Let’s pretend that Americans are 80 times more productive that their Chinese counterpart.
Let’s also pretend that you understand labour resources.
If I needed my lawn mowed, the 80 to 1 ratio would suggest that I would need 80 Chinese workers to complete the job that 1 red blooded American could do in one day. That makes an American worker worth 80 times more than a Chinese worker.
The most basic economic consideration would then be, which is cheaper: that 1 American will want $15/hour, medical, dental, vacation, time off because his/her kid is home sick, etc. Round that up and say it would cost $130 for me to hire an American. If offshoring could get my lawn mowed for $100, I have $30 more to put into the economy, yes, it means 1 American is out of work, but keep this point in mind, it will be important later.
The second consideration is that if Americans are so productive, why would I want to waste that on mowing a lawn? As an example, Canada makes it very easy for medical doctors to immigrate, but then makes it extremely hard for them to get licensed. As a result, many are forced to work very low-end jobs to stay solvent, such as driving a taxi.
Under your logic, you’d say that was great, he has a job, and nothing, NOTHING, NOTHING is worse than being unemployed.
But the guy is trained as a doctor, he represents a valuable asset to the economy. We have lots of people that can drive taxis, but only a few that can perform heart bypass.
Under your system, you would rather have Americans with Masters degrees chained up in factories, assembling Bic Pens for minimum wage. To you that would mean success. 0% unemployment because the state has seen to it that everyone has a task.
Offshoring frees up valuable American workers so that they can be put to better use. Getting people off assembly lines meant that fewer people could drop out of highschool and get a nice stable low wage job. As a result, Americans have some of the highest literacy rates, and some of the highest secondary education rates. One follows the other. Flood your economy with low skill jobs and you’ll produce a nation of low skill labour.
Historically: software development, as it was new, was highly skilled. Few people were trained in it, and it was in high demand. Over the course of a generation the market got saturated with computer scientists capable of little more than cranking out low end code. What used to be high skill became mundane. Initially this meant that products requiring a lot of code were extremely expensive, software used to cost a lot considering how little it did.
Companies noticed that high cost and realized that the Ukraine was able to generate huge numbers of equally trained software engineers who demanded a fraction of the salary. So over the past few years a lot of low end coding has been sent to the Ukraine. This meant the elimination of a lot of US jobs, but it also meant the cost of coding has fallen.
So if we were to be myopic about this, we’d say of boo hoo, Americans lost their jobs. But pragmatically, it means fewer students are going to look at CS as the big money maker, and instead see it as the new secretarial pool. Those students will focus their efforts and energy on the next new thing. The Ukraine will continue to be a country full of code-monkies, while the US will grown and progress.
Or at least it would, except that you ensured every American is guaranteed low wage mindless employment. Students now have an incentive to drop out of highschool, get a 6 month code-diploma from the University of Phoenix, and spend the rest of their life generating code for some other country’s development.
So the question: do you want to maintain American productivity? If it’s 8-1 now, would you rather it be 12-1, or 1-8? Feel free to answer that with one of your moronic questions, like “uh, black night, would you like everyone to be unemployed ah yuck yuck.”
This statement once again shows how little you understand about business, economics, and labour costs. Why do I say that? As an insult? No, I say that because I spend most of my time negotiating with vendors to save money on production. Today I spent an hour trying to get the cost of plastic containers from 18 down to 15cents, that will save me thousands per month. Should I have wasted my time?
I also need to make sure my employees are working as effectively as they can. In order to stay solvent I need to minimize labour costs, otherwise my prices go up and I lose business to my competitor. If I lose business I don’t have enough money to pay my staff.
Make note here: My salary will remain very good whether I’m working at 600 units per day, or my new goal of 1600 units per day. But the latter means I’ll hire an additional 8 guys and 2 drivers.
Fuck with my costs and those guys are out on the street, is that what you want? Or do you want them employed? Make it harder for me and I’ll just as happily go back to producing 150 units per day and enjoy more free time with my wife.
If you are going to use this sentence in your posts, you need to actually apply what it means to the rest of YOUR threads.
You want a vibrent American market to sell to. So shove your bullshit ideology, uh, what’s the rule on that? How about you drop your bullshit ideology and do what’s best for all 320million Americans, including the 16million unemployed.
