Then you should vote with your pocketbook.
Can I ask where your computer was made? You’re DVR and and your TV? How about your shoes-- US made?
Seriously, if there is a good way to force companies to keep jobs in the US, I’d like to hear it.
John Kerry had some good ideas on how to do this, you may recall.
Well, what is YOUR suggestion? That they get to keep their job for life? That they are entitled to make $15/hr regardless? Seriously…what is the alternative?
So, what you seem to be getting at here is that US corporations (the Evil Bastards™) should be forced to keep jobs here in the US, regardless of if they can make a profit (profit being evil after all), yes? That workers are entitled to their $15/hour for life…or until the evil company folds and goes out of business. Are companies allowed to go out of business in your scenario? Just curious.
In the real world things are never so black and white. Countries that don’t ‘allow’ their companies to outsource and instead do what you seem to be suggesting are attempting to protect their own market. France is probably a good example of this…though even they don’t (afaik) force their companies to never outsource. How is it working out for them do you suppose?
Here is the thing. Lets say that the US decides it won’t outsource manufacturing to any other country but instead force companies like GM to only build plants here in the good ole USA. Unless you can force other countries to do the same THEY will outsource to India or China or wherever…because cheap labor means you can cut costs to the consumers AND increase profits. What do you suppose the effect will be on, say, GM, if Toyota outsources but GM is forced to continue to pay high wages and high benefits? What will be the effect on consumers wrt price of the products? Do you suppose that GM will be able to continue to compete? What about all the other companies out there? Or does it not matter…should GM be driven under? That is one way to sock it to the Evil Bastards of big business…drive them out of the country or out of business! That will surely get them their just deserts…
-XT
My computer is five years old…I wasn’t paying attention to this issue then. I didn’t buy the dvd player or television in our house (we don’t have a DVR). My shoes are American made.
But what happens when nothing is made in the US anymore? What happens when the only businesses available for anyone to work in are services? Are we going to be a nation of fast food clerks and cleaning ladies?
I don’t know a good way to force companies to keep jobs here, except for revoking their corporate charters if they do more than 50% of their manufacturing overseas. A lot of people (including the politicians who benefit from the generosity of corporations and the officers thereof) forget that corporations only exist on the sufferance of the government. There are NO consequences for abandoning a generations-long relationship with this country or the regions in it now. It sucks.
Well, that is what the government is for, innat? I’m not saying cut social programs. It’s why we have a safety net. I would MUCH rather see that safety net expanded than to force companies to keep jobs here in the US at the detriment of those companies. I would MUCH rather see social type programs (my one caveat is: For gods sake make them work…but that is for another discussion) than to have folks who don’t have a clue about business or how the market work monkeying with that same market or business to try and right perceived social injustice or make the world a better place or something.
-XT
If nobody has a job then it doesn’t matter if GM makes an affordable car or not. If I’m making $15,000 a year, I’m not going to buy a new car unless it costs less than $6,000. That’s not going to happen anyway. If everyone’s making minimum wage at a KwikiMart job, nobody’s going to have the money to buy anything that any of those corporations are making for pennies on the dollar over in China.
Hey! I can think of a way that corporations can cut their costs enough to possibly keep their plants open! STOP PAYING OFFICERS 450 TIMES WHAT THE AVERAGE LINE WORKER’S MAKING! Stop treating corporate officers like they’re some kind of royalty and bring executive pay back into some kind of SANE ratio with peon wage. Stop rewarding executives with bonuses for devastating the corporation’s workforce with needless downsizing.
And yes, I think it’s very easy for corporations to tend to evil, because their primary purpose precludes doing anything that resembles any sort of morality. The purpose of a corporation, under current economic doctrine, is to maximize profits for the shareholders. It’s not to produce a product…that’s just the basic means by which it makes profit. It’s not to produce jobs…those are a necessary side effect. There’s no reason, beyond PR, for a corporation to bother with employee relations, or environmental concerns, or have any kind of loyalty to the community which has worked to make it successful for generation. Corporations have no conscience and no reason to want one. And they’re powerful. They have more money to throw around than anyone outside of possibly Bill Gates and Warren Buffett (thank god both of them are altruists). And they influence far too much of what we see and hear and who we actually get to vote on.
So yes, I am more than somewhat antagonistic to the corporation. In my mind, people are more important than companies.
Stop giving them tax cuts that are immediately invested in foreign economies would be a good start.
Forcing US companies to keep their hiring in-country would only benefit foreign companies that don’t have such qualms.
I recall his rhetoric, but not any actual ideas.
And how about non-US corporations? Import duties on their cheaper goods? How much is this going to cost?
There are consequences. Consumers like you can not buy their goods.
Fear Itself: The myth about tax credits is just that-- a myth. It was debunked by one of the cites like factcheck during the 2004 election. I’ll see if I can dig up the cite later. Gotta run right now.
OK, it was easier to find than I thought. I got some of the details wrong, but the bottom line is the so-called tax break has been around for decades, and most economists think it has very little to do with whether or not a company outsources jobs. So, go ahead and eliminate it, but it won’t make any difference. FactCheck Link.
Steven Landsburg makes a good argument that international trade is much the same as a new technology. There are, he says, two ways to make a car: one is to build one in Detroit, another is to grow it in Iowa. You grow a car by planting corn seeds, which then grow to produce corn. The corn is then placed on a barge and shipped to a machine Japan, and, as if by magic, a barge loaded with Hondas and Toyotas come back. The fact that there are people and companies in this “Japan” is irrelevant from the US’s point of view; the same benefits and costs accrue to Americans either way.
In this way, arguing for protectionism is essentially Ludditim. Just as the Luddites protested the destruction of their jobs by newfangled machinery, protectionists cry about the loss of American jobs without considering the benfits to consumers from having cheaper goods. Just as pretty much everyone agrees that technology leads to a higher (material) standard of living, all economists agree that free trade is good for the overall US economy. This is not an issue about which reasonable people can disagree - it is a fact. (I wrote a more detailed explanation in a post in an earlier thread; if someone wants, I can dig it up.)
Now, you can make a tenable argument for protectionism, but you have to know what you’re arguing. The only good case for protectionism is a normative statement that a loss of jobs by those workers threatened by free trade is more valuable than a larger gain by American consumers. And if you want to argue this, you’d better be willing to make the same argument against a new machine that threatens those same jobs.
And who might that be, XT? Every night I see Ph.D. economists, experts in the Dark Arts, giving mutually contradictory answers to The Problem. And not just some what disparate answers, but directly and entirely contradictory. (I frequently find that one set of answers is more appealing to my political persuasions, and the guys that’s wrong seems more aligned with yours.)
It would appear, then, that clear and empirical facts are not available due to mileage variations. Shall we trust the captains of industry, then, men of demonstrable and proven mettle, do we trust them to be objective and non-biased? Any caveats we might have? Might we be reasonably suspicious of a guy who made 3.5 Godzillabucks while his company went straight into the toilet?
Who, in your estimation knows “how the market works”? Frankly, I’m not entirely convinced that it does, outside of providing obscene amounts of money to persons no more deserving than you or I. (Giving you the benefit, I haven’t any doubt about my own just deserts, justice may be best served by you sleeping under a bridge and begging my indulgence, but lets assume not, for the sake of argument…)
Not to mention the jobs created by free trade. See the link in my last post for some of those details. It’s counter-intuitive, but outsourcing does create jobs. And remember when Bush did his little protectionist thing for steel workers? Well, the analysis was that the net effect was to destroy more jobs in other industries than were saved in the steel industry.
Corporations are run by some pretty savvy people, and they’re going to find a way around any half-measures taken. So, unless you willing to build a wall around the country and not let any goods in, then you’re fooling yourself if you think you have a solution to the problem-- if there even is a problem in the first place.
I was not talking about that tax credit/break. I was talking about tax cuts in general that are touted to create jobs in America. When multi-national companies receive tax cuts, there is no guarantee that money will be reinvested here to produce jobs. Why would a multi-national company with factories overseas spend the benefit from tax cuts here, where labor costs are higher?
OK, I read back over how this exchange had evolved, and it’s not entirely clear what specific issue you guys are arguing about, but since the general tenor of this thread has shifted to free trade, outsourcing and globalization, I’m going to assume that is what you’re talking about. In that case, it simply isn’t true that there is some “controversy” in the field of economics over the goodness or badness of free trade. The only controversy is along the lines of the one between evolution and intelligent design.
I’ve done this several times before for you, but if you’d like I will once again drag out the cite that the overwhelming view among economists is that free trade is beneficial. There is no controversy.
15 bucks an hour sounds like a good spot for minimum wage. Thanks for agreeing.
What will the various mailboxes in the Cayman Islands or The Bahamas think about this?
OK, so you’re going to double the minimum wage. How are you going to prevent the inevitable inflation following that, and what about the huge chunk of the middle class whose wages are not paid hourly who now find that their dollar buys half as much as it used to?
OK. I’d agree that it’s unclear how a tax cut to a corporation will translate into US jobs. It might and it might not. But the thing is… if our corporate tax code is out of sync with a good part of the rest of the world (and it is), then companies looking for tax breaks will just shop around to the country offering them the best deal-- and they’ll often find it outside the US. And if US companies don’t find it, non-US companies will. And unless you’re willing to tax the importation of goods from those companies to offset the imbalance, then you’ve lost. And that brings up back to the downward spiral of protectionism.
Raising the minimum wage is just like putting a price floor on bread - it creates a surplus of labor: i.e., unemployment. If workers currently don’t produce something justifying $15 of work currently, then under the LOUNE plan, they wouldn’t get employed at all. Welcome to your first attempt at meddling with the free market!
Seriously, I think we should have a policy that only people with at least a basic understanding of economics get to participate in these threads. Much more so than in any global warming thread, the ignorance on this topic is crippling.