"Carl Byrns" wrote in message
...
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 14:08:22 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Carl Byrns" wrote in message


Wages have declined because they were too high!
Ed, I worked in an all-union car parts factory for 18 months. The
waste of time and talent was incredible- a janitor makes as much as a
skilled machinist, despite the fact the janitor contributes absolutely
f*cking nothing to the output of the factory.
Only a $50 dollar an hour electrician can screw in a light bulb- if
anyone else does, the union will file a grievance, may stop work in
the plant for a day.

I would be curious as to what year this happened. I started working in car
plants around 1986 or so, as a construction worker for contractors doing
work in the various plants, not as a plant employee. So I've had a chance to
observe the UAW in action quite a bit and in the time since the mid 80's
I've never been in a plant (not only UAW car plants but also tire/rubber,
food, paper, chemical, powerhouses, ect.) where plant employees had to get
an electrician to do a light bulb or plug in a welding machine or that type
of thing. I have heard a lot of stories of the days when those things were
done, from old timers. Universally, in my experience, the old timers speak
of those days as a bad thing. Most in plant unions these days allow for wide
latitude in doing small tasks outside ones trade.
I'm not exonerating the UAW as I've witnessed many things in their world
that I couldn't condone or tolerate. I do put them a (large) step (or three)
ahead of the teachers union or the public employees unions.
And I put them many, many steps behind the building trades unions which have
for the most part had big changes in leadership and outlook in the last 5
to 10 years. Long gone is the attitude that it is the worker vs. the
contractor, the building trades hand is constantly hammered with the fact
that he must be better trained and produce more than his lower paid non
union counterpart for the contractors to survive and thrive. A few years ago
this was a minority stance, now it is recognized as the only stance that
will allow them to survive. Some building trade unions came to this before
others, and some are just now realizing it, but it is about universal now.
Anyway, what year did you work in the plant, and which one was it?

JTMcC.

In article , Carl Byrns says...

If the labor rate in China really is 80 cents an hour, then it's game
over, ...

I think that's what Ed's been saying all along. If they tinker
the valuation of china's currency, it might be 1.33 or so.

Game over? Ed?

Jim

==================================================
please reply to:
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==================================================

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 08:09:27 +0000 (UTC), DejaVU
wrote something
.......and in reply I say!:

WOT!? Unions in a Communist country?! What next?

the answer is simple and clear gentlemen, we have to get over to
china and start labour unions there, pronto. yes indeed, a
subversive campaign to educate the chinese workers in having and
needing unions to up their wages so they can live like Americans.
production costs will skyrocket and th erest of us will be ok....

Hey! I got my job back! Now. What's for dinner....?

hmmmm...The US accounts for 30% (?? maybe it's only 20%, ot does not
matter) of the world's resource consumption, with about 5% of the
population. Imagine something like 20% of the population doing the
same.

If you get in there and raise the standard of living to anything lke
the US (and Oz!) standard, along with the resource consumption that
this causes, you get your job back and, for a short while, enough
resources. If you _don't get in there and do it, then it will take a
little longer for the resource problem to bite, and you won't have
your job....
************************************************** ****************************************
Whenever you have to prove to yourself that you are
not something, you probably are.

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music
Please remove ns from my header address to reply via email
!!
")
_/ )
( )
_//- \__/

On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 21:30:12 GMT, Carl Byrns
wrote something
.......and in reply I say!:

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?

No he's not. Something 1 foot tall, growing at a foot per minute, is
faster growing than something ten feet tall, growing at 1 inch per
minute.

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 are asking US workers to work at $0.80/hour? These days, that's
all that counts? hmmmm..yes, mit probably does. You expect Chinese
workers to keep that up when they see the money rolling in? They live
under an almost totalitarian state, and will have a hard time fighting
it. Do you want a totalitarian state in the US?

Don't forget humanititarian behaviour in all of this Carl.
************************************************** ****************************************
Whenever you have to prove to yourself that you are
not something, you probably are.

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music
Please remove ns from my header address to reply via email
!!
")
_/ )
( )
_//- \__/

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 15:42:03 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:

Indeed, there was a time when jingoism overrode good sense. But
the purpose of a corporation is to earn value for its shareholders.
Eventually it has to do that, or it will cease to exist, its shareholders
will have lost their investments, its workers will be unemployed, and
who benefits from that?

Gary

The purpose of a government is to protect its citizens. Eventually it
has to do that, or it will cease to exist, its citizens will have lost
their investments, the leaders will be terminated and who benefits
from that?

Ed Patterson

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:31:13 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
.. .
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 20:14:25 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
The US economy since WWII has been built on an
underworked, overpaid middle class. May they rise again.

The reason for that was that at the end of WWII the US was the only
major industrialized nation left with an intact infrastructure. The rest
of
the world was either smashed flat, or was made up of remnants of a
colonial infrastructure which held them to peasant level. So the US
could allocate resources profligately without enduring any negative
consequences.

I'm real curious about why you think that should have led to such a big
social and economic change in the US. What's your rationale? With numbers,
please. No fuzzball theories. g

I just told you why. The US had no effective economic competition
at the end of WWII. US companies could sell everything they could
make. They didn't have to care much about costs or quality. If the
unions wanted more money, fine, they gave it to them to keep the
wheels turning and the profits rolling in. The US was top of the heap,
the men in the grey flannel suits had the world by the tail and could
do no wrong. Coca Colonialism was in full swing, and there was
little the rest of the world could do about it.

The Red Menace also fueled the fire. The taxpayer would fork over
inordinate amounts of money to defend against it, and government
borrowed even more. Huge industries, which would have otherwise
withered at the end of the war, fed off that paranoia and bellied up
to the federal trough to feed. All that money circulated through the
economy, driving it even further and faster.

I'll supply you with a few illustrative numbers since you asked.

Numbers: The US GNP was $70 billion in 1939, but rose to $174
billion by 1948. That was fueled mostly by federal spending and
federal borrowing for the war effort. US budget, $43 billion in 1940,
climbed to $98 billion by 1945. Also rationing ended in 1948 and
pent up consumer demand was unleased. The GNP shot up to
$400 billion by 1952.

But realize that numbers are only a part of economics. Psychology
plays at least as large a part in economic behavior as the numbers.

What we had post-war was a classic demand pull situation. Demand
was so large it could not be satisfied, even by factories running 3 shifts.
That changed the psychology of the market from the pre-war depression
era maliase to a go for broke optimism which caused people to spend
and spend and spend, borrow, borrow, and borrow, then spend, spend,
spend some more.

But of course it couldn't last. Eventually all those 20 year bonds
started maturing, commercial loans started coming due, etc, and
the government's response was to run the printing presses night
and day, generating a roaring inflation which reached double digits
in the 1970s.

Also, the rest of the world rebuilt. US businesses no longer faced
meager competition. People who had suffered the brunt of war and
were hungrier than those in the US were willing to work harder for
less money, and they had brand new state of the art plants to do it
in (often built with US aid money). Finally, even previously peasant
economies began to industrialize in earnest, and thus we have the
Asian Tigers, China, and coming soon, India.

The US was still top of the heap, but by a much smaller margin,
and its businesses started to have to be more efficient to compete
for a piece of the action, which means increased productivity, which
means reduced employment for a given level of output.

Today the world is a much more competitive place than it was in
Eisenhower America. Demand pull is no longer the driver it was in
the 50s and 60s. People and businesses are starting to realize that
unlimited growth won't continue to pull the economy. Debt service
now takes a huge chunk of the federal budget, and total debt,
government, commercial, and consumer, has soared to levels
where there is no realistic hope that it can ever be paid off.

People and companies are learning that they have to scratch
harder for the dollars that are out there, because others in the
world are willing, and now able, to do so too.

Gary

The official minimum wage in China is 31 cents/hour. In the interior,
footwear and textile workers often are paid 17 cents/hour. In the coastal
cities, the "illegal immigrants" (those are the rural peasants who moved to
the cities without permission; the number is well up in the millions) also
make less than 31 cents/hour.

I build die cast dies for both China and Mexico. The full burden rate(labor
+overhead)at the Mexico die caster is $3.48 per hour,the China die caster is
$1.42 U.S. dollarsThe mexcio die caster is screaming over loss of work to
China They are also seeing cast and trim type die casting coming back to
the states due to cost The work they can keep has a lot of vlue added work done
in order to get to the $3.48 figure Ray Mueller

Their standard of living *is* lower than ours because their government's
socialist policies (socialized medicine, nationalized broadcasting,
nationalized

BULL**** Ray Mueller

Canadian dollar is only worth 68 cents. That's not a government pegged
number, it is what the free market determines is the relative purchasing
power of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar.

AND BULL**** AGAIN Ray Mueller

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 22:59:44 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Carl Byrns" wrote in message
.. .

The official minimum wage in China is 31 cents/hour. In the interior,
footwear and textile workers often are paid 17 cents/hour. In the coastal
cities, the "illegal immigrants" (those are the rural peasants who moved to
the cities without permission; the number is well up in the millions) also
make less than 31 cents/hour.

The 80 cents/hour figure comes from a report of what moldmakers are paid in
coastal cities. Engineers often make $1/hr or more, sometimes more than $2.
An engineering director in a substantial manufacturing company may make
$10,000/year. Roughly half of the people in China are rural peasants, and
they make almost nothing per hour. They live in a classical peasant culture,
which is to say, it is nothing like living in true poverty in the US.
Chinese peasants have a life.

No, the game isn't over, unless you think you have to sacrifice yourself on
the pyre of "free" trade ideology. It pays to remember what Mickey Kantor, a
former US Trade Representative (that's the head of our Trade Office, Dept.
of Commerce) said about free trade. He said there is no such thing.

How are you going to overcome such a huge difference in wages?
Build a wall _around_ China?
If the US decides to restrict trade with China, so what?
Will every other market instantly cease to exist? Of course not.
Canada, Mexico, and Europe won't stop buying Chinese, will they?

As far as free trade goes, you cannot find an example where a
protected market flourished. Doesn't happen. Can't happen.
I can find some outstanding examples where a protected market failed
in a major way. The best would be the former Soviet Union with Brazil
a close second. Or Cuba, which was going to be a gross exporter by
1962, IIRC.

Trade barriers are a slow, certain death.

Don't forget it. And then analyze our policies with a critical and
non-ideological eye, questioning every presumption. That's the only way
we'll figure a way to deal with it.

Ed, the only thing that sells is price. Bang for the buck. Bottom
line.

That's not a glib statement- there are many on this NG who realize
that one $200 US built power tool is worth more than three $49.95
Chinese ones.

On the flip side of that, there are many on this NG who would buy one
$49.95 Chinese tool if they knew that it would most likely only be
used once or twice, or was going to used where it would be damaged.
Dropping a HF belt sander in the lake doesn't hurt as bad as dropping
a Milwaukee. That's just plain sense.

The only way for the US to lower price is to contain labor costs and
increase quality _and_ output. That ain't gonna happen with organized
labor in the driver's seat. We've both seen by example US unionized
workers close a plant rather than accept a no-pay raise contract. Just
like lemmings jumping off a cliff.

-Carl

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 23:06:20 GMT, "JTMcC"
wrote:


"Carl Byrns" wrote in message
.. .
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 14:08:22 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:

"Carl Byrns" wrote in message


Wages have declined because they were too high!
Ed, I worked in an all-union car parts factory for 18 months. The
waste of time and talent was incredible- a janitor makes as much as a
skilled machinist, despite the fact the janitor contributes absolutely
f*cking nothing to the output of the factory.
Only a $50 dollar an hour electrician can screw in a light bulb- if
anyone else does, the union will file a grievance, may stop work in
the plant for a day.

I would be curious as to what year this happened. I started working in car
plants around 1986 or so, as a construction worker for contractors doing
work in the various plants, not as a plant employee. So I've had a chance to
observe the UAW in action quite a bit and in the time since the mid 80's
I've never been in a plant (not only UAW car plants but also tire/rubber,
food, paper, chemical, powerhouses, ect.) where plant employees had to get
an electrician to do a light bulb or plug in a welding machine or that type
of thing.

True story:
I worked in a section of the plant where there are some truly huge
power-lifted garage doors. On one cold (below zero) day, one the door
motors popped a circuit breaker. Of course, the door was open. Being
new, I walked over to the electric panel and was about to reset the
breaker when one of the other guys knocked my hand away. He said that
we had to call an electrician. We did so, and then everyone (about 8
guys) went where it was warm and waited for two hours for a sparky to
show up and flip the breaker.

You probably haven't ever worked in a convention center- the
electricians charge (no pun intended) anywhere from $40 to $100 to
plug in an extension cord or appliance like a computer.
This rule seems to be kind of flexible. My employer spends about 40
grand at one yearly trade show (taking up about quarter of the floor
space) and the sparkies don't say **** about how many outlets we use.
The single booth vendors aren't so lucky.

And I put them many, many steps behind the building trades unions which have
for the most part had big changes in leadership and outlook in the last 5
to 10 years. Long gone is the attitude that it is the worker vs. the
contractor, the building trades hand is constantly hammered with the fact
that he must be better trained and produce more than his lower paid non
union counterpart for the contractors to survive and thrive. A few years ago
this was a minority stance, now it is recognized as the only stance that
will allow them to survive. Some building trade unions came to this before
others, and some are just now realizing it, but it is about universal now.

Smart thinking.

Anyway, what year did you work in the plant, and which one was it?

1989 to 1991 and I won't name the plant because I know some folks who
work there and things haven't changed at all.

In fact, their biggest customer- a US car company- dropped them and
started importing from Europe and Japan. The layoffs started the next
day.

-Carl

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 21:00:05 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:31:13 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
. ..
On Sun, 12 Oct 2003 20:14:25 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
The US economy since WWII has been built on an
underworked, overpaid middle class. May they rise again.

The reason for that was that at the end of WWII the US was the only
major industrialized nation left with an intact infrastructure. The rest
of
the world was either smashed flat, or was made up of remnants of a
colonial infrastructure which held them to peasant level. So the US
could allocate resources profligately without enduring any negative
consequences.

I'm real curious about why you think that should have led to such a big
social and economic change in the US. What's your rationale? With numbers,
please. No fuzzball theories. g

I just told you why. The US had no effective economic competition
at the end of WWII. US companies could sell everything they could
make. They didn't have to care much about costs or quality. If the
unions wanted more money, fine, they gave it to them to keep the
wheels turning and the profits rolling in. The US was top of the heap,
the men in the grey flannel suits had the world by the tail and could
do no wrong. Coca Colonialism was in full swing, and there was
little the rest of the world could do about it.

The Red Menace also fueled the fire. The taxpayer would fork over
inordinate amounts of money to defend against it, and government
borrowed even more. Huge industries, which would have otherwise
withered at the end of the war, fed off that paranoia and bellied up
to the federal trough to feed. All that money circulated through the
economy, driving it even further and faster.

I liked to add the following:
Not only did all of the above conditions exist, but the US had at that
point a state-of-the-art manufacturing base and transportation system
(railroads) that had been both funded by war bucks and been brought to
a high rate of production by war demands.

None of this is fuzzball theory-the difference in ton-miles any given
railroad posted pre and post war is staggering, but the example most
often given is the Pennsylvania Rail Road alone moved as much material
in 1942 as every US road _combined_ did in 1939.

-Carl

In article , Carl Byrns says...

Ed, the only thing that sells is price. Bang for the buck. Bottom
line.

Umm, but who's gonna be buying all this stuff, if
wages and employment is down? My guess is that
the manufacturers are betting on a given US market
for goods, and that market is going to start
shrinking.

Jim

==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================

"Carl Byrns" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 23:06:20 GMT, "

True story:
I worked in a section of the plant where there are some truly huge
power-lifted garage doors. On one cold (below zero) day, one the door
motors popped a circuit breaker. Of course, the door was open. Being
new, I walked over to the electric panel and was about to reset the
breaker when one of the other guys knocked my hand away. He said that
we had to call an electrician. We did so, and then everyone (about 8
guys) went where it was warm and waited for two hours for a sparky to
show up and flip the breaker.

There is a big difference between this story, and your first example of a
plant being shut down all day because someone changed a light bulb. And
understandable too, when you start allowing any employee access to
electrical panels (even for something as simple as resetting a breaker) you
are treading on dangerous ground with not the union but with your workmans
comp carrier, the company safety policy and probably OSHA as well. Let an
employee open an electrical panel, and you better be paying the electricians
WC rate on that employee and he had better have been trained on the
precautions and hazards of doing so cause if some non electrician dummy
sticks his hand in there and gets a big zap, the employer is guilty of WC
fraud. And probably an OSHA violation. And, the claim won't be paid. And the
employee can sue. Sometimes there are reasons for seemingly stupid rules and
policies that employees don't understand. A bit off the topic but true.

JTMcC.

"SMuel10363" wrote in message
...
The official minimum wage in China is 31 cents/hour. In the interior,
footwear and textile workers often are paid 17 cents/hour. In the coastal
cities, the "illegal immigrants" (those are the rural peasants who moved
to
the cities without permission; the number is well up in the millions)
also
make less than 31 cents/hour.

I build die cast dies for both China and Mexico. The full burden
rate(labor
+overhead)at the Mexico die caster is $3.48 per hour,the China die caster
is
$1.42 U.S. dollarsThe mexcio die caster is screaming over loss of work to
China They are also seeing cast and trim type die casting coming back
to
the states due to cost The work they can keep has a lot of vlue added work
done
in order to get to the $3.48 figure Ray Mueller

Those burden rates are in the same ballpark I've heard, Ray.

BTW, one of the molder/moldmaker operations in China that we talked about in
an article earlier this year was full of new Charmilles CNC EDMs, and had
about 80 Krauss-Maffel molding presses, half of them with robotic unloaders.
Not bad, huh? Have you ever seen a molder with 80 Krauss-Maffels in the US?
I haven't. That would be one heck of a slick operation over here. It's one
heck of a slick operation in China, too, I suppose. And it's enough to
squelch any ideas that they're behind the curve in machine technology.

Charmilles builds those EDM machines in China, BTW. A Charmilles exec in the
US says they're about as good as the ones they sell here.

Ed Huntress

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 04:19:39 GMT, "JTMcC"
wrote:


"Carl Byrns" wrote in message
.. .
On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 23:06:20 GMT, "

True story:
I worked in a section of the plant where there are some truly huge
power-lifted garage doors. On one cold (below zero) day, one the door
motors popped a circuit breaker. Of course, the door was open. Being
new, I walked over to the electric panel and was about to reset the
breaker when one of the other guys knocked my hand away. He said that
we had to call an electrician. We did so, and then everyone (about 8
guys) went where it was warm and waited for two hours for a sparky to
show up and flip the breaker.

There is a big difference between this story, and your first example of a
plant being shut down all day because someone changed a light bulb. And
understandable too, when you start allowing any employee access to
electrical panels (even for something as simple as resetting a breaker) you
are treading on dangerous ground with not the union but with your workmans
comp carrier, the company safety policy and probably OSHA as well. Let an
employee open an electrical panel, and you better be paying the electricians
WC rate on that employee and he had better have been trained on the
precautions and hazards of doing so cause if some non electrician dummy
sticks his hand in there and gets a big zap, the employer is guilty of WC
fraud. And probably an OSHA violation. And, the claim won't be paid. And the
employee can sue. Sometimes there are reasons for seemingly stupid rules and
policies that employees don't understand. A bit off the topic but true.

That sounds like typical union rhetoric.
What if the light bulb could only be reached by a ladder? Does that
make it a union job because an untrained worker could fall off the
ladder?

Here's another:
At another car parts plant, a machine I helped build needed to have a
24 volt solenoid replaced.

The union rules required:
A representitive from the company that built the machine. That was a
good friend of mine.

An electrician to unplug the machine from the wall and disconnect and
reconnect the dangerous 24 volt wires to the solenoid.

A plumber to cycle the disconnect and then remove and reattach the
dangerous 10 psi flex air line to the solenoid.

A mechanic to unscrew and screw two 10-32 socket head cap screws
holding the solenoid to the valve bank. He also removed the solenoid,
but could have requested a laborer to do that.

A foreman to ensure everything was done in a safe manner.

The plant manager. No one knows why he was there, but rules are rules.

Six guys to stretch a five minute one man job into an hour.

That happened at General Motor's Fisher Guide plant in Syracuse, New
York.
GM closed the plant about a year later, saying the building cost too
much to heat and light.
Privately, the real reason was labor expense was higher than other
similar GM plants.

-Carl

"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
...
On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 17:15:47 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
.. .
Actually, Ed has proposed zero sum trade, and that is a form
of protectionism.

Where did you get that idea, Gary?

Because the only way you can achieve zero sum trade in
the short term is if the government artificially interferes with
commerce and restricts imports so that they exactly match
exports in dollar value. That is protectionism.

If it makes you happy, call it protectionism. Most people would say it's
protectionism only if it limits imports in some way. Offsets don't limit
imports. They just require an equal amount of imports at the other end.

BTW, the 100% figure probably wouldn't be necessary. Just enough to take the
edge off of the enormous trade deficit probably would do the job -- maybe
50 - 70%, tops. This is in contrast to the offsets we face when we sell
airplanes abroad. We often have to take OVER 100% offsets on those deals.

An interesting aside: those offsets never show up in our trade balance
figures for aircraft. They show up somewhere else, in the categories in
which we had to take the offset trade -- it can be steel, or cars, or
consumer electronics, or whatever. So the supposed "beneficial" trade
balance we get from aircraft sales is a crock of bull. We actually wind up
running a trade deficit as a result of nearly every airplane that Boeing
sells.


The net effect is that higher price domestic producers have
less competition in the domestic market, and can gouge
domestic consumers to their heart's content. That's always
the result of protectionism.

Not true. You should look into the way the Japanese market worked during the
'60s through the mid-'90s. They were heavily protected from imports, but,
domestically, their companies competed like cats and dogs. That's how they
developed products for export, in fact. They were honed in the domestic
market first, and all of the fat was squeezed out of the costs before they
made their export assaults. Until their crony banking system and cultural
aversion to consumer spending bit them in the rear, they used that system to
wrench themselves from peasantry to world domination in many categories of
manufactured goods, in just a few decades.


OTOH, free trade allows the consumer to seek out the best
value, wherever it may be, and maximize the value received
for dollars spent. That rewards efficient producers and
penalizes inefficient ones.

No, efficiency has nothing whatsoever to do with it when you have workers
who earn 80 cents/hour. Then it's just cost, not efficiency. Don't confuse
the two. You can be the low-cost producer even if your efficiency sucks,
when you pay your workers less than a dollar an hour.



In the long term, this also results in balanced trade, because
in a free trade situation goods and value seek their own levels.
But it does so naturally via the net movement of value from the
less efficient nations to the more efficient ones.

This is unmitigated bull****. Even the most sanguine of the free-traders,
Milton Friedman, says you have to let the dollar float downward to make the
adjustment. That's how goods and value "seek their own levels." In the case
of China (a situation old Milton never anticipated when he wrote the modern
free-trade theories that have our policy makers so entranced), that would
mean the utter collapse of our capital account, and an almost certain
economic depression. Work out the numbers and see for yourself.


Economics is the study of allocation of resources. Trading
systems are judged good if they maximize value, bad to the
degree that they impede maximization of value. Thus
protectionism is bad, free trade is good, because it allocates
resources in the most efficient manner.

They've really got you well trained, Gary. g To quote former U.S. Trade
Representative Mickey Kantor again, there is no such thing as free trade.
You're building your ideas on a myth that never existed and that probably
never will.


Of course there is another thing, called political economy,
which tries to devise systems which allocate resources for
political purposes, ie narrow national advantage, rather than
for economic efficiency. This is warfare by another name.
Protectionism (and dumping) are its chief weapons.

When you start talking about protectionist policies, you're
talking about warfare systems instead of purely economic
systems. Such warfare is also called economic imperialism.
That's a generally discredited policy, known to lead eventually
to warfare of the actual shooting kind.

Come on down out of the clouds and tell us what the 500,000 - 800,000
workers who have already been "displaced" (what a nice metaphor for "thrown
out of work") by trade deficits should do about it. Then tell them and a
couple of million others what they'll be doing when Ford and GM increase
their imports of Chinese auto parts from $2.3 billion this year, to around
$25 billion by 2007 and $30 billion by 2010. That's what they're planning to
do, openly and explicitly.

Ed Huntress

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:58:26 +0800, Old Nick
wrote:

the answer is simple and clear gentlemen, we have to get over to
china and start labour unions there, pronto. yes indeed, a
subversive campaign to educate the chinese workers in having and
needing unions to up their wages so they can live like Americans.
production costs will skyrocket and th erest of us will be ok....

Hey! I got my job back! Now. What's for dinner....?

hmmmm...The US accounts for 30% (?? maybe it's only 20%, ot does not
matter) of the world's resource consumption, with about 5% of the
population. Imagine something like 20% of the population doing the
same.

Something you lads always forget to mention. Please add to you lineny
above..the percentage of the worlds goods provided by the US with that
30% consumption figure.

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle
behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

Carl Byrns wrote in message . ..


I disagree. If anything kills manufacturing in the US, it will be
union workers pricing themselves out of the market.

Bull****. During the raygun reign of ruin, the auto industry got NO
wage increase, NO increase of benefits, and made major concessions on
seniority and overtime. In return the ****ups that run the company
took bonus money. Strange how an eye can be blind when you don't WANT
to see. Just like Lee Iacocca getting concessions from the Chrysler
workers, then when things turned around he was going to give bonus
money to the managers until he was reminded that the concessions were
a loan, not a gift. Look at the latest investigations into the NYSE,
several retirees getting millions, far more than they have any right
to expect, far more than any one man is worth. Nothing but a semi-
legal or maybe illegal form of ripoff. I'm quite sure Worldcom and
Enron weren't caused by unions, just by educated criminals with huge
ego's. Kalifonicate power shortage? Now seems like it was
manipulated in corporate boardrooms. Seems like most of the criminals
aren't in prison, they're in corporate offices. Then explain to me
why the president of Case, when they existed, got millions in bonus
every year, even though he ran the company into the ground. (He got
booted out too, but what the hell would that mean to him?)

On 14 Oct 2003 01:43:03 GMT, (SMuel10363) wrote:
Canadian dollar is only worth 68 cents. That's not a government pegged
number, it is what the free market determines is the relative purchasing
power of the Canadian dollar against the US dollar.

AND BULL**** AGAIN Ray Mueller

Seems you're slipping deeper and deeper into it. The Canadian dollar
has floated since 1970. See
http://www.bankofcanada.ca/en/dollar..._text-e.htm#28

BTW, the value of the Canadian dollar at noon today was 76 cents.

Gary

On 14 Oct 2003 01:41:23 GMT, (SMuel10363) wrote:
Their standard of living *is* lower than ours because their government's
socialist policies (socialized medicine, nationalized broadcasting,
nationalized

BULL**** Ray Mueller

Canadian per capita GDP-PPP is $25,179 (US).
United States per capita GDP-PPP is $33,872 (US)

GDP-PPP is the income figure corrected for a market basket
of local commodities. In other words, it is a measure of the
average purchasing power of that money in that locality. As
such, it gauges how well you can live on the median wage
in a given area.

Gary

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:14:11 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
.. .
The net effect is that higher price domestic producers have
less competition in the domestic market, and can gouge
domestic consumers to their heart's content. That's always
the result of protectionism.

Not true. You should look into the way the Japanese market worked during the
'60s through the mid-'90s. They were heavily protected from imports, but,
domestically, their companies competed like cats and dogs. That's how they
developed products for export, in fact. They were honed in the domestic
market first, and all of the fat was squeezed out of the costs before they
made their export assaults. Until their crony banking system and cultural
aversion to consumer spending bit them in the rear, they used that system to
wrench themselves from peasantry to world domination in many categories of
manufactured goods, in just a few decades.

Lets look:

bottle of beer $2.30
6 slices of bread $2.00
Butter 200g $3.10
Coke $1.20
pack cigarettes $2.50
Big Mac $2.80
Oranges (6) $5.00
Dominos Pizza $30.00
Rice 5 kg bag $17.50
Movie ticket $18.00
Gasoline liter $1.00

OTOH, free trade allows the consumer to seek out the best
value, wherever it may be, and maximize the value received
for dollars spent. That rewards efficient producers and
penalizes inefficient ones.

No, efficiency has nothing whatsoever to do with it when you have workers
who earn 80 cents/hour. Then it's just cost, not efficiency. Don't confuse
the two. You can be the low-cost producer even if your efficiency sucks,
when you pay your workers less than a dollar an hour.

In economics, you're always balancing capital costs against labor costs
and raw materials costs to achieve the most efficient combination. When
labor it cheap, its usage is maximized while the others are minimized.
That's efficient use of available resources.

In the long term, this also results in balanced trade, because
in a free trade situation goods and value seek their own levels.
But it does so naturally via the net movement of value from the
less efficient nations to the more efficient ones.

This is unmitigated bull****. Even the most sanguine of the free-traders,
Milton Friedman, says you have to let the dollar float downward to make the
adjustment. That's how goods and value "seek their own levels." In the case
of China (a situation old Milton never anticipated when he wrote the modern
free-trade theories that have our policy makers so entranced), that would
mean the utter collapse of our capital account, and an almost certain
economic depression. Work out the numbers and see for yourself.

Indeed, as I said, "net movement of value from the less efficient nations
to the more efficient ones." Of course that means the dollar will drop in
value. It also means we won't be able to afford as many Chinese products.
That'll knock that old trade deficit right down.

Economics is the study of allocation of resources. Trading
systems are judged good if they maximize value, bad to the
degree that they impede maximization of value. Thus
protectionism is bad, free trade is good, because it allocates
resources in the most efficient manner.

They've really got you well trained, Gary. g To quote former U.S. Trade
Representative Mickey Kantor again, there is no such thing as free trade.
You're building your ideas on a myth that never existed and that probably
never will.

Despite what nation states may try to do, the multinational corporations
are opening up the world to free trade, by the back door if not the front.

Of course there is another thing, called political economy,
which tries to devise systems which allocate resources for
political purposes, ie narrow national advantage, rather than
for economic efficiency. This is warfare by another name.
Protectionism (and dumping) are its chief weapons.

When you start talking about protectionist policies, you're
talking about warfare systems instead of purely economic
systems. Such warfare is also called economic imperialism.
That's a generally discredited policy, known to lead eventually
to warfare of the actual shooting kind.

Come on down out of the clouds and tell us what the 500,000 - 800,000
workers who have already been "displaced" (what a nice metaphor for "thrown
out of work") by trade deficits should do about it.

Well, the US Army says it will need 1.2 million recruits over the next two
years to fill the losses of retention due to the invasions and occupations
of Iraq and Afganistan (probably Syria and Iran too by then). So they could
join the Army. The People's Army is where those Chinese workers would be
if they couldn't get jobs making things for export.

Then tell them and a
couple of million others what they'll be doing when Ford and GM increase
their imports of Chinese auto parts from $2.3 billion this year, to around
$25 billion by 2007 and $30 billion by 2010. That's what they're planning to
do, openly and explicitly.

Well, I'll tell them one thing they won't be doing if they sit around wringing
their hands. That's buying a new car. So the Chinese won't be selling any
cars to them. The Chinese will have to look elsewhere for customers.

If the gloom and doom you and Jim have been spouting is right, no one
in the US will be able to buy a new car. But somehow I doubt that will be
the case. So those workers will just have to retrain to get jobs like those
of people who *can* afford a new car. For example, they could become
product liability lawyers. There's always room for another multimillion
dollar class action law suit.

Gary

"Ed Huntress" wrote in message et...

There is no way the best factories in China are 2/3 as productive as
even the average U.S. factories, and what I've seen tells me that
they're at best only 1/3 as productive.

I've interviewed a number of US manufacturing executives upon their
return from China, and they tend to be shaken up by what they've
seen. One that I quoted in my first article on the subject had just
visited a mold shop in China that he said was running at virtually
the same productivity level as his shop in the US...and he runs one
of the best mold shops in the US. He had visited three others that
he said were slightly below his productivity levels, but not by an
awful lot.

I have a lot of problems believing that the Chinese are that good
except in a few very isolated cases because it took the Japanese a
long, long time to get their productivity and quality up to U.S.
levels, and Japan started out being way ahead of China. Even Taiwan
still has quality problems, and look how advanced they are. There are
always exceptions, but usually even identical factories will almost
always be quite a bit more productive in the First World than in
China, mostly because low-wage workers just aren't valued as much by
management.

This may be why Honda has estimated that its Chinese parts
factories will be only 30% cheaper than those in Japan and
North America, despite wage disparities being much, much greater

It costs Honda nearly $2,000 more to build an Accord in China as
to build it in Japan. The reason is that many of the parts in an
Accord have to be imported from Japan. And the prices for those
parts are exorbitant, because that's how Honda gets profits out
of China: they overcharge the Chinese division for parts costs,
and take the extra margin out as corporate profits. Many foreign
manufacturers in China do the same thing.

Japan always reserves its best factories for Japan, no matter what
they want people in the U.S. to think. I don't know of a single
exception, and the company I work for has studied this like crazy
since the early 1980s, when we first entered Japan (no Chinese
presense, due to the "no dictatorship" rule, which also forced us to
quit Taiwan). The immediate reason Japan is building cars in China is
for political purposes because most countries require domestic
production as a condition for sales (why so many countries have
small-scale kit factories).

The prime reason for job losses in the manufacturing sector is
productivity improving faster than sales,

When you actually run the numbers, you'll see that it's partly
productivity and partly excessive imports. The figures for job
losses due to imports range from 500,000 to 1,200,000, going
from the conservative economists to the more liberal ones.
Mainstream economists are now saying it's something under 800,000.

It takes something like only 35-40% as many workers to produce the
same number of cars as 20-30 years ago, and this isn't going to slow
down. There simply isn't going to be any large scale mass production
in the U.S. in 5 years except where each worker's output is at least
$300K-$500K a year.

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:55:38 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:58:26 +0800, Old Nick
wrote:
hmmmm...The US accounts for 30% (?? maybe it's only 20%, ot does not
matter) of the world's resource consumption, with about 5% of the
population. Imagine something like 20% of the population doing the
same.

Something you lads always forget to mention. Please add to you lineny
above..the percentage of the worlds goods provided by the US with that
30% consumption figure.

World GDP (2001 US dollars) $47,000,000,000,000
US GDP (2001 US dollars) $10,400,000,000,000

Gary

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 06:27:29 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:55:38 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:58:26 +0800, Old Nick
wrote:
hmmmm...The US accounts for 30% (?? maybe it's only 20%, ot does not
matter) of the world's resource consumption, with about 5% of the
population. Imagine something like 20% of the population doing the
same.

Something you lads always forget to mention. Please add to you lineny
above..the percentage of the worlds goods provided by the US with that
30% consumption figure.

World GDP (2001 US dollars) $47,000,000,000,000
US GDP (2001 US dollars) $10,400,000,000,000

Gary

This tells me what? That we are making 20% of the goods for the
entire planet and are using 30% of its resources to do so?

Break it down so that a poor ignorant cowboy can understand it, will
ya?

How much of that 30% of the worlds hard resources, is returned to the
rest of the world, in hard goods and services, directly and
indirectly, outside of the US, is a good start in your explaination.

Gunner



"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle
behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto

In article , Ed Huntress
says...

Come on down out of the clouds and tell us what the 500,000 - 800,000
workers who have already been "displaced" (what a nice metaphor for "thrown
out of work") by trade deficits should do about it. Then tell them and a
couple of million others what they'll be doing when Ford and GM increase
their imports of Chinese auto parts from $2.3 billion this year, to around
$25 billion by 2007 and $30 billion by 2010. That's what they're planning to
do, openly and explicitly.

Well heck I can answer that one.

They're gonna fire somebody for themselves.

Like whatever sitting president happens to be
in the white house at the time.

Jim

==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 14:46:54 GMT, "Ed Huntress"
wrote something
.......and in reply I say!:

Short of an imperialism that any civilized person would decry, 300
million
people consuming 30% of the world's resources cannot be sustained in
the face of 6 billion others who want to live and raise families too.

Gary

That's exactly right.

You know, I've spent most of my waking hours for the past year studying this
subject, and I can't think of a single factual, quantitative reason why you
would draw that conclusion.

Barring your philosophical ideas about it, Carl, what makes you think this
should lead to a decline in the socio-economic stature of our middle class,
in economic terms? With numbers, please. As I said to Gary, no fuzzball
philosophy will do. g

Ed. I tend to agree with most of what you say. You have certainly
studied it. I am going to dig up a couple of your articles. But....

Given that Carl seems to think only in economic terms, I agree that
such an imbalance as Gary mentions could possibly be maintained, and I
certainly do not have the figures to argue. But Gary's actual comment
carries more weight when you take the whole picture.

"Fuzzball philosophy"...it's "not fair" that 5% of the population
should use 30% of the resources, or that probably 20% of the
population uses 70%, or whatever, if we look wider and not just at the
US. I realise that Oz certainly has a very high impact per capita on
the environment. I feel (and as with most, spend a lot of my time
simply ignoring) the "unfairness".

Human nature. As more and more people become _aware_ of what is
happening, and in fact do rather get it shoved in their faces day
after day by radio/TV, the net, and ads, they will do anything to get
the goodies. At the very least this means offering all sorts of
incentives to manufactureres from high-income countries to bring work
to the lower income countries.
************************************************** ****************************************
Whenever you have to prove to yourself that you are
not something, you probably are.

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music
Please remove ns from my header address to reply via email
!!
")
_/ )
( )
_//- \__/

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 15:42:03 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote something
.......and in reply I say!:

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 11:06:29 +0800, Old Nick wrote:
Union workers are "pricing themselves out of the market" at least in
part because they need the wages to buy the products they make

But at least in part those products are priced so high because of the
excessive wage demands of the union workers. It is a vicious circle.


That is my point, actually. It's called inflation, caused by profit. I
mean profit as in the workers want to be paid more than they have to
actually work for, and the companies want to get more for the product
than they had to pay for it. I am fighting Carl's contention that
removing one half of the equation will solve the problem. It will not
work for many reasons.

But the lower paid workers in Singapore will not be able to buy the
very products they make. Singapore will probably export huge portions
of whatever it makes.

GM is setting up car factories in China. GM says they are building for
the Chinese market only, but I wonder...

*Someone* has to be making enough money to buy those products.
If you follow Jim Rozen's theory that all US citizens will be working at
Walmart, they won't be making enough to buy those products.

There has to be a mass market large enough to absorb Chinese
production. And that market has to be rich enough to pay for that
production. If all the jobs are going to China, who is going to buy
what they build if it isn't the Chinese? And how will the Chinese
buy them if their wages don't rise? And what does that do to the
comparative advantage of Chinese factories over US ones?

In the end they will have none. But it will sure bite hard in the
meantime. And in the end I believe we will all have a "standard of
living" somewhere in between. Quality of life? I shudder to think.


Indeed, there was a time when jingoism overrode good sense. But
the purpose of a corporation is to earn value for its shareholders.
Eventually it has to do that, or it will cease to exist, its shareholders
will have lost their investments, its workers will be unemployed, and
who benefits from that?

hmmmmmmmm....here we really go head to head.

Firstly, I do not describe what I was talking about as jingoism
overriding good sense, although there is an element of this. Companies
believed in their product, saw the long haul, and realised that their
best bet at prosperity and good feeling (which they valued then) was
by making the place (town, state, country) in which they were based,
and in which the huge majority of their "power men" lived, prosper
along with them. The majority of their "power men" were directly tied
up in the processes that the company carried out. They believed in the
product to at least some extent. While not in any way egalitarian, it
also maintained a moderately contented and relatively stable situation
in many places around the world. It was not equality, but resentment
was kept controllable, and many people were more than content to
largely ignore the inequality, on both sides. Others, not so well off,
were envious and more or less resentful, but they saw little enough of
it that it was not important to either side to really worry about it.

Secondly, unless that corporation is that evil of evils, a straight
out trader in companies and shares, the purpose of a corporation is
_not_ to earn value for its shareholders. The purpose of a corporation
is to carry out its job well. To do its job, it needs to sustain
profit _only_ enough to keep trading _in its product_ healthily. It
could in effect be non profit, still pay lots of people good money,
some a lot more than others, and be a sound, successful company. It
could also profit enough pay shareholders a reasonable rate of return
for their help, in the form of dividends. This rate of return can be
agreed upon before shares are bought, and reviewed as needed or
possible. It should never override the core business of the company.

I agree with the share system. It has allowed many companies to things
they could not have done otherwise. But I disagree with _trading_ in
shares because:
- a share trade, between parties totally disconnected from the
shares' "owners" (the company) does absolutely nothing for the core
business, or productivity of the company
- in fact, come to think of it, it achieves nothing!
_ the fact that dividends are often not paid because it would affect
the share price is crazy.
- the idea that shareholders, who have _no_ interest in the
company's business as such, should account for vastly more than the
actual value of what the company produces, or is any way worth, is
crazy.
- the idea that shareholders are the _only_ reason that a company
exists is crazy.
- the fact that a 5% downward blip in a company's capabilities can
cause the company to collapse in "value" to 1/10th of its former
"value" because of shareholder panic, while another company that is
borrowing from its own funds in order to keep trading can be showing
strong growth according to the total share value, is crazy.
- I am not sure, because I am not a shares man more than the "mom
and pop" Telstra type share owner. But I think the Australian Stock
Exchange is listed on itself, and trades there! Sorry, they lost me
there somewhere.

ran _on_ (crikey! they all say)

("Leaving Lepidoptera (please don't touch the displays little boy, oh
cute), we come to Arachnida, the spiders, our finest collection...")
thanks and any needed apologies to Alice Cooper.)
hrrrmph! Sorry.

It is automation and human nature that are causing the current unrest.
But AFAICS, people look at automation as the robot that displaces the
worker. I reckon there's a far more important automation, and that is
the computer; the simple PC on the desk, netted up. It allows such
rapid flows and processing of information "without consequence" that
we can easily abuse it, have no idea of what we are doing either in
the short or long term, and _do not have to care_ as far as we can
see. I press a button, and there are no apparent consequences! It also
allows; no, _forces_ information to get to vast numbers of people who
never had it before. Elitist though it may be, ignorance can be bliss
and certainly makes things easier.

rant off
************************************************** ****************************************
Whenever you have to prove to yourself that you are
not something, you probably are.

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music
Please remove ns from my header address to reply via email
!!
")
_/ )
( )
_//- \__/

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 22:36:10 GMT, Carl Byrns
wrote something
.......and in reply I say!:

OK. I will accept those statements. You somewhat had me fooled, I have
to admit.

That's true, not all of this is my opinion, nor do I endorse
everything I've written. Some of it is distilled from business owners
_and_ union workers I know.


I'm not endorsing any extreme answer. I am asking some hard questions
and getting soft answers.
If the labor rate in China really is 80 cents an hour, then it's game
over, the Chinese are the winners, and the rest of us better get
comfortable with being farmers because we will be the new peasants.


-Carl

************************************************** ****************************************
Whenever you have to prove to yourself that you are
not something, you probably are.

Nick White --- HEAD:Hertz Music
Please remove ns from my header address to reply via email
!!
")
_/ )
( )
_//- \__/

"Old Nick" wrote in message
...

Given that Carl seems to think only in economic terms, I agree that
such an imbalance as Gary mentions could possibly be maintained, and I
certainly do not have the figures to argue. But Gary's actual comment
carries more weight when you take the whole picture.

"Fuzzball philosophy"...it's "not fair" that 5% of the population
should use 30% of the resources, or that probably 20% of the
population uses 70%, or whatever, if we look wider and not just at the
US. I realise that Oz certainly has a very high impact per capita on
the environment. I feel (and as with most, spend a lot of my time
simply ignoring) the "unfairness".

Fairness is another issue, Nick. We aren't arguing about fairness. What Gary
and Carl are saying is that there is an *economic* reason for their claims.
I don't know of any, and no one has presented one here except in fuzzy,
qualitative terms.

A lot of these fuzzy ideas break down when you look at actual numbers and
actual patterns of economic events. This subject can't be discussed in real
terms without a lot of solid numbers to prove or disprove one idea or the
other. Gathering them is very hard work. Even finding them can be hard work.
That's the hard work on which I've spent so much of my time lately, and it
makes me skeptical about these off-the-cuff and anecdotal "theories." They
often collapse when you look at the numbers.

Ed Huntress

Carl Byrns writes:

If the labor rate in China really is 80 cents an hour, then it's game
over, the Chinese are the winners, and the rest of us better get
comfortable with being farmers because we will be the new peasants.

By that logic, if they gave us all their labor for free, we would be even
worse off.

Do you curse the sun for flooding us with cheap, imported light?

Ed Huntress writes:

If it makes you happy, call it protectionism. Most people would say it's
protectionism only if it limits imports in some way. Offsets don't limit
imports. They just require an equal amount of imports at the other end.

Yeah, we should shroud the earth until the sun agress to equal imports.
The domestic power industry just can't compete with all that cheap imported
heat and light.

Ed Huntress writes:

Come on down out of the clouds and tell us what the 500,000 - 800,000
workers who have already been "displaced" (what a nice metaphor for
"thrown out of work") by trade deficits should do about it.

The same thing the whalers and buggy-whip manufacturers did. Find
something productive to do instead of ambushing us at the shipyard pier.

I'm in software. It's hard to compete with the furriners who give it away
for free. We get "displaced" and "thrown out of work". I think we need to
stop people from downloading software products from outside the country. I
have a right to have government men with guns make you to buy my software
instead of the cheaper imported stuff.

There is a big difference between this story, and your first example of a
plant being shut down all day because someone changed a light bulb. And
understandable too, when you start allowing any employee access to
electrical panels (even for something as simple as resetting a breaker)
you
are treading on dangerous ground with not the union but with your
workmans
comp carrier, the company safety policy and probably OSHA as well. Let an
employee open an electrical panel, and you better be paying the
electricians
WC rate on that employee and he had better have been trained on the
precautions and hazards of doing so cause if some non electrician dummy
sticks his hand in there and gets a big zap, the employer is guilty of WC
fraud. And probably an OSHA violation. And, the claim won't be paid. And
the
employee can sue. Sometimes there are reasons for seemingly stupid rules
and
policies that employees don't understand. A bit off the topic but true.

That sounds like typical union rhetoric.
What if the light bulb could only be reached by a ladder? Does that
make it a union job because an untrained worker could fall off the
ladder?

It has absolutely nothing to do with a union, the workmans comp system
doesn't give two hoots as to weather a company is union or not. Neither does
OSHA.
To use your example of a light bulb that can only be reached by ladder,
speaking for my little company, I would have to do it myself or have someone
other than my office manager do it because we have her classified as"
clerical " and pay the present clerical WC rate of .24% , these
classifications are pretty well defined and clerical employees don't work
from ladders. So, I change out the bulb, while paying 12.21% WC in a
classification that indeed is expected to work at heights, in excavations
and around and over water. Nothing union about it, your tax dollars at work.
She also can't drive to a job site to bring me drawings (or coffee or
anything else) without going from the clerical to the gas and oil pipeline
welder classification. So I pay the same rate on her then as I do on a
welder making a hot tie in on a 42" natural gas main line!
This isn't rhetoric, this is reality to those of us trying to run a little
business and employ a few folks. And it has nothing to do with union or non.

JTMcC.

"Richard J Kinch" wrote in message
...
Carl Byrns writes:

If the labor rate in China really is 80 cents an hour, then it's game
over, the Chinese are the winners, and the rest of us better get
comfortable with being farmers because we will be the new peasants.

By that logic, if they gave us all their labor for free, we would be even
worse off.

Do you curse the sun for flooding us with cheap, imported light?

It's true that cheap imports can be a benefit, but that assumes our economy
can grow fast enough to replace a lot of well-paying jobs lost to imports.
When the trade deficit gets as large as it is today ($418 billion deficit,
goods and services total; goods alone are around $460 billion deficit), it
probably can't. The job-growth rate and average new-job wages would have to
reach heights we've never seen, and which there is no indication we ever
will.

Ed Huntress

In article , Richard J Kinch
says...

I'm in software.

Well, those jobs are going to india.

Jim

==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================

In article , Old Nick says...

There has to be a mass market large enough to absorb Chinese
production. And that market has to be rich enough to pay for that
production. If all the jobs are going to China, who is going to buy
what they build if it isn't the Chinese? And how will the Chinese
buy them if their wages don't rise? And what does that do to the
comparative advantage of Chinese factories over US ones?

In the end they will have none. But it will sure bite hard in the
meantime. And in the end I believe we will all have a "standard of
living" somewhere in between. Quality of life? I shudder to think.

This is where the econonomics guys either do the sleight
of hand thing to distract, or say, 'trust us it will work out.'
My personal feeling is, they simply don't know. No clue.

That *one* issue (what happens to the US markets when the
US companies shift operations overseas - and not just
manufacturing, btw) is where the rubber meets the road.
Can the markets continue as they are now, if the outsourcing
causes massive US unemployment?

Secondly, unless that corporation is that evil of evils, a straight
out trader in companies and shares, the purpose of a corporation is
_not_ to earn value for its shareholders. The purpose of a corporation
is to carry out its job well.

Wrong wrong wrong. You would never make it in the 'evil
corporate boss' school. That is *exactly* the purported
reason for corporations to exist. To provide ROI. Not
any of the other touchy-feely crap. If they could provide
ROI to the shareholders by running little old ladies through
giant Waring blenders, they would do that. If they could
provide ROI by throwing orphans and widows out in the
streets in winter, they'd do *that*, too. This is the
fundamental tenent of capitalism, which is: if we can
boost the stock price somehow, even for a tiny bit, at
the expense of long term benefit, we *have* to do this,
or somebody else will, and eat our lunch.

They don't carry out jobs. They make money. There are
plenty of corporations that don't do any real work at
all and are wildly successful, because they keep the
investors happy and keep their stock price up.

If you could change any of the above points, even *one*
of them, then you would be halfway there to solving
the 'china' problem. Because those points, deep down
inside of it, are the cause of the 'china problem.'

Jim

==================================================
please reply to:
JRR(zero) at yktvmv (dot) vnet (dot) ibm (dot) com
==================================================

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:07:08 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 06:27:29 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:55:38 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:58:26 +0800, Old Nick
wrote:
hmmmm...The US accounts for 30% (?? maybe it's only 20%, ot does not
matter) of the world's resource consumption, with about 5% of the
population. Imagine something like 20% of the population doing the
same.

Something you lads always forget to mention. Please add to you lineny
above..the percentage of the worlds goods provided by the US with that
30% consumption figure.

World GDP (2001 US dollars) $47,000,000,000,000
US GDP (2001 US dollars) $10,400,000,000,000

Gary

This tells me what? That we are making 20% of the goods for the
entire planet and are using 30% of its resources to do so?

Break it down so that a poor ignorant cowboy can understand it, will
ya?

How much of that 30% of the worlds hard resources, is returned to the
rest of the world, in hard goods and services, directly and
indirectly, outside of the US, is a good start in your explaination.

Total value of US exports (2001) $731,000,000,000. Or put another
way, about 7% of the US economic output is exported. The largest
aggragate proportion of that is agricultural products, timber, and
other raw materials. In other words, exports with very little value
added by labor.

Gary

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003 15:08:40 GMT, "Ed Huntress" wrote:
"Gary Coffman" wrote in message
.. .

A more accurate and relevant figure for 1967 can be drawn from table
P-8 http://www.census.gov/hhes/income/histinc/p08.html . Here you'll
find that the median income for males 35 to 44 was $7,636. That is
$33,137 in 2001 dollars. By contrast the 2001 income for males 35 to
44 was $41,104, which represents a only 24% real increase over the 33
year span.

It's household, or family incomes that determine what cars can be bought,
Gary. That's why I used per-capita rather than per-worker figures. That
weeds out the changing patterns in the number of workers per family, etc.

I disagree. In general, each worker needs a car, but that's not necessarily
so for each family member. And any family member not working outside the
home isn't contributing to the purchase of those cars. In other words,
their "per capita income" is all coming from the paychecks of the wage
earners of the family.

Gary

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 14:03:20 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 11:07:08 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 06:27:29 -0400, Gary Coffman
wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 05:55:38 GMT, Gunner wrote:
On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 07:58:26 +0800, Old Nick
wrote:
hmmmm...The US accounts for 30% (?? maybe it's only 20%, ot does not
matter) of the world's resource consumption, with about 5% of the
population. Imagine something like 20% of the population doing the
same.

Something you lads always forget to mention. Please add to you lineny
above..the percentage of the worlds goods provided by the US with that
30% consumption figure.

World GDP (2001 US dollars) $47,000,000,000,000
US GDP (2001 US dollars) $10,400,000,000,000

Gary

This tells me what? That we are making 20% of the goods for the
entire planet and are using 30% of its resources to do so?

Break it down so that a poor ignorant cowboy can understand it, will
ya?

How much of that 30% of the worlds hard resources, is returned to the
rest of the world, in hard goods and services, directly and
indirectly, outside of the US, is a good start in your explaination.

Total value of US exports (2001) $731,000,000,000. Or put another
way, about 7% of the US economic output is exported. The largest
aggragate proportion of that is agricultural products, timber, and
other raw materials. In other words, exports with very little value
added by labor.

Gary

Ok, and how much of the "goods and services" are related to military
protection of other nations, with money spent in those nations, plus
that covered by the umbrella effect? A sizable fraction of our
military expenditures are dollars spent in other nations on
infrastructure alone. Do you have any figures for that?
How about benefits other nations derive from our R&D expenditures,
plus spin offs in medicine, space etc etc?

Not arguing, just wondering if the GDP really is an accurate indicator
of how that alleged 30% of world resources is used solely for the good
of Americans.

Gunner

"You cannot invade the mainland United States. There would be a rifle
behind each blade of grass." --Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto