DIYbanter - View Single Post - How Real Americans Can Compete with "Hard Workin" Day Labor

Leif Erikson

wrote:
Leif Erikson wrote:
Brent P wrote:
In article . com, Leif Erikson wrote:
Brent P wrote:
In article om, wrote:

Of course there is another aspect of this that you completely overlook.
And that is the great benefit of people being able to buy that car for
$7000. All the folks who complain about jobs lost to lower cost
labor completely ignore the fact that everyone is also receiving a huge
positive benefit from this. This is especially true of lower income
families. If they had to pay 2X for everything they buy at Walmart and
everywhere else, it's not clear that they would be any better off.
Lower income people in the USA cannot compete with near slave wages. It
cuts them out of the job market.
There is less than 5% unemployment. No one is being cut out of any job
market.
I take it you are totally unfamiliar with how unemployment rate is
calculated. The persons of whom I speak don't get counted in the
unemployment rate.
I'm quite familiar with how it is calculated. The method of
calculating it hasn't changed much for a long time. Lots of people
don't get counted in it, but they weren't counted before, either.

This is a common canard - in plainer English, bull**** - of whining
economics-illiterates: that the "real" unemployment rate is much
higher than what is reported. It simply isn't true. Those people who
are excluded from the official definition of the workforce are properly
excluded. If you're not seeking work and you're not working, you're
not counted - and you *shouldn't* be counted. But dopes like you want
to pretend there are some tens of millions of people who have dropped
out of the workforce due to being discouraged, etc., and there simply
is no valid basis for your belief. The only basis for it is your
class-consciousness and your overweening negativity. Your ideology
demands that you make these absurd, outlandish claims, even though
there isn't a shred of theory *or* fact to back them up.

Leif, this Brent guy is absolutely amazing. All this started when I
simply pointed out that cheap imports are not all bad and that you have
to look at the positive side of the ledger too, one of which is people
can buy goods for less money. And I pointed out that this is a good
thing for everyone, especially low income families. Tthis is so
elementary, and obvious, it's incredible anyone, even those who haven't
taken an economics course, would attempt to argue it.

On balance, trade is good for consumers, but there are
some who are worse off if their wages decrease
significantly, or even disappear due to the
disappearance of their jobs. Brent appears to be
adopting a neo-mercantilist position, but from a
populist direction.

The thing to keep in mind is that patterns of "trade"
can make some people better off and others worse off
even within a country the size of the U.S. The
textiles industry in the U.S., before it all but
disappeared due to imports from Asia, first shifted
from the northeast to the south. People in the
northeast who worked in the textiles industry were
thrown out of work, and people in the south found new
and well-paying employment...for a while. More
recently, as real estate in the San Francisco - San
Jose area skyrocketed, software companies still located
there began shifting their customer support call
centers from the Bay Area to Arizona and Texas.

Brent wants to try to camouflage his ignorant
opposition to trade under some guise of "fairness",
e.g. comparable worker protection and environmental
regulations, but even if China and the U.S. had
identical regulations in those areas, China still would
be able to manufacture just about everything cheaper
than we can.

Equally amazing is his continual refusal to acknowledge that you need
to look at economic numbers relative to others that represent the size
of the economy and the ability to pay.

This really does reflect his economics illiteracy. It
really doesn't matter what the absolute level of debt
is; what matters is debt relative to income. Someone
earning $100,000 a year can almost certainly obtain a
mortgage of $300,000; someone earning $20,000 probably
cannot obtain a mortgage of $100,000.

I still don;t know what debt
level he thinks should be the reference point. Sounds like maybe
whatever it was in 1776 and it should only go down from there. As I
tried to point out to him before, if you look at govt debt, per capita
private debt, etc, a country like Germany that is advanced is going to
have a hell of a lot more than say Sudan or Haiti, because it goes hand
in hand with economic progress and a rising std of living. But
according to him, it's a sign of impending doom.

Also, good to see someone else can spot the clueless STRAWMAN defense.
Most times I ask a simple question, his answer is STRAWMAN! It's
quite laughable.

He doesn't know what the term means.