear; it’s exponential.
In the not-too-distant future the scenario that would produce the greatest total human wealth would be one mega-city occupying substantially all of Europe or all of the US midsection. Surrounded by vast stretches of irrelevant land with no more inhabitants than has present day Siberia or Antarctica.
There isn’t the money, even if there was the social/political will, to set up the rural 20% of the populace as some kind of park rangers simply squatting out in the relative wilderness for a paycheck from the rest of us.
The eventual development of cost-effective non-farm production of food and meat will be the final straw that renders Ruralia pointless.
The plight of small town Iowa in 2075 will look just like the plight of a remote Indian reservation in 1925. Choosing to opt out of the dominant civilization is choosing to stagnate / revert your local economy to bare subsistence levels. With all the social pathologies appurtenant thereunto.
I applaud the OP’s identification of the problem and his sentiment to help. But he’s barking up the completely wrong solution tree. Just like how we buy up flooded riverfront towns and encourage people to move somewhere on higher ground, while refusing payments to let them rebuild at the riverfront, we should be buying up rural America and depopulating it as a deliberate program of internal resettlement. e.g. Buffalo Commons - Wikipedia
These people are displaced economic migrants. Just ones who haven’t started moving yet. It’s time to support them as such.
In Olden Tymes society changed slowly enough that each of us could mostly live our lives as our fathers told us to expect while we were seated on his knee. With just small incremental changes each of us could tell our kids almost the same story our Dad did and still be mostly right.
That era is OVER. Most of won’t live our 40s the way we expected to in our 20s. Our 60s certainly won’t be what our parents told us to expect as kidlets. Nor will whatever we tell our kids to expect turn out to be true. Our best bet is to tell them the only thing to expect is continuous accelerating change. Us as a society trying to support stasis is doomed to failure. Expensive failure.
People who are unable or unwilling to change at that pace will be just like the Native Americans or First Nations folks who choose to live on the reservations. Maybe society will throw you a scrap or two. Otherwise it’s subsistence hunting and fishing with maybe small-plot agriculture if you’re near flowing fresh water.
In what ways has the concept of “a trade” changed in the last few decades? It used to mean plumber/carpenter/etc for blue collar work and lawyer/accountant/etc for white collar work. What are the more recently created trades? Is programmer a trade?
Note that the jobs which are considered trades are often under the aegis of some kind of modern-day guild.
Or a Missouri meth lab : )
The reference for Indian reservations is apt. For Indians, they tend to deal with it with alcohol and retreating into nostalgia for Turtle Island or dancing in eagle headgear.
For whites, it’s meth/heroin/fentanyl and retreating into Know-Nothingism and evangelical Christianity.
For black Americans, it’s been any number of hard drugs, religion and messed up conceptions of masculinity.
It wouldn’t be the first time that people moved from the country to the city en masse. Every time there’s been significant increases in agricultural productivity, that’s resulted in migration from rural to urban areas which must have been more difficult in the past than today and yet it happened.
Except for food? Lol. That’s a big exception. And it misses the fact that “economically useless” land has trees, minerals, energy, etc. that are all necessary for production of tangible goods. Let’s see. Can a city survive without surrounding land to provide raw materials? No. Can the surrounding areas survive without the city? Yes.
One is necessary. One is not.
There are solutions to these economic displacements but neither Trump nor Clinton advocated for them.
Why on earth is anyone making a comparison of global and U.S. manufacturing now to back in WW2 or immediate post-war? In WW2 and for a good deal of the decade afterwards, a good portion of the world was still rebuilding its economic and industrial base while another good chunk of the world was in the process of decolonizing and then converting its economies from merely serving their colonial master’s needs.
So long as labor is cheaper overseas, labor protections overseas are weaker than the U.S./West, and environmental regulations overseas are either much weaker or non-existent, U.S. manufacturing in certain sectors is going to be at a severe competitive disadvantage to the point of not making economic sense to be located in the U.S. Trump knows this, given how many of his and his licensed products are made overseas.
Short of another world war that devastates much of the world to the exclusion of the U.S., we will never be as economically prosperous, fast growing, or dominant as we were then.
No kidding. I was pointing out that it was preposterous that the US today can’t mill a block of aluminum.
One of the criticisms of mass deportations is there aren’t enough agents to round up all the immigrants. Two birds, one stone.
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So the US government somehow forces Apple to make its products in the US.
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That increases the cost by about 10%.
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Samsung, Apple’s major competitor, keeps churning out their model in Korea at lower costs, now with a built-in price advantage.
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Apple sales drop worldwide.
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[del]Profit![/del]
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Apple goes under.
Fwiw, the component parts in an iPhone cost about $200.
Apple strategy is to avoid US tax.
That makes them smart! 
Let’s get back exactly to what the government can do. Manufacturers spend a significant amount of money on taxes, health care, unemployment compensation… Suppose you have universal health care funded by a value added tax. Suppose you have basic income and eliminate unemployment insurance. Suppose you quit funding education with property taxes (currently property taxes are about 36% of funding of local schools)…
Anyone have a systematic analysis of what can be done by these type actions?
Retrain and move is very easy to say. Little harder to do for some in real life. Consider a couple. Both work. One has a job with a pension and has put in 15 years. The other loses their job in a declining community. Oh, the one who lost their job should just leave their spouse and kids to follow work. The other will retire in a few years and come join you. Or both should just move so both can work and rest the number of years toward retirement, if they can get another job with the same benefits. The odds of both finding work in the same area with the one still having a job ring a replacement with comparable benefits in the same timeframe are not odds I would want to bet on. Moving works great for singles, or if the incomes between the two are very disparate and the higher income person lost their job moving can make sense. If the couple have similar incomes, moving becomes more difficult.
My suggestions probably won’t fly- they’ll be shouted down as :eek:Socialism:eek:, people very likely won’t be interested/will view it as an intrusion into their lives, and there is really no guarantee that it will be workable anyway.
Basically, we get people working on addressing the kinds of problems that are holding them back. Obesity is a major problem in America, no? Use government resources (out of a GOP administration? ha ha) to train people as physical trainers and nutritionists. Identify people who are in need of such services and subsidize them to receive such services. Get people fit and healthy, for their own good. Real simple, right? We just broadcast the message to rural America that they are too fat and don’t eat right, and that Uncle Sam is here to help. The lines to sign up will be around the block! /snerk
People are addicted to dangerous drugs more and more, or at least is seems that way, no? Heroin, oxy, meth, highly addictive devils that crash people’s lives right into the ground. So, Uncle Sam subsidizes the training of people who can work as educators of rural people, who themselves get subsidies to attend these classes to learn how to be drug counselors and generally run treatment facilities. Identify addicts and subsidize them to go through these treatment programs. All these formerly broken-down people will eventually be whole again, it will be just fantastic.
Have Uncle Sam subsidize the training of a wide variety of educators. English as a second language teachers? Maybe not so much, looks like immigrants are going to get the boot, but we’ll need people to do the booting, and that is at least one thing the GOP and Trump voters can agree on. But take it further, train educators to teach people to go into a variety of skilled jobs, starting with installing high-speed internet to low-density areas, get people online and connected. Some work as programmers, some get trained as mechanics. Some get trained to address the dilapidation you can observe all over the place in underserved areas. Some build homeless shelters and soup kitchens, some get trained to run them. Develop a greater emphasis on social skills training so that people can interact with each other more effectively and be more interconnected members of communities of mutual respecting citizens, people who really have a deep understanding of what the word “citizen” means. Rural people love stuff like that, almost as much as GOP government figures!
With the new supply of healthy, fit, well-adjusted sober people, they’ll all be chomping at the bit to improve their skillsets and cooperate with the bigger picture, making the necessary sacrifices and changes to their lives to meet a changing world halfway. Eventually, with enough “pump priming” from Uncle Sam, the aggregate of these programs will become self-sustaining. People will have jobs and money in their pockets, they will pay enough taxes to cover all the education and health services they need without having to tap the rich (or Uncle Sam’s credit card) for it, people will be productive and rural areas will shine once more.
More highly technical training will also be needed to keep America competitive with the rest of the world. Nanotech looks like it will be the next big thing, but we need talented people with the skills to pursue that. Teams of genetic engineers could work together to devise things like goats that sprout wings and fly, because just think about it, flying goats would be Awesome, we’d be the envy of the world for sure!
So, yeah. Maybe somebody with a less jaundiced eye can go over these kinds of ideas and find the optimism and workability in them.
Oh, and look at Spain and Portugal. The Spanish government trains prostitutes. And Portugal has legalized most (all?) drugs. The less dangerous drugs can amount to a whole new set of industries- see marijuana in Colorado, it’s not nearly as disruptive as meth or heroin, admit it. The Evangelicals don’t have to participate in these kinds of things, they just have to stay out of the way of progress and realize that people need jobs jobs jobs. I’m sure when it is explained to them, they’ll see the sense in it.
Pick one:
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You’re missing that whooshing sound.
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I can’t do satire.
Hell, pick both!
Well, that certainly sounds like something that Trump would say!
A good “sound bite” that has no basis in reality.