I agree that training might not be the best solution for all. Understand that I am not neccessarily talking about a 6 month course in network administration. While that may work for some, others might need a complete 4 years back in college.
As to government support for opening a business (counseling, business operations training, loans, etc.), I like this idea. The question is though, what business would you start? As I drive around my area in northern CA, I’ve noticed an awful lot of new small resturants, pizza stores, nail salons, $0.99 stores, vitamin stores, package/mail handling stores, produce stores, discount shoes, sports shops and so on. These are all small operations that may keep the owner employed but someone has to wonder exactly how much market share possibilty there is in the above occupations, how many people they could employ and what they might pay their employees? Businesses like these depend on people having free money to availal themselves of the product or service being offered. I don’t see stores like this as any kind of solution to the bigger picture problem.
I think one thing that can be done is for the government to bring like-minded and skilled people together and then perhaps give these groups of people first dibs on technology that the government is trying to license (such as here.
Well, we might start by not introducing a third party to pay for the education. another option might be to make sure that the training that is available is of the highest quality. See the “data” I mentioned above and below.
Well, it is based on your salary and the amount of time you worked. That is the more you make and the longer you made it, the more benifits you get. Also, there are extensions available to certain industries. Perhaps this could be applied more generally.
I hope you will still think it is foolish when people who also recieve income from other sources also want to avoid taxes on any unemployment.
For a start, we have to give up on the idea that displacements will be totally painless. If your jobs disapear, you should not be able to require the rest of us to “keep you in the manner to which you have become accustom” as it were.
They will put it into those or other investments. That’s exactly what I said. Now if Mr. Cuomo contends that these individuals will not themselves create new jobs, then I can probably agree with that. The individuals who create jobs are a minority. That means that a tax cut for any group will not result in a business created by each of the individuals who get a tax refund. However, if he contends that the money will not go toward the creation of new business, then he is silly. What do you think those investments do? I can buy that some will not directly create new jobs, but not in general.
And what exactly do you think a hedge fund is? Are they not simply a type of strategy for investing in the stock market? That is businesses?
Cool then we should have no trouble.
Uh oh, we may have a problem. I’m not sure I understand that this has been happening in a way that needs addressing. At least not the way you seem to be implying.
Wouldn’t the unemployment numbers have shown a steady increase over the last several decades if this were true? Or maybe is there something else going on?
I disagree. Many of the treaties signed in the last decades involved more than just the USA. And most of them provided some benifit to the US. There are pressures we can bring to bear, there are arguments to be made, and finally, there are retaliations available to us. We have a lot of influence.
Of course. We do not want anyone to do anything which benifits the USA only. That does not amount to trade. Trade is mutually benificial or it is fraud or theft.
Well, of course. But first we have to understand the size of such a problem. If unemployment is still only 5-6 percent, how big of a problem can it be?
Again, I ask, if this were true in the sense you seem to mean, wouldn’t our unemployment be much higher? Or at least wouldn’t it have shown steady growth over these last decades?
What else? You help him find a new job or retrain him to do another job. What else is there?
No, how did you get that. I’m not talking about a program to shout neener at unemployed people. That’s ridiculous.
Now you’ve got it. If people have good information as to the options available to them, they can make informed choices about what to do.
Well, I’m not so sure. Isn’t one of the biggest problems the dispare generated by the “What do I do now…” type of question? Solid information answering that question would go a long way to providing the unemployed with hope.
Right. What I am suggesting is that we give up on the notion that once through school is all that anyone will ever need. We need to adopt a culture of continued learning.
Uhm… Because we are demanding more services? What other reason could there be?
But they are. I suggested a payroll tax. That comes out of both pockets to some extent.
And obviously extra taxes on corporations will not lead to more corporations doing business over seas will it?
And if it is the wealthy they will take their wealth somewhere else.
I am not suggesting that we lower the taxes on rich people and raise them on others. I am only suggesting that a balanced approach is best.
Also, I am not suggesting that higher taxes are a good idea in any event. I’m simply trying to propose options to the “Tax the rich and pay the poor” sort of proposals which seem to accompany this kind of discussion. Personally, I think a better understanding of economics would do the most good.
So I read that post twice, js_africanus, and from what I can figure out you’re saying that
1 - free trade is giving an economic benefit right now but
2 - that economic benefit may not be distributed in a way that fairly compensates those who are affected, which is the political part of this question.
What does it mean to redistribute wealth and leave the market unfettered? I’m not sure I understand. If a third party invaded your island and began taking rats from you and distributing them to me, how would that not effect the market?
[QUOTE=iamme99]
Unemployment generally doesn’t cover much…
But only up to a point. The benefits only increase to a generally low maximum amount. As I stated, that generally isn’t enough to cover most people’s living expenses. A well-employed tech person might be making $5000-8000 monthly. Taking them down to $1500 monthly doesn’t seem like people would be living in the style they were accustomed to! And taking taxes out of unemployment only worsens the problem for the person and their family. In the case of unemployed people, I think an exception to taking this particular source of income makes good economic sense.
[QUOTE=iamme99]
Take people who have millions/billions invested in various funds, real estate, whatever. They get a windfall tax cut, giving them even more dollars. What do you think they do with that extra money?
If you have 5 million in a fund and you add 2 million more to that fund, that doesn’t generate anything more economically. It doesn’t take extra people (new hires) to manage the extra money in the fund. But wasn’t that the administrations rational for the tax cut? That it would generate new jobs? Since that isn’t working, I propose removing the tax cut FROM THE WEALTHY ONLY.
[QUOTE=iamme99]
Many are unable to find equal employment for a wide variety of reasons.
Yes, there is something else going on. The government is screwing with the unemployment numbers!. Large numbers of people are deemed too dissatisfied, too depressed, too fatalistic, too whatever and are no longer considered actively looking for work. These people are then summarily removed from the unemployment count. I have seen statements that the real unemployment rate in the USA, were everyone who would like to work counted, would be about 10-11%.
I posted the below on unemployment on another thread.
And what would that do? What do you do for someone who is past 40, has been working in their career for 20+ years, has a kid or two in college and has been displaced?
Great! So let’s get going. I’ve been in the IS technical arena for quite some time. But I don’t have a good feeling that this is a safe course for the future. Maybe a law degree would be a good adjunct. I’ll need living expense support through the new education curriculum (2 years). I’ll split the cost of education for this career change 50/50 with the government and my 50% will be at 0% interest. You OK with that?
[QUOTE=iamme99]
People have already paid for their education and training through college.
But that isn’t working. If you read the stories of people who have been displaced or are currently job hunting, many HAVE taken extra education courses, often on their own. It doesn’t matter BECAUSE the company can get the same skills at a lower cost somewhere else in the world. That is why taxes have to be applied to the companies to equalize the playing field.
Not if you make it economically expensive to do so through additional taxes. If corporations want to reside here and sell here, then they need to get religion real fast. They need to recognize that our economic contract can’t continue to work if their only focus is profits at any cost.
[QUOTE=iamme99]
The bottom line remains that out-of-work don’t pay taxes or consume much. Marginally employed people pay little or no taxes and also don’t consume much. […]I say someone’s going to pay the cost of maintaining the government and the services we have grown used to. If it isn’t the wealthy and the corporations, then it’s going to be the middle-American’s with jobs.
And that is what I am trying to do also - find a balance. IMO, the old rules and guidelines are not working and we fall deeper into a black hole if we continue on the same path. Middle America doesn’t have the means to pay more taxes. So corporations and the wealthy simply have to pay their fair share. Corporations have to accept their part and place in our society and realize that they have a certain social responsibility. And yes, it will cost them. Perhaps they will have to take some money from their overpaid executive compensation packages. Makes me so sad, sniff.
js_africanus: I agree with everything you said. I was just trying to simplify the problem by just considering the one side and treating the other as a black box. The other country is simply a big factory - you feed materials into one end, and goods come out the other. Losing your job to Autocad is no different than losing it to a foreigner. Both are economic units that reduce the cost of producing things, and therefore displace the old means of production. This is almost by definition an improvement in efficiency.
From this perspective, even if the other country subsidizes its workers or puts tariffs on your product, it just lowers the efficiency of your big factory. As long as it remains more efficient than domestic production, it’s still to your benefit to use it.
iamme99 said:
I don’t agree. Estimates for outsourced tech jobs range around 425,000. A LOT of draftsmen lost their jobs. And many of those kinds of jobs were lost very quickly. The rise of the laser printer decimated small print houses in the space of five years. In contrast, outsourcing happens gradually - it’s been happening for decades, and the U.S. IT industry is still the biggest in the world.
js_a: * […] if the market—because of real-world imperfections, bad luck, etc.—ends up distributing welfare in a manner that is morally or ethically objectionable, the way to solve the problem is to redistribute the wealth and then let the market do its thing. You will be getting the maximum amount of well-being possible with a distribution that is morally justified. *
Fine by me. I’ve been saying all along that while I don’t support outright protectionist measures or economic isolationism (except perhaps in limited and targeted ways to compensate for protectionism in other economies), I think there’s an important role for government intervention to moderate the excesses of unfettered capitalism’s boom-and-bust, winners-and-losers cycles. I’ve never been arguing “scrap the market”, rather “moderate the extreme social impacts of the market”. You and I have AFAICT nothing to argue about here.
However, what Sam and now pervert have been claiming is that even these governmental measures of “redistributing the wealth” constitute a dangerous interference with the workings of the market. You are now arguing with them, not me.
No. Not the way I understand it. The rational had much more to do with the way money is invested. It is invested in businesses. Either to grow existing ones or to create new ones. Even hedge fundes participate in this to some degree.
I was afraid something like this was behind your comments. Ok, let’s follow it. If over the last several decades, people have been falling off of the the employment and then off even the unemployed roles, where did they go? Wouldn’t we have significant numbers of starving indigents in the streets by now?
Well, no, if you look at the BLS site linked to in the article And here for compleness you’ll see “Unemployed persons. All persons who had no employment during the reference week, were available for work, except for temporary illness, and had made specific efforts to find employment some time during the 4 week-period ending with the reference week.” It says little about why they did not look for work in the last four weeks. And your cite makes the assumption that if they had not dropped out of the civilian labor force, the would still be unemployed. Perhaps they found another occupation. Your cite suggests they may have gone to school.
No, not particularly. Why should I pay 50% of such a thing? Has your job been outsourced by me?
Except I think it will equalize in a way you don’t intend.
And imposing vast new taxes on business will not be a very big incentive for them to stay here. hy do you think that new taxes on businesses will not accelerate the problem you are trying to address?
No, you are trying to find a new excuse to “stick it to the rich”.
Which of course means that coprorations need to pay more and the rest of us should not. This is your idea of balance.
Well, to be fair none of you ever give a good estimate for the level of market interference that would result from this redistribution you want. If you want to impose a .01% new tax that is one thing. If you want to impose a 40% new tax that is another all together.
I think it is unfair to say “even these governmental measures” implying that I am unsympathetic or unconcerned (or more probably) a libertarian/anarchist nut. If you wish to suggest how much wealth needs to be transfered and provide proof that it would not impact the economy in any large way, we can debate that. Otherwise, I am assuming that you mean to institute a system whereby the government can arbitrarily take any amount of wealth it deems necessary to support as many people it deems necessary in whatever lifestyle it deems necessary for as long as it deems necessary. Which system, BTW, I do not consider a small interference in the market.
Perhaps you can alter my perceptions of your proposals.
I didn’t say it was dangerous. I said it was less efficient. It will hurt economic growth. It will cause other job losses in the country as a cost of that drop in efficiency.
Whether that is a bad thing depends on what your ideals are. If you want to give up some growth and economic efficiency in exchange for more social justice, that’s fine. But at least discuss the issue from that basis, and be aware of the costs involved. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can just tweak the system and prevent those jobs from being outsourced without paying a pretty hefty price for the privilege.
pervert:Otherwise, I am assuming that you mean to institute a system whereby the government can arbitrarily take any amount of wealth it deems necessary to support as many people it deems necessary in whatever lifestyle it deems necessary for as long as it deems necessary.
This, of course, is the system we’ve currently got. There are no constitutional limits on the rates at which wealth or income may be taxed, nor on the amount of taxes that may be spent on social benefits, nor on the nature and extent of social benefits that the government may provide, nor on the number of people that may benefit from them.
So the job for us as a society is to agree where in this arbitrary system of potentially unlimited wealth redistribution we want the lines to be drawn. I agree that this is not an easy job.
SS:Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can just tweak the system and prevent those jobs from being outsourced without paying a pretty hefty price for the privilege.
Again, I don’t think I’m the person you mean to be addressing with this point; you are talking past what I’m talking about. I have said repeatedly that I don’t think outsourcing is the primary problem in our jobs situation and that I don’t think protectionist measures are the best way to deal with it.
Let me break some of this out so we can focus on one issue at a time.
Originally Posted by iamme99
It doesn’t take extra people (new hires) to manage the extra money in the fund. But wasn’t that the administrations rational for the tax cut?
Can you provide any cites that show that this money IS being deployed into business creation? Cuomo says it isn’t happening. Here’s an excerpt from the Matthews/Cuomo transcript link that I pointed to earlier. Cuomo is much better positioned than you or I to know what is going on with wealthy people, like himself. When he says they had all the money they needed to invest with, before the tax cut, I would tend to believe him. The money gained by the tax cut, for this class of people, was NOT required to help anyone in this class further invest in either new or existing companies. It just added some more zeros to their net worth. So it would make little or no difference if it was taken away and better applied somewhere else.
I don’t know what to say. It you truly read this link I provided before (Unemployment link) then it should be clear as to what is going on. Perhaps extracting a couple of examples will help:
If you are removed from the unemployment count, then the number of unemployed “officially” goes down. All administrations like the number of unemployed to be low. If you are young, you may have moved back in with mommy and daddy and don’t have to look for work. Or you may have decided to go back to school because you had looked for work for the last year or whatever and hadn’t found anything. Doesn’t mean that you wouldn’t like to be working if you could get a job.
If you are over 16 and work for even 1 hour in a week, you are counted as fully employed. Again, this helps reduce the unemployed number.
Unless you have some other relevant cites that contradict this information, I don’t see any profit in pursuing this pint further. Facts are facts. Unemployment numbers do not accurately represent everyone who is unemployed or not fully employed.
I’m not trying to turn this into class warfare. There are a lot of people out of work, who have lost their careers solely because corporations are searching for the lowest cost provider. There will be many more suffering this fate in the near future if outsourcing continues on at its present rate. Out-of-work or marginally employed people pay no or less taxes, which hurts the government and ultimately, everyone else. All out-of-work people need retraining opportunities and support during the retraining.
But WHO is going to pay for this support and training? Currently, the government only provides for retraining of manufacturing people who have been outsourced. If you work in IT, medical technology, a call-center, essentially anything considered white-collar and you lose your job to outsourcing, you get no help from the government.
Warren Buffet recently said that corporations do not pay enough tax. Cuomo and others say the wealthy already have enough money. It should be clear by now that the tax cuts already passed HAVE NOT generated the new jobs that were supposed to come from these massive tax cuts.
So if corporations pay more taxes and the tax cut that was allocated to the wealthy is rescinded, then the monies gained can be used to support retraining and/or business start-up loans to the white-collar unemployed. If this doesn’t happen, then we will have more and more unemployed, less revenue for the government, higher state taxes and higher deficits.
If you have better solutions, then please post what they are. OTOH, if you believe everything is hunky-dory and we don’t have any problems that need dealing with right now, then say so and let’s move on. We can both nitpick at each others sentences forever but it won’t help solve any of the problems.
Mr. Stone asks what’s the difference between draftsmen getting booted by Autocad and other workers getting booted by outsourcing.
There is one big difference at least. Autocad gave you just as good a product, if not better, for less time and money. It gave producers an absolute advantage over retaining the workers and doing the old way. The same thing for telephone switch board operators.
Chinese and Indians taking American jobs don’t give such an advantage; in fact, the quality will probably go down in the short term, nor will they provide the product faster. Still, these disadvantages are worth it to the producer because these people work for cheap.
So it is with any product: some people will buy Coke for 99c a 2 L bottle, and some people will buy Dipsy Cola for 49c a 2 L bottle. There is always a market for done worse-done cheaper.
Another difference between the situation of the draftsmen and today’s displaced workers is environmental. Yes, there have been some pretty shacky job markets since WWII (I’ve even enjoyed a few myself!), but there has been this sense since the bubble that nothing new was coming, and nothing good could happen. IT guy? Go to hell. Newly minted MBA? F*ck you. Fluent in Japanese–go back to Japan (I did). 15 years of industry experience? How’s 30k sound?
The nostrums have been spilled in advance–retraining, go back to school, blah cough blah. Been there, done that, and there is still f*ck all out there in the market for us. Add to that the hypercompetition of the era, in which you have to have a BA in order to barista at Starbuck’s, and you have one hell of a frustrated populace.
Outsourcing is just a match on tinder, that’s all.
What can the government do? Not much. I don’t know if it really should, either. Indians and Chinese are no less deserving of these jobs than anyone else. Sometimes when you’re fct you’re fct and that’s that.
No new industry is coming along. Nothing. Biotech? That’s not labor intensive, and it’s really just a new thing for the drug industry (oddly, quite depressed with everything else right now, at least as far as jobs are concerned) to chew on.
So what am I advocating here? Just plain talk about the situation, sans rose-tinted glasses. The US is in a horrible economic mess right now; it really is. The stock market is horrendously overvalued (again!), the currency is way over-valued, and we have a housing bubble. Oh yes, and mind-boggling personal debt. NO JOBS. Let’s, for now, call a fct situation a fct situation.
Boy, I’ve been called “The Voice of Doom” in real life, but I am officially handing the mike over to Aeschines.
As your in Japan, I’d like to suggest some good sake to wash that POV down with.
After all, its been 3 whole years since the IT bubble burst. No new great technology has come about in that vast amount of time. Nothing new will ever come along I’m sure. I see it now. My rose colored glasses have turned to grey and I bow to your ability to see into the future…
Would it be your position, pervert, that corporations are now paying their fair share of taxes? Because they aren’t. They’ve used legal loopholes to avoid existing taxes to such an extent that many pay no federal taxes at all. We should, of course, shut down these loopholes, but that would involve an honest Congress, and I have my doubts about that prospect.
