Erma1ina wrote in message ...
willshak wrote:
Erma1ina wrote:
[...]
"He closed some plants, and negotiated
with the labor unions to trim back wages and employment"
Is this the Democrat platform? Close plants, lay off workers, reduce wages?
Hmmm. ANOTHER "Dumbya-deep-thinker." LOL.
http://www.netstate.com/states/peop/people/pa_lai.htm
Another Excerpt [The point: Lee Iacocca knows how to lead and knows a
leader when he sees one. He sees one in John Kerry, not in George
"Dumbya".]:
I don't know WHY I got myself drug into this sorry debate but if you
think Kerry is some sort of Knight in Shining Armor, you are wrong.
If you think big business is in bed only with W., you're wrong. If
you think the outsourcing debacle will end with Kerry, you are wrong.
I apologize in advance to the groupi because I answered these silly
twits and, worse, because I attached the following as back up for what
I wrote:
------------------------------
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
by Rob Sanchez
October 10, 2004 - No. 1105
------------------------------
If the Presidential debates are any indication, we might as well
forget
about anything substantial being done on the outsourcing issue. Our
choice for president is between Bush who thinks that outsourcing is
good for America, and Kerry who thinks that opposing outsourcing would
be pandering.
You can read the entire transcript of the debate at this webpage:
http://www.debates.org/pages/trans2004c.html
There was practically no time devoted in the second debate to
outsourcing and they didn't even say the word "immigration".
BUSH: He's talking about his plan to keep jobs here.
You know he calls it an outsourcing to keep -- stop
outsourcing. Robert Rubin looked at his plan and
said it won't work. The best way to keep jobs here
in America is, one, have an energy plan.
GIBSON: Senator, I want to extend for a minute, you
talk about tax cuts to stop outsourcing. But when you
have IBM documents that I saw recently where you can
hire a programmer for $12 in China, $56 an hour here,
tax credits won't cut it.
KERRY: You can't stop all outsourcing, Charlie. I've
never promised that. I'm not going to, because that
would be pandering. You can't.
Which John Kerry should you believe - the John Kerry who wants to
limit
outsourcing or the John Kerry who thinks that stopping outsourcing is
pandering? As the old saying goes, actions speak louder than words.
Kerry's actions speak very large - in the late 1990's Kerry led a U.S.
trade mission (junket) to the People's Republic of China with the sole
purpose of outsourcing jobs from Boston Capital & Technology (BCT).
Kerry was wined and dined in Beijing as a tribute to his betrayal of
the workers in his state of Massachusetts. Go to this webpage to see a
picture of Kerry's China junket:
http://gogov.com/kerrychina.htm
This website has the same picture with some excellent commentary:
http://www.flashbunny.org/commentary...utsourced.html
Kerry's tax plan to limit outsourcing is a Weapon of Mass Deception
that will do nothing to stem the massive job losses in our nation. At
least Kerry's plan merited a rebuttal in the LA times - Bush's
lame-brained answer isn't worthy of discussion.
------------------------------------
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-f...bs8oct08.story
Kerry's Plan to Rein In Outsourcing Has Holes
By David Streitfeld
Times Staff Writer
October 8, 2004
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry cites the
shuttered steel plant in Massillon, Ohio, as a symbol of what's wrong
with the economy under President Bush.
Under current tax laws, Kerry has complained, the owners of factories
like Massillon Stainless get "special breaks" for outsourcing work.
Not
only were the jobs at the steel plant sent overseas, but so was the
equipment.
Kerry may well bring up outsourcing at tonight's second presidential
debate, especially if the national employment report for September,
set
to be released today, is weak.
Yet changing the tax code to keep companies from shipping work abroad
-- a centerpiece of Kerry's proposal to create 10 million jobs in the
U.S. -- may not do much to solve the problem.
Some economists note that getting a tax break is only one reason that
companies outsource, and rarely the most important. Others maintain
that the outsourcing of office work -- the big growth area of the
future -- will be hard to control.
And even with factories, there are cases that apparently wouldn't be
affected by the kind of change in the tax law that Kerry is talking
about. Among them: the Massillon steel plant.
That's where, as Kerry mentioned in his July speech accepting the
Democratic nomination, veteran worker Dave McCune "saw his job sent
overseas and the equipment in his factory literally unbolted, crated
up
and shipped thousands of miles away along with that job."
Yet here's what Kerry didn't say: When that happened in late 2002,
Massillon was owned by Jindal Stainless Ltd., the largest stainless
steel producer in India. And an Indian company closing an American
plant, cutting 100 jobs and sending its gear to China, would
presumably
fall outside the scope of the proposals Kerry is advocating.
"Traditional low-wage manufacturing jobs -- the backbone of so many
communities for so long -- are fleeing," said Douglas Shackelford, a
professor of taxation at the University of North Carolina. "Maybe we
can slow it down a tad" by altering the tax code or taking other
steps,
"but we're just talking about whether a factory closes in one year or
two."
Massillon, about 50 miles south of Cleveland, has outsourcing examples
to spare.
World Kitchen closed its Massillon plant in July, laying off 200
workers. The privately held Reston, Va., company said it would start
buying its Baker's Secret cookware from Asian suppliers instead of
manufacturing it.
"We weren't chasing a tax break," said Doug Arnold, World Kitchen's
vice president of human resources.
But many companies do pursue tax breaks. Most corporate tax advisors
would suggest that a firm in World Kitchen's position set up a
subsidiary in a low-tax haven that would purchase the cookware and
then
sell it to the American company. Under Kerry's plan, such a maneuver
would no longer be as attractive.
Kerry seized on the outsourcing issue during the winter primaries,
repeatedly referring to companies and executives who transferred jobs
overseas as "Benedict Arnolds."
This happened against a backdrop of weak job creation, highly unusual
so long after the end of a recession. The economy needs to create at
least 150,000 jobs a month just to keep pace with population
increases.
In August, employment rose by 144,000, which looked good only in
comparison with the 73,000 gain reported for July.
Faced with such sluggish job growth, Bush has a good chance of
becoming
the first president since Herbert Hoover to suffer a net decline in
jobs during his term. Economists' average expectations of 150,000 net
new jobs in September would not make enough of a dent to change that
undesirable distinction.
When Kerry announced his economic program at the end of March, he said
it would create 10 million jobs in four years. Critics said the memo
backing up this claim, by Harvard economics professor and Kerry
advisor
Lawrence Katz, never detailed how the policies would directly produce
the jobs.
The memo is no longer on Kerry's website, and the candidate now talks
more vaguely about "millions" of jobs in speeches.
Jason Furman, a Kerry economic advisor, said the campaign wasn't
backing off its claim of 10 million jobs. He added that the Katz memo
was dropped from the website by mistake.
Predicting job growth is easy politics but hard without a crystal
ball.
The global economy is an immensely complicated affair, and
unanticipated events -- terrorism, a sudden slowdown in new economic
heavyweight China, continued oil price rises -- could knock it for a
loop. A president also needs to have the economic recession-recovery
cycle in his favor.
Some industries, like steel, will be hard-pressed to ever return to
anything approaching their glory days. Massillon Stainless, for one,
supplied its shiny metal to a long list of American icons, including
the Empire State Building, World Trade Center towers and Chrysler
building. But under a succession of owners, employment declined from
1,200 people in 1976 to 750 in 1984 to 500 in 1999.
"You have to be realistic," said Alan Auerbach, a UC Berkeley
economics
professor who has advised the Kerry campaign.
"There are limits to what Bush could have done to create jobs, even if
he had adopted the best policies," Auerbach said. "It's fair to say
that. It's also fair to say he didn't try."
Bush inherited an economy that was slipping into recession even before
the 2001 terrorist attacks. His job-creation policy involved cutting
taxes as much and as quickly as possible.
In early 2003, for example, the White House Council of Economic
Advisors said speeding up the tax cuts would boost nonfarm employment
to about 137 million by late 2004. The cuts were duly enacted, but
employment is only 131.5 million -- 4 million lower than the council
was predicting even without the quicker cuts.
Kerry's plan certainly sounds straightforward and reasonable,
economists say.
"If a company is trying to choose between building a factory in
Michigan or Malaysia, our tax code actually encourages it to locate in
Asia," the candidate wrote in an article for the Wall Street Journal.
That's because of a long-established policy known as deferrals. A
factory in Michigan gets taxed at the standard U.S. corporate tax
rate.
A U.S. factory in Malaysia gets taxed by Malaysia, but not by the U.S.
until the profit enters the U.S.
"Changing the tax code is not going to solve the outsourcing problem,
but it will reduce it by removing an incentive. I don't think there
can
be any doubt about that," said Samuel Thompson, a tax expert at UCLA
who has just published "Citizen's Guide to U.S. Economic Growth and
the
Bush-Kerry Economic Debate," a book that examines the candidates'
proposals in depth.
Kerry says that U.S. firms setting up enterprises overseas will be
taxed at U.S. rates only if they're serving the U.S. market. This
would
be easy to enforce if a California firm is making shoes in China to
sell in California.
But what if a U.S. company hires an Indian outsourcing firm to run its
computer technology department from Bangalore? That's an expense for
the U.S. company, not something it will book as a taxable profit.
"Kerry's right in showing that tax policy does have the effect of
encouraging the export of manufacturing jobs, but I'm not sure that
extrapolates to the services industry -- which is where most
outsourcing is happening," said Marc Hebert, executive vice president
of Sierra Atlantic, a Silicon Valley software firm that does
development work in India.
With a projected $12 billion in revenue raised by eliminating tax
deferrals, Kerry would give all companies a small tax break. Cutting
the federal corporate tax rate from 35% to 33.25%, he says, would
reward companies loyal to America.
Even business groups that don't like Kerry's proposal on deferrals,
such as the National Assn. of Manufacturers, like this one. "Reduced
taxes encourages job creation," said Dorothy Coleman, the
association's
tax policy vice president.
Others are less sure.
"Corporations have so many ways to save on taxes now," said Duke
University finance professor John Graham, whose research has shown
that
many companies pay less than 35%, if they pay anything at all. "I
don't
think that's the direction we need to go in terms of helping the
economy."
But it's a direction the nation is likely to be going in any case. On
Thursday night the House passed a $140-billion business tax overhaul
that effectively reduces the corporate tax rate on manufacturing to
32%. The Senate is expected to follow suit as early as today.
Regardless of whether changing multinational taxation has an effect on
employment, a number of economists think it's a fine idea from a
revenue point of view. It has been proposed before but hasn't passed
Congress amid resistance from corporate interests, which say it would
undermine competitiveness.
"This is an old idea, and to finally pass it would be wonderful," said
George Mundstock, a law professor at the University of Miami who
worked
in the Treasury Department's Office of Tax Legislative Counsel during
the Reagan administration. "It would raise a lot of money and not hurt
the country's competitiveness."
The overseas profits reported by multinationals have been soaring --
up
more than 50% since 2001 -- without a commensurate rise in
income-producing activities, according to an analysis in the journal
Tax Notes.
Moreover, companies appear to be funneling as much as $75 billion of
domestic profits to such low-tax havens as Bermuda in "an aggressive
use -- or abuse -- of the nation's tax laws," former Treasury
economist
Martin Sullivan wrote.
"The U.S. system of taxing international income is breaking down,"
Sullivan said, concluding that the U.S. Treasury was losing at least
$10 billion and perhaps as much as $20 billion a year.
Part of Kerry's plan involves getting that money back to the U.S.,
where it can be invested domestically. To achieve that goal, he would
declare a one-year tax holiday where the funds would be subject to a
10% tax rate. This, too, would be eclipsed by Congress' pending tax
overhaul bill, which declares a holiday rate of 5%.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
www.ZaZona.com
Support this Newsletter and ZaZona.com by donating:
www.zazona.com/Donations.htm
To Subscribe, Unsubscribe or to view the Archive go to:
http://www.zazona.com/shameh1b/JobDestructionNews.htm
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -