On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 20:14:25 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

The US currently is the most productive manufacturing country in the world,
according to the World Bank. We have a tremendous growth rate in
productivity. There's no room there to open the gap, because the Chinese are
becoming more productive at a rate even faster than ours. And they're paying
their workers peanuts.

You're contradicting yourself- how can the US be the most productive
manufacturing country in the world if the Chinese are becoming more
productive at a rate even faster than ours?
Does that mean China will become more productive than the US, despite
having a 80 cent an hour peasant work force?
If so, why _are_ we paying US factory workers $25.63 an hour? It's
pretty obvious US manufacturing is not getting it's money worth.

You have to ask yourself why this is happening. If NAFTA and China trade
are
supposed to leave the high-end jobs in the US (they're even supposed to
*increase* the number of high-end manufacturing jobs in the US, according
to
their supporters), why have average manufacturing wages, adjusted for
inflation, declined by 7.6% in the US over the last 25 years or so?
There's
a pattern, and there are numbers, and they fly right in the face of the
free-trade doctrine.

Wages have declined because they were too high!

Says who? By what standard? The Chinese standard? Yes, they're high by the
Chinese standard. How far down are you willing to see wages go?

Ed, look at your own numbers. 80 cents an hour vs. $25.63 an hour for
what have to be similar jobs. How much value added does $24.83 buy?
I mean if a former rice farmer can work on assembly line screwing
together V8 engines for 80 cents an hour, what qualities does an
illiterate drunk US worker possess that makes him worth that extra
$24.83? Not to mention other bennies that push his true wages closer
to $50. How can you justify a $48.20 labor gap?

And when GM starts closing US plants and those poor, underpaid, UAW
workers start sucking at the welfare tit- are you ready for your taxes
to go up again?

Who will be left to pay them? Whose rates are you going to raise?

Yours, Ed. You'll still have a job writing editorials on how US unions
took the high road and didn't back down in front of those godless
commies.

-Carl