There is no more nobility in thinking of impoverishing our workers to gain market share than there was in enslaving blacks 150 years ago to achieve the same ends. This _should_ be the country where _everybody_ lives well, and should not have to own a business in order to do it. Most people are employees, not owners, and it is not good for the nation to have hordes of poor people in the country. If poor people are predominant, then the rich, or even the well-to-do business owners, end up supporting them some way or another, whether it's welfare or the insurrection of the oppressed that decide to rise up and take it. Might as well be fair to people in the 1st place, rather than having the gov't come and take your money to redistribute to the poor, or the poor coming after it directly.
With our vast country, vast natural resources, work ethic, transportation infrastructure, and so forth, there is no doubt in my mind that the USA can still, if it stops stealing money from everyone with income taxes, or at least greatly reduces the rates of industry-harming corporate income taxes, be the best place to manufacture on the planet. We just have to stop sticking pins in little dolls of CEO's and corporations, and help them instead.
"Even if your very rosy picture is true, who is it exactly that they're going to be selling a lot of those goods too? The US has been a mercantile nation for much of its existence, but if it starts erecting tariff walls, this will lead to trade wars."
If we would just abolish the income taxes, we wouldn't even need the tariff.
Otherwise, Trump is the "great negotiator" as Reagan was the "great communicator." He will renegotiate the treaties so that they are not charging tariffs on our stuff (as they reportedly are now) while we let their stuff come in completely for free, while the Chinese _additionally_ manipulate the value of their currency such that they are overcompetitive. That crap has to stop. We either trade with them fairly, or not at all. The thing that Trump has been saying for way over a year is that THEY need US waaaaay more than WE need THEM. I think he's good enough at this to know what he's talking about.
"Large American companies pay an effective corporate tax rate closer to 12.6%, according to the Government Accountability Office. They pay more to their CEO's than they pay in corporate income tax."
So we might as well eliminate corporate income tax entirely, because it isn't making significant money for the US Treasury, AND the corporations have to jump thru all kinds of hoops and hire armies of lawyers and accountants to take advantage of every loophole to lower their taxes to 12.6%.
Just get rid of _all_ income tax - pass the Fair Tax, and watch the economy roar - and yeah, ALL those factories that left would come back.
I don't believe they will be low-wage jobs, because we can make the cost of manufacturing the same or lower than the foreigners despite their low wages by not taxing and regulating the H out of them. Just lower (or I prefer eliminate) the taxes they've been paying, and relax all the regs we can without gettting people hurt or killed (you can totally eliminate all the workplace regs that go with O'care and save a bundle and not hurt or kill anyone) and we'll be once again competitive with the rest of the world. Eliminate _all_ income taxes at the Federal level, and institute the Fair tax, and I believe it would be they who lose most of their factories to us, and we would be absolutely wealthy as a nation.
Our auto plants are highly automated, and yet 1000's of people tromp in and out of them every day. That'll work to help eliminate the poverty class without everybody having to go to college. You can learn "electrician" and "welder" and so forth with union classes and on-the-job training. Learning the automation to be able to tend it and adjust it and repair it would come from the vendor's classes - the vendor of the automatic machines.
70,000 factories coming back from all over the world, employing 300 people each, would be 21 million. Maybe they won't average 300 people each, I dunno, but there are other things that can make the USA a winner that we could still do if the 15% corporate income tax and relaxation of regulations doesn't get them all.
And yeah, I think those rust-belt plants are coming back. There's a big-ass iron mine in N. Minnesota just aching to restart to full capacity and send taconite to Pittsburgh, or wherever. We'll make American products with American steel and sell them to Americans at the former lower prices the foreigners were charging and not have to ship either the taconite or the raw steel back and forth across the ocean. If we can just keep the freighters from following the Edmund Fitzgerald again, we should have the great lakes full of them, and the freighters full of ore to be smelted.
I really, really believe that we can make America great again. (We're going to do it with natural gas this time, too, and keep the emissions lower than the furriners do now since they're largely burning coal.)
I believe DJT's intervention amounts to not taxing and regulating the H out of them, so they can win in the marketplace without subsidies. It shouldn't cost us anything after the initial shock of not collecting so much money from corporate income taxes, but of course those taxes only amount to about 9% of our tax intake overall, so it shouldn't be all that big of a shock. After that, when our less-regulated and much-less-taxed industries start winning in the marketplace, the taxes from the now-richer middle class people that used to be poverty class should outstrip the losses in corporate income tax. If we indeed get back all 70,000 of our factories that have fled since about year 2000, the taxes from those, plus the taxes from their workers, _should_ allow us to start paying down the National Debt. I _think_ this is the grand plan as I decipher it out of what I've heard in speeches and from pundits. Have to wait and see what actually happens, of course.
Naw, the reason you automate _is_ our labor rates, but the fact that we can do it and mitigate the low-wage advantage of other countries is that reason we're going to win this.
The corporate income taxes are simply what keeps American manufacturing from winning in the marketplace except for a narrow range of products, such as autos, trucks, and heavy equipment, all with outsized shipping costs. If we can dramatically lower the corporate income taxes, we can probably get much more manufacturing into the country, and supply people that didn't go to college with good jobs that get or keep them out of poverty. (If we passed the Fair Tax, which completely eliminates all Federal income taxes, we could probably have the entirety of the world's manufacturing here, we'd be such a good manufacturing tax haven, and would prosper beyond wild imagination.)
As for the regulations, a lot of them do scale with the size of the workforce. Obamacare, for instance, has a lot of rules and regulations that cost a whale of a lot of money for each employee, or if the number of employees per company exceeds a certain amount, or if the employees exceed a certain number of work hours. This is just one set of extremely expensive regulations that can be repealed, and are in fact slated to be repealed in the next administration.
Safety regulations often are more expensive for more employees. Of course, a lot of these are _not_ unnecessary, and we wouldn't want to get rid of them, but some could be a bit over the top. I'm not really familiar with them, but keep reading about their existence and damaging impact on American business. I read an account by an Virginia mine operator that the inspections they undergo are a bit ridiculous, kind of like a military white glove inspection, that are not designed to be passed, but instead to generate fines as a revenue stream for the gov't. Things like a barrel of some waste material is found to have a loose lid, and then its large sized fines for that when the worker was just coming back within a few minutes to put more in the barrel, things like that. We have to review all the regulations, get rid of the ones that are not necessary and the ones that are more expensive than any consequence they purport to prevent.
That's not a million new jobs in the US, but probably 50,000 new jobs in the US, maybe less. We will automate what they have people standing at tables by the 1000's to assemble by hand. They have cheap labor, so cannot afford to automate. We can. Still, 50,000 new American jobs which may cost the company, say, $70,000 a year with all the benefits and such is still a good deal when compared to a million Chinese costing them maybe $5 / hr, or $10,000 / yr. These of course are not real, researched numbers, but probably aren't all that far off either. That would be 10 billion dollars for the 1 million Chinese workers and 3 billion, 500 million for the US workers. Don't know how much for the additional costs of the machinery, but the machinery works 24/7 and doesn't get tired or sick. Apparently we need more US workers, or the machinery costs are sufficient to keep us from doing this here now, but I think if the taxes are lowered on US manufacturing, and a lot of costly regulations that don't benefit in proportion to their cost are eliminated, we can get this done, and the jobs back here.
"However high labor costs in the US necessitate a high level of automation..."
High corporate income tax rates and costly regulations necessitate a high level of automation... that screws millions of US citizens out of good-paying factory jobs here...
"Let's not forget the regulatory difference. Some of that manufacturing is unprofitable to bring to the states because it is so dirty."
Its dirty the way they do it. I am not convinced that we can't figure out how to do it cleanly. We're already making much of our electricity with natural gas, solar, and wind, which is likely to only continue to get better since we have absolute oceans of natural gas, and the Dakotas are the Saudi Arabia of wind. Solar is everwhere, and these interruptable sources will, if we _ever_ get the magic battery that will store that much electrical energy, take over completely. Then things will be _really_ clean. We only then have to manage the various chemicals we use in our processes. I think we can, with the gov't aiding us instead of hindering us.
"That is correct. As long as the US has wages that substantially exceed those of other countries there will be a strong pull to locate labor intensive jobs in places where labor costs are low. That is why most US based manufacturing is capital intensive instead of labor intensive."
This is the huge misconception that has been screwing us for decades. Labor rates are NOT the problem. Taxes are.
We have the higest corporate income tax on the planet. THAT is what is causing manufacturing to leave the country. Its not the worker wages, because when we build factories in the USA, we automate the H out of them. There aren't that many workers. Certainly not like Foxxcon where 1000's of workers stand at tables all day and assemble them by hand. We'd have maybe a hundred or two hundred in a factory with 1000's of machines, the workers feeding the machines raw materials, keeping them adjusted and lubricated, checking for scrap, etc. The labor would not be the big part of the price of the product when produced in the USA, but right now, corporate taxes AND regulations have killed much of US manufacturing.
Here's an example from the auto industry. It takes 30 - 33 labor hours to build a car in a US factory. According to the car industries themselves, their workers cost them about $78 / hr. Multiply it out, its about $2500. However, if you study the Fair Tax, the cost of _all_ income taxes to US manufacturing, and this includes the capital gains taxes, worker's individual income taxes, payroll taxes, etc. is 22% of the price of whatever product is built in the USA. So, for a $30K SUV, that is about a $6,600 tax bite while the labor rate would still be only about $2500. You could enslave auto workers, pay them $0, and still not have anywhere close to the size of the effect that getting rid of ALL the income taxes, which is what the Fair Tax people have advocated for a couple decades (and we still do.) But the simple act of lowering the corporate income taxes, and rolling back a lot of unneeded regulations as the new administration is promising to do, will help the auto industry build more cars in the USA, and I believe will likely help the cell phone industry build cell phones in the USA.
I've read in years past - 1 or 2 years ago - that there are exactly zero cell phones built in the USA. Is that right? I don't know, but if so, I think that's about to change.
We have sources of materials in our own country, we don't need the Chinese materials. Our mines for them are currently closed because the prices of those materials in the currency-manipulated China are so cheap that our raw materials are too expensive when mined here. Lowering the corporate income tax to 15% is likely to change that, and see those rare earth mines opened up again, and... presto, no more problem with raw materials in the USA.
With the pro-business administration that is coming into Washington, and the vow to "Make America Great Again", I'm expecting that much of what is made in China is going to be made in America after a while. It won't be 1000's of Foxxcon workers standing for hours at tables assembling them by hand for a dollar two nintety eight an hour, it'll be American workers tending 30 - 50 automatic machines, keeping them in raw materials, keeping them adjusted, lubricated, supplied with power, and checking for scrap, and they'll be well-paid, and the iphones shucking out the conveyor belt will be every bit as desirable as the ones from China, and about the same price. That's what I expect, anyway. There's lots of ways for America to compete if we stop allowing the foreigners to have the huge advantages of lower taxes and currency manipulation.
No, its 'cuz if we were wrong about WMD in Iraq, it was likely that Saddam, who hated our guts over Gulf War 1, would have given said WMD to terrorists who would have deployed it on our densest population centers, the east coast and California. An anthrax attack could have possibly killed a million people. Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think? I live on the east coast, BTW, but have, or at least had immunity to anthrax due to having traveled to Iraq a couple times to assist the US Army. But it wouldn't be any fun to wake up one day and find that 90% of the people in my area dead due to such an attack.
...and hire all foreign staff. When they eventually leave, hire someone else that wants to learn the code base, waste however long it takes them to learn it, and then say goodbye to them when they too go back to wherever they came from.
Or go ahead and outsource the whole thing to half-way round the world, so's you have to talk to 'em at 2 AM when you're tired as F and get stuff screwed up, or alternatively, they're working at 2 AM when the human being is at his worst and they get stuff all F'd up.
We're worth it 'cuz we're here, and won't necessarily be saying goodbye so's you have to retrain a whole new crew every couple-three years. You won't have to repeat yourself to be understood nor listen very, very closely to understand what we're saying either.
But the American business is always going to go for the short-term gain, so go ahead - the people that would have graduated from American universities with software degrees are also smart enough to realize that you're going to skimp on wages, and make them compete unfairly with the rest of the world, and decide to get into some other line of work that is more steady and maybe doesn't even require all that study. There's lotsa jobs with decent, but not breathtaking pay that don't require accumulating a huge debt - maybe they can be OK with being a welder, or a railroad locomotive engineer, or 1 of a 100 different things to do that can't be outsourced and don't commonly involve a lot of layoffs. Hell, some of those jobs even have unions, something that makes it hard to feel sorry for the uppity software bunch that think they're too good to need a union, in spite of actors and pro sports players using them - but nooooo.... software people are too proud to form a union that would sue the asses off some company like Disney that (illegally) hires 250 software people from overseas to replace 250 of their US Citizen software people simply because the furriners will work for peanuts.
If the furriners are at all better at this than than US citizens, then its probably because the smartest US citizens are too smart to put in that sort of time and expense to compete for a job with a US company that's going to s*** all over them and fire them simply for wanting a salary commensurate with living well in the USA for the efforts required to acquire similar knowledge for other more lucrative careers.
So, suck it up, US industry. You created this situation. Just go ahead and suffer when you can't control your cheap labor because... losing your penny-pinching salary isn't worth enough to do what you want them to if they want to go home and you want 'em to stay. Y'all deserve each other.
We don't need nukes to feed the grid, I'm sure we can do it with wind, solar, and a global HVDC power grid. Problem solved, 'cuz if its midnight and the wind stops blowing, we'll get our power from the Ukraine... or maybe some windy place is Argentina.
What we _don't_ have a solution for is transportation. We cannot power cars, trucks, ships, planes, and locomotives on battery or grid power. We might be able to eventually electrify all the locomotives but not any time soon. Otherwise, 18 wheelers and riverboats and such all require big batteries that do not exist. They don't exist because they need to be cheap and small and cheap and high capacity and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap and quickly rechargeable and cheap. They need to be cheap so Joe Blow can buy a $12K electric car that does everything that a $12K gasoline powered car can do now. And that's no small feat. For instance, in the 1987 1 Lap of America rally a 1987 Yugo drove 9000 miles in 10 days to circumnavigate the USA. No electric car can do that right now, not even the Tesla because those doing that rally chose their own routes between certain identified points, so there needed to be gas stations pretty much everywhere, and not even Tesla has enough "supercharger" battery exchange stations to do that. And, of course Teslas are not cheap, and will not serve the lower classes with little disposable income.
So there's no electric solution for transportation, and we're forced to keep burning fossil fuels until there is. We can't stop, because stopping the travel, even a little, will have an outsized economic impact from people not being able to purchase and spend as they otherwise would, so those involved in the businesses they would otherwise patronize will go out of business, go on welfare roles, and the economy will be greatly harmed with much human suffering for those cast into poverty until the whole thing becomes completely unsupportable and collapses. We MUST continue burning fossil fuels.
I suggest to those that want to continuously whine about CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere suspend their protesting and marching and seeking new laws, but instead get their PHD's in electrochemistry and materials science, get their butts into a lab somewhere, and invent for us the magic battery that will make gasoline cars more expensive to buy and run than electric cars because the electric cars are so cheap, and not because you've done something to tax gasoline cars. Do that, and we can fill in everything else with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. and the world will be saved, maybe even cast into pre-industrial temperature ranges eventually. But no LAW you can pass will do anything to make this happen, and will likely have unintended consequences that end up impeding the move to electric cars.
Well, we already have the plants, and they are obviously not getting the job done. We likely don't have enough land that can grow them, and it might even be dangerous to create some kind of super-plant and stick it into the sea without knowing the environmental impact of doing so - what if it overmultiplies and not only clogs the seas to make shipping impossible, but sucks virtually all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and plunges the planet into an ice ball. I once read of an alien attack that was accomplished entirely by tricking our scientists into creating some single-cell critters that they carelessly allowed into the environment, they found their ways to the sea, and commence to sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, suffocating all animal life on the planet. Forget how the planet was saved, but it was probably unworkable and the planet would actually have been destroyed.
Doing our geo-engineering without summoning the fire of using living things to do it might be a safer route. If we make a machine that is detrimental to our survival, we can turn it off. Living things in the biosphere are much harder to control.
The geoengineering that needs to be worked is one that extracts the CO2 from the air and turns it into carbon and oxygen. Make it something that runs on solar energy and generates electricity at the same time and it'll be a winner. The STEP process:
would be something that would fix things forever, but apparently no one has actually gotten this thing to work. Somebody should. We could run it, have more and more pure carbon than you could get out of coal mines, and then recycle the carbon thru power plants to make even more electricity with _just_ CO2 as an emission, rather than CO2 plus SO2 plus mercury plus uranium plus radon plus a thousand other things not good for living things to contact.
The thing to stop is the diminishment of the prosperity we actually need to have in order to research the solutions to the problem. Research costs money, and if the country is pauperized by ill-conceieved and ineffective half-measures to attack the problem that don't actually have a hope of making a significant difference, the real solution will be delayed instead of hastened.
What we need first and foremost is a much improved battery. I call it the "magic battery" which needs to be cheap and small and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap and durable enough to not be wearing out and further increase cost and cheap and easily manufactured in quantity and cheap. Oh, and it has to be cheap so customers can buy a $12,000 electric car that will do everything that a $12,000 gasoline-powered car will do.
What we need is to be able to leave the oil and gas and coal in the ground, and we can't do that until we can make cars and planes and boats and ships and locomotives run on electricity. For that we need the magic battery. Otherwise, for solar and wind we need a world-wide power grid so that when the wind stops blowing at night, we can get our power from the Sahara or the Ukraine. A world-wide power grid and a magic battery will together solve the problem, but both will be expensive to make happen, and will be delayed by a strategy of "conservation" and maybe even "efficiency" if that is misapplied, such as vacuum cleaners that just make it take twice as long to do the carpets because they're underpowered.
Work the solution, but don't diminish us as a strategy.
Yes, radical. These guys want to harm the human race with extreme measures that still won't make a bit of difference, but they don't care, they have "the environment" to worship.
SCCA Solo 2 has a class for karts, shifter karts to be exact, and those are some of the scariest rides on the planet. And they'll give you a helluva shaking especially if the Solo 2 venue is not entirely smooth. So it'll scare the piss out of you and shake the kidney stone out of you.
You can get full-up, "used very little" shifter kart setups pretty cheap as racing hardware goes - less than $10K in a lotta cases for absolutely everything you need - because people buy 'em, put 'em on the track, it scares hell out of them, and they immediately put it on the trailer and then onto ebay.
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"The end of minimum wage laws..."
There is no more nobility in thinking of impoverishing our workers to gain market share than there was in enslaving blacks 150 years ago to achieve the same ends. This _should_ be the country where _everybody_ lives well, and should not have to own a business in order to do it. Most people are employees, not owners, and it is not good for the nation to have hordes of poor people in the country. If poor people are predominant, then the rich, or even the well-to-do business owners, end up supporting them some way or another, whether it's welfare or the insurrection of the oppressed that decide to rise up and take it. Might as well be fair to people in the 1st place, rather than having the gov't come and take your money to redistribute to the poor, or the poor coming after it directly.
With our vast country, vast natural resources, work ethic, transportation infrastructure, and so forth, there is no doubt in my mind that the USA can still, if it stops stealing money from everyone with income taxes, or at least greatly reduces the rates of industry-harming corporate income taxes, be the best place to manufacture on the planet. We just have to stop sticking pins in little dolls of CEO's and corporations, and help them instead.
"Even if your very rosy picture is true, who is it exactly that they're going to be selling a lot of those goods too? The US has been a mercantile nation for much of its existence, but if it starts erecting tariff walls, this will lead to trade wars."
If we would just abolish the income taxes, we wouldn't even need the tariff.
Otherwise, Trump is the "great negotiator" as Reagan was the "great communicator." He will renegotiate the treaties so that they are not charging tariffs on our stuff (as they reportedly are now) while we let their stuff come in completely for free, while the Chinese _additionally_ manipulate the value of their currency such that they are overcompetitive. That crap has to stop. We either trade with them fairly, or not at all. The thing that Trump has been saying for way over a year is that THEY need US waaaaay more than WE need THEM. I think he's good enough at this to know what he's talking about.
"Large American companies pay an effective corporate tax rate closer to 12.6%, according to the Government Accountability Office. They pay more to their CEO's than they pay in corporate income tax."
So we might as well eliminate corporate income tax entirely, because it isn't making significant money for the US Treasury, AND the corporations have to jump thru all kinds of hoops and hire armies of lawyers and accountants to take advantage of every loophole to lower their taxes to 12.6%.
Just get rid of _all_ income tax - pass the Fair Tax, and watch the economy roar - and yeah, ALL those factories that left would come back.
I don't believe they will be low-wage jobs, because we can make the cost of manufacturing the same or lower than the foreigners despite their low wages by not taxing and regulating the H out of them. Just lower (or I prefer eliminate) the taxes they've been paying, and relax all the regs we can without gettting people hurt or killed (you can totally eliminate all the workplace regs that go with O'care and save a bundle and not hurt or kill anyone) and we'll be once again competitive with the rest of the world. Eliminate _all_ income taxes at the Federal level, and institute the Fair tax, and I believe it would be they who lose most of their factories to us, and we would be absolutely wealthy as a nation.
Our auto plants are highly automated, and yet 1000's of people tromp in and out of them every day. That'll work to help eliminate the poverty class without everybody having to go to college. You can learn "electrician" and "welder" and so forth with union classes and on-the-job training. Learning the automation to be able to tend it and adjust it and repair it would come from the vendor's classes - the vendor of the automatic machines.
70,000 factories coming back from all over the world, employing 300 people each, would be 21 million. Maybe they won't average 300 people each, I dunno, but there are other things that can make the USA a winner that we could still do if the 15% corporate income tax and relaxation of regulations doesn't get them all.
And yeah, I think those rust-belt plants are coming back. There's a big-ass iron mine in N. Minnesota just aching to restart to full capacity and send taconite to Pittsburgh, or wherever. We'll make American products with American steel and sell them to Americans at the former lower prices the foreigners were charging and not have to ship either the taconite or the raw steel back and forth across the ocean. If we can just keep the freighters from following the Edmund Fitzgerald again, we should have the great lakes full of them, and the freighters full of ore to be smelted.
I really, really believe that we can make America great again. (We're going to do it with natural gas this time, too, and keep the emissions lower than the furriners do now since they're largely burning coal.)
I believe DJT's intervention amounts to not taxing and regulating the H out of them, so they can win in the marketplace without subsidies. It shouldn't cost us anything after the initial shock of not collecting so much money from corporate income taxes, but of course those taxes only amount to about 9% of our tax intake overall, so it shouldn't be all that big of a shock. After that, when our less-regulated and much-less-taxed industries start winning in the marketplace, the taxes from the now-richer middle class people that used to be poverty class should outstrip the losses in corporate income tax. If we indeed get back all 70,000 of our factories that have fled since about year 2000, the taxes from those, plus the taxes from their workers, _should_ allow us to start paying down the National Debt. I _think_ this is the grand plan as I decipher it out of what I've heard in speeches and from pundits. Have to wait and see what actually happens, of course.
Naw, the reason you automate _is_ our labor rates, but the fact that we can do it and mitigate the low-wage advantage of other countries is that reason we're going to win this.
The corporate income taxes are simply what keeps American manufacturing from winning in the marketplace except for a narrow range of products, such as autos, trucks, and heavy equipment, all with outsized shipping costs. If we can dramatically lower the corporate income taxes, we can probably get much more manufacturing into the country, and supply people that didn't go to college with good jobs that get or keep them out of poverty. (If we passed the Fair Tax, which completely eliminates all Federal income taxes, we could probably have the entirety of the world's manufacturing here, we'd be such a good manufacturing tax haven, and would prosper beyond wild imagination.)
As for the regulations, a lot of them do scale with the size of the workforce. Obamacare, for instance, has a lot of rules and regulations that cost a whale of a lot of money for each employee, or if the number of employees per company exceeds a certain amount, or if the employees exceed a certain number of work hours. This is just one set of extremely expensive regulations that can be repealed, and are in fact slated to be repealed in the next administration.
Safety regulations often are more expensive for more employees. Of course, a lot of these are _not_ unnecessary, and we wouldn't want to get rid of them, but some could be a bit over the top. I'm not really familiar with them, but keep reading about their existence and damaging impact on American business. I read an account by an Virginia mine operator that the inspections they undergo are a bit ridiculous, kind of like a military white glove inspection, that are not designed to be passed, but instead to generate fines as a revenue stream for the gov't. Things like a barrel of some waste material is found to have a loose lid, and then its large sized fines for that when the worker was just coming back within a few minutes to put more in the barrel, things like that. We have to review all the regulations, get rid of the ones that are not necessary and the ones that are more expensive than any consequence they purport to prevent.
That's not a million new jobs in the US, but probably 50,000 new jobs in the US, maybe less. We will automate what they have people standing at tables by the 1000's to assemble by hand. They have cheap labor, so cannot afford to automate. We can. Still, 50,000 new American jobs which may cost the company, say, $70,000 a year with all the benefits and such is still a good deal when compared to a million Chinese costing them maybe $5 / hr, or $10,000 / yr. These of course are not real, researched numbers, but probably aren't all that far off either. That would be 10 billion dollars for the 1 million Chinese workers and 3 billion, 500 million for the US workers. Don't know how much for the additional costs of the machinery, but the machinery works 24/7 and doesn't get tired or sick. Apparently we need more US workers, or the machinery costs are sufficient to keep us from doing this here now, but I think if the taxes are lowered on US manufacturing, and a lot of costly regulations that don't benefit in proportion to their cost are eliminated, we can get this done, and the jobs back here.
"However high labor costs in the US necessitate a high level of automation..."
High corporate income tax rates and costly regulations necessitate a high level of automation... that screws millions of US citizens out of good-paying factory jobs here...
"Let's not forget the regulatory difference. Some of that manufacturing is unprofitable to bring to the states because it is so dirty."
Its dirty the way they do it. I am not convinced that we can't figure out how to do it cleanly. We're already making much of our electricity with natural gas, solar, and wind, which is likely to only continue to get better since we have absolute oceans of natural gas, and the Dakotas are the Saudi Arabia of wind. Solar is everwhere, and these interruptable sources will, if we _ever_ get the magic battery that will store that much electrical energy, take over completely. Then things will be _really_ clean. We only then have to manage the various chemicals we use in our processes. I think we can, with the gov't aiding us instead of hindering us.
"The mines could be re-opened, but it would probably require government intervention."
I think Donald Trump is all about intervention if it will "Make America Great Again." Stand by for governmental miracles of the beneficial kind.
"That is correct. As long as the US has wages that substantially exceed those of other countries there will be a strong pull to locate labor intensive jobs in places where labor costs are low. That is why most US based manufacturing is capital intensive instead of labor intensive."
This is the huge misconception that has been screwing us for decades. Labor rates are NOT the problem. Taxes are.
We have the higest corporate income tax on the planet. THAT is what is causing manufacturing to leave the country. Its not the worker wages, because when we build factories in the USA, we automate the H out of them. There aren't that many workers. Certainly not like Foxxcon where 1000's of workers stand at tables all day and assemble them by hand. We'd have maybe a hundred or two hundred in a factory with 1000's of machines, the workers feeding the machines raw materials, keeping them adjusted and lubricated, checking for scrap, etc. The labor would not be the big part of the price of the product when produced in the USA, but right now, corporate taxes AND regulations have killed much of US manufacturing.
Here's an example from the auto industry. It takes 30 - 33 labor hours to build a car in a US factory. According to the car industries themselves, their workers cost them about $78 / hr. Multiply it out, its about $2500. However, if you study the Fair Tax, the cost of _all_ income taxes to US manufacturing, and this includes the capital gains taxes, worker's individual income taxes, payroll taxes, etc. is 22% of the price of whatever product is built in the USA. So, for a $30K SUV, that is about a $6,600 tax bite while the labor rate would still be only about $2500. You could enslave auto workers, pay them $0, and still not have anywhere close to the size of the effect that getting rid of ALL the income taxes, which is what the Fair Tax people have advocated for a couple decades (and we still do.) But the simple act of lowering the corporate income taxes, and rolling back a lot of unneeded regulations as the new administration is promising to do, will help the auto industry build more cars in the USA, and I believe will likely help the cell phone industry build cell phones in the USA.
I've read in years past - 1 or 2 years ago - that there are exactly zero cell phones built in the USA. Is that right? I don't know, but if so, I think that's about to change.
We have sources of materials in our own country, we don't need the Chinese materials. Our mines for them are currently closed because the prices of those materials in the currency-manipulated China are so cheap that our raw materials are too expensive when mined here. Lowering the corporate income tax to 15% is likely to change that, and see those rare earth mines opened up again, and... presto, no more problem with raw materials in the USA.
With the pro-business administration that is coming into Washington, and the vow to "Make America Great Again", I'm expecting that much of what is made in China is going to be made in America after a while. It won't be 1000's of Foxxcon workers standing for hours at tables assembling them by hand for a dollar two nintety eight an hour, it'll be American workers tending 30 - 50 automatic machines, keeping them in raw materials, keeping them adjusted, lubricated, supplied with power, and checking for scrap, and they'll be well-paid, and the iphones shucking out the conveyor belt will be every bit as desirable as the ones from China, and about the same price. That's what I expect, anyway. There's lots of ways for America to compete if we stop allowing the foreigners to have the huge advantages of lower taxes and currency manipulation.
No, its 'cuz if we were wrong about WMD in Iraq, it was likely that Saddam, who hated our guts over Gulf War 1, would have given said WMD to terrorists who would have deployed it on our densest population centers, the east coast and California. An anthrax attack could have possibly killed a million people. Was it worth 5000 dead soldiers to prevent that for-sure? I dunno, whadda you think? I live on the east coast, BTW, but have, or at least had immunity to anthrax due to having traveled to Iraq a couple times to assist the US Army. But it wouldn't be any fun to wake up one day and find that 90% of the people in my area dead due to such an attack.
...and hire all foreign staff. When they eventually leave, hire someone else that wants to learn the code base, waste however long it takes them to learn it, and then say goodbye to them when they too go back to wherever they came from.
Or go ahead and outsource the whole thing to half-way round the world, so's you have to talk to 'em at 2 AM when you're tired as F and get stuff screwed up, or alternatively, they're working at 2 AM when the human being is at his worst and they get stuff all F'd up.
We're worth it 'cuz we're here, and won't necessarily be saying goodbye so's you have to retrain a whole new crew every couple-three years. You won't have to repeat yourself to be understood nor listen very, very closely to understand what we're saying either.
But the American business is always going to go for the short-term gain, so go ahead - the people that would have graduated from American universities with software degrees are also smart enough to realize that you're going to skimp on wages, and make them compete unfairly with the rest of the world, and decide to get into some other line of work that is more steady and maybe doesn't even require all that study. There's lotsa jobs with decent, but not breathtaking pay that don't require accumulating a huge debt - maybe they can be OK with being a welder, or a railroad locomotive engineer, or 1 of a 100 different things to do that can't be outsourced and don't commonly involve a lot of layoffs. Hell, some of those jobs even have unions, something that makes it hard to feel sorry for the uppity software bunch that think they're too good to need a union, in spite of actors and pro sports players using them - but nooooo.... software people are too proud to form a union that would sue the asses off some company like Disney that (illegally) hires 250 software people from overseas to replace 250 of their US Citizen software people simply because the furriners will work for peanuts.
If the furriners are at all better at this than than US citizens, then its probably because the smartest US citizens are too smart to put in that sort of time and expense to compete for a job with a US company that's going to s*** all over them and fire them simply for wanting a salary commensurate with living well in the USA for the efforts required to acquire similar knowledge for other more lucrative careers.
So, suck it up, US industry. You created this situation. Just go ahead and suffer when you can't control your cheap labor because... losing your penny-pinching salary isn't worth enough to do what you want them to if they want to go home and you want 'em to stay. Y'all deserve each other.
We don't need nukes to feed the grid, I'm sure we can do it with wind, solar, and a global HVDC power grid. Problem solved, 'cuz if its midnight and the wind stops blowing, we'll get our power from the Ukraine... or maybe some windy place is Argentina.
What we _don't_ have a solution for is transportation. We cannot power cars, trucks, ships, planes, and locomotives on battery or grid power. We might be able to eventually electrify all the locomotives but not any time soon. Otherwise, 18 wheelers and riverboats and such all require big batteries that do not exist. They don't exist because they need to be cheap and small and cheap and high capacity and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap and quickly rechargeable and cheap. They need to be cheap so Joe Blow can buy a $12K electric car that does everything that a $12K gasoline powered car can do now. And that's no small feat. For instance, in the 1987 1 Lap of America rally a 1987 Yugo drove 9000 miles in 10 days to circumnavigate the USA. No electric car can do that right now, not even the Tesla because those doing that rally chose their own routes between certain identified points, so there needed to be gas stations pretty much everywhere, and not even Tesla has enough "supercharger" battery exchange stations to do that. And, of course Teslas are not cheap, and will not serve the lower classes with little disposable income.
So there's no electric solution for transportation, and we're forced to keep burning fossil fuels until there is. We can't stop, because stopping the travel, even a little, will have an outsized economic impact from people not being able to purchase and spend as they otherwise would, so those involved in the businesses they would otherwise patronize will go out of business, go on welfare roles, and the economy will be greatly harmed with much human suffering for those cast into poverty until the whole thing becomes completely unsupportable and collapses. We MUST continue burning fossil fuels.
I suggest to those that want to continuously whine about CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere suspend their protesting and marching and seeking new laws, but instead get their PHD's in electrochemistry and materials science, get their butts into a lab somewhere, and invent for us the magic battery that will make gasoline cars more expensive to buy and run than electric cars because the electric cars are so cheap, and not because you've done something to tax gasoline cars. Do that, and we can fill in everything else with wind, solar, hydro, geothermal, etc. and the world will be saved, maybe even cast into pre-industrial temperature ranges eventually. But no LAW you can pass will do anything to make this happen, and will likely have unintended consequences that end up impeding the move to electric cars.
1) Build a prison cell for absolutely every American citizen.
2) Pass a law about changing passwords or otherwise securing computers.
3) Fill 'em all up.
Well, we already have the plants, and they are obviously not getting the job done. We likely don't have enough land that can grow them, and it might even be dangerous to create some kind of super-plant and stick it into the sea without knowing the environmental impact of doing so - what if it overmultiplies and not only clogs the seas to make shipping impossible, but sucks virtually all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and plunges the planet into an ice ball. I once read of an alien attack that was accomplished entirely by tricking our scientists into creating some single-cell critters that they carelessly allowed into the environment, they found their ways to the sea, and commence to sucking all the oxygen out of the atmosphere, suffocating all animal life on the planet. Forget how the planet was saved, but it was probably unworkable and the planet would actually have been destroyed.
Doing our geo-engineering without summoning the fire of using living things to do it might be a safer route. If we make a machine that is detrimental to our survival, we can turn it off. Living things in the biosphere are much harder to control.
The geoengineering that needs to be worked is one that extracts the CO2 from the air and turns it into carbon and oxygen. Make it something that runs on solar energy and generates electricity at the same time and it'll be a winner. The STEP process:
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10...
would be something that would fix things forever, but apparently no one has actually gotten this thing to work. Somebody should. We could run it, have more and more pure carbon than you could get out of coal mines, and then recycle the carbon thru power plants to make even more electricity with _just_ CO2 as an emission, rather than CO2 plus SO2 plus mercury plus uranium plus radon plus a thousand other things not good for living things to contact.
The thing to stop is the diminishment of the prosperity we actually need to have in order to research the solutions to the problem. Research costs money, and if the country is pauperized by ill-conceieved and ineffective half-measures to attack the problem that don't actually have a hope of making a significant difference, the real solution will be delayed instead of hastened.
What we need first and foremost is a much improved battery. I call it the "magic battery" which needs to be cheap and small and cheap and rugged enough for automotive use and cheap and durable enough to not be wearing out and further increase cost and cheap and easily manufactured in quantity and cheap. Oh, and it has to be cheap so customers can buy a $12,000 electric car that will do everything that a $12,000 gasoline-powered car will do.
What we need is to be able to leave the oil and gas and coal in the ground, and we can't do that until we can make cars and planes and boats and ships and locomotives run on electricity. For that we need the magic battery. Otherwise, for solar and wind we need a world-wide power grid so that when the wind stops blowing at night, we can get our power from the Sahara or the Ukraine. A world-wide power grid and a magic battery will together solve the problem, but both will be expensive to make happen, and will be delayed by a strategy of "conservation" and maybe even "efficiency" if that is misapplied, such as vacuum cleaners that just make it take twice as long to do the carpets because they're underpowered.
Work the solution, but don't diminish us as a strategy.
Yes, radical. These guys want to harm the human race with extreme measures that still won't make a bit of difference, but they don't care, they have "the environment" to worship.
SCCA Solo 2 has a class for karts, shifter karts to be exact, and those are some of the scariest rides on the planet. And they'll give you a helluva shaking especially if the Solo 2 venue is not entirely smooth. So it'll scare the piss out of you and shake the kidney stone out of you.
You can get full-up, "used very little" shifter kart setups pretty cheap as racing hardware goes - less than $10K in a lotta cases for absolutely everything you need - because people buy 'em, put 'em on the track, it scares hell out of them, and they immediately put it on the trailer and then onto ebay.
If the kidney stones are not loose, will it still shake them?
Orlando? Best coasters on the planet are in Ohio: Cedar Point (Mellenium Force) and Kings Island (Beast.)
20? If I were you, I'd be on a coaster every weekend!!! Buy a season ticket. NOW!