"J. R. Carroll" wrote in message
om...

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message
...
"J. R. Carroll" wrote in message
. com...

"F. George McDuffee" wrote in message
...

This may have been true at the higher levels at one time but with
telecommuting service sector jobs are also rapidly disappearing.
For example many low to mid level accounting jobs such as tax
returns are now done overseas. Where the jobs cannot be done
externally H1B visas allow worker importation.

Perhaps, but half of my customers are in Europe and Asia. My feeling
is
that
the value you add is what customers are interested in. It goes right
to
their bottom line.

That's fine in your business, John. It's not so fine if you're making
injection moldings for consumer products or assembling car engines in
Detroit or Windsor.


Ed,
When I owned half of an injection molder we never lost a job we wanted to
Asia, not once. In fact, the first big tooling/molding package we nailed
down was something running in Malaysia. One project that was bid around
the
world was commercial binary syringe assemblies for tooth whitening gel.
The
quantities were 20 million units per month to start. You probably know the
company we did this for. If you have a Hot Springs Spa, 90 percent of the
molded parts are from my tools running in the United States. Carlsbad to
be
precise. I could go on here at some length as 100 million dollars per year
in molded product is a lot of product. That isn't my point.
In each and every case the costs of making product were lower when
customers
did business with us than if they made there purchase overseas. We were
shipping parts on several jobs to China as a matter of fact.

This is the important part - in no year between 1991 and 2002 did the
company's net after tax margin fall below 18 percent of gross revenues -
never, not once, period. It was almost embarrassing and we did not have a
single product of our own.
If Detroit or Windsor can't stay busy or if GM files it won't be because
they couldn't get the answer right. It will be because they kept asking
the
wrong damned question.

And are you talking about a solution for 10% of the market, or are you
claiming you have a general question and a general solution for it?

Because we can always make a positive anecdote of the virtues of 10%, if we
neglect the fact that an economy is all 100%, and that the consequences of
what happens to the other 90% eventually catches up with all of us.

Sooner or later, you have to answer the question of how you compete with 80
cents/hour wages, when technology and business expertise can be packaged
into shipping containers and sent to Bangalore or Shanghai just as easily as
to Cleveland, and that clever ideas, hard work, and insight are distributed
quite evenly around the world.

--
Ed Huntress