Originally Posted by techs
1: Uhm, yeah. If a job is going to move, it kinda has to stay the same to provide the same good or service that the market demands.
You missed the point. the market is not the same. Jobs in the U.S. compete on very close terms. Environmental protection, worker safety, etc. To just say a job is a job no matter what country it is performed in is wrong. If that is your point then jobs will go to the country with not only the lowest wages but the worst environmental, safety, etc laws.
2: And we can do this without trade barriers. Penalize companies that outsource to take advantage of lax environmental protections. They either respect the same environmental protections they would stateside, or they pay fines.
Fine, call it what you want. Penalizing companies (i.e. forcing them to raise prices) on products that are producing without environmental safeguards etc is just a semantic difference from trade barriers(which I meant as anything other than than treating say China as the 51st and on a completely equal level)
3: I assume you mean workers union, and I don't believe access to one is a right, so your "we" is at least one man weaker. I imagine a quick poll would reveal it to be quite a bit smaller than that. And its kind of funny, because a monied middle class is kind of important to any positive (in my opinion) social development. Which is to say, as they make more money, they will have more power and demand more changes. Sort of a problem that can fix itself.
OK, you don't want the right to unionize treated as right. How about the right not to be slave labor? According to your point slave labor produced goods should compete equally. Or perhaps goods perfromed by desperate people in a lead factory where the survival expectancy is 5 years? As to a monied middle class demanding changes the last I looked China was a dictatorship.
4: Our manufacturing base doesn't have to get smaller, it just has to become more sophisticated. We can't expect to maintain a stranglehold on certain industries indefinitely, unless you like the idea of stagnating world economic process and keeping the craptasmic status quo. Competition breed innovation, innovation is progress, progress is good. Who cares if China takes automobiles, we just need to start building hovercraft. Analogy, of course, but you get the idea.
We produce goods at the most efficient rate in the world in terms of labor. However jobs are going to China were it is cheaper to have 100 people produce the same amount of goods we produce with 10 due to the wage difference.
Also, you suggest we build "new" products like Hovercraft? What about the other 99.9 percent of goods already in production. And by the way where do your really think the Hovercraft will be made? China!
5: You know, the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz didn't have a brain. He was a strawman too.
If you are saying that what your call "penalties" and I call trade barriers will not cause the dreaded "worldwide depression" then you are agreeing with me.
6: Only if we continue to focus on industries we can be outperformed in. You wish to preserve easy mediocrity, I want us to work for excellence.
Huh? We are not "outperformed" in almost any industry. We are losing jobs to people who will works for so much less than us. Plus dictatorial governments that don't care about their workers health. Plus where workers have no say in electing officials who will change this.
If you want us to work for "excellence" tell me the jobs that went to China because they are being produced there more "excellently" and not more cheaply.
7: Or Western military buildups forced them to spend a huge portion of their GDP on a counter military buildup that they could not sustain. Not to mention the Soviet economy was of the centralized control variety and just about the ultimate as far as trade protectionism goes. How again is emulating them in any respect effective?
I didn't say it would be effective to follow the Soviets. On the contrary I pointed out what fanatical devotion to an economic system that disregards reality can do to a country. Just like our fanatical devotion to the lowest possible cost of production no matter where and how it is done. And at what cost to America.
8: We are not spending a huge amount. The defense budget is still under $350 billion, as far as I know. That seems like a lot, but when the GDP is over $10,500 billion... well, you do the math. Wait, I'll do it for you. That works out to roughly 4% of the GDP going towards defense. The Soviet Union in 1989? 10%. Well, damn. That arguement didn't work too well.
I love this one. We are not spending too much? Only 350 billion. Basically 50 percent of our budget (not counting Social Security and other entitlements). And only roughly 4 percent of our GDP. Meanwhile europe spends less than half of that as a percentage of their gdp and China less than half the europeans. Since we spend so much more on defense it stands to reason we have less for infrastucture, education, research etc. Just he very things that can keep us "innovating". Just like what happened to the Soviets. They continued to spend money they needed for infrastructure etc on the military and eventually their economy collapsed.
But that is OK. Since we in America will build "hovercraft" while the rest of the world builds everything else.