No, they're not going to give up on all those Chinese factories. It means that they may set up a new plant, either for new work, or to augment existing work. I doubt it will replace anything though. If you're manufacturing in bulk and it requires a lot of labor, then the US is not a good place to do it. But there's still demand for US manufacturing in other areas; automated plants for parts, or building/assembling items with smaller quantities (macbooks maybe). For manual labor, most companies want cheap labor, non-union labor, and labor that doesn't go whistleblowing to the government.
Yup. The common reason to hire more workers is if your company is expanding. And they never hire more workers than they actually need. In boom times they may make less prudent hiring decisions (witness the dotcom), but generally they're always paying attention to the bottom line. Extra revenue coming from company growth is likely to mean they want to expand. But extra revenue coming from a tax break is different - it doesn't mean the company is growing, they don't have a larger market, they haven't reduced their operating expanses, the margins remain the same. So it's highly likely that in this case that extra revenue will be funneled back to the investors and shareholders.
Now the tax cuts may help a few businesses survive that otherwise wouldn't. That's a good thing. But the giant increase in the deficit probably balances that out. A deficit can hurt a business as well as they may feel pressure to provide more servicesm to employees (growing health care costs, a better retirement plan, etc).
Which is probably still more than most companies will do. It's the way companies work in real life. If they become more profitable, the share holders make more money and the employees may get a thank you. If profits go down, some of those employees will lose jobs and salaries will be frozen across the board. Trickle down always stops a few feet outside of the board room.
Yup. I'd rather get cash myself. Sure, I still get some cash bonuses, but for awhile most of it was RSUs with strings attached. Every few months I'll get an email that says something like "7 shares have vested!"
And remember, we're not supposed to worry about the war, and just pretend that everything is normal and spend money instead of save it, otherwise the terrists win.
Of course, not necessarily Bush's fault either. Rumsfeld was trying to shrink and optimize the military. And then you back to earlier presidents and the earlier, and the chain keeps going back a long ways. Anyone blaming a deficit on a single president is deluded. But in the game of Us Versus Them, you're required to blame Them.
Also remember, government mispending depends upon what your politics are. Pork barrel spending is bad, unless it's your own representative who promises to add 100 temporary jobs. Both major parties are guilty of overspending in order to appease their voting base, and both are guilty of increasing the deficit to record highs. What we've got are two school boys with bloody noses pointing to each other and saying "he started it!"
It's only a labor shortage for certain types of employees. Meanwhile there are many unemployed or homeless people who will only ever see the wrong kind of trickle down.
Economically you need to do this at scale. Ie, have utilities do this, not individual homes. But solar is focusing on homes right now. And indeed storage is one of those issues involved.
When my grandfather set up his ranch in the hills, he had no electricity at the start. So he had to make his own with a generator when it was needed, and that could be expensive and inconvenient. When the power lines ran to his house things improved and were cheaper. Today solar is a bit similar. Having each homeowner be responsible for their own solar is inefficient. It's used mostly to augment existing electricity from the grid.
And you augment this with energy storage. Which on a large scale will make commercial wind and solar farms more reliable. Right now I think the reason solar is big on homes and not very big commercially, is because of the storage problems. Solar is great for the extra energy boost on a home when the air-conditioner is running, it's moderate to good for providing extra daytime power to the grid (enough so that utilities don't want to buy that power anymore), and it's bad to moderate on cost (everyone buy individually.
Ultimately we need to be trying all these things, any sort of renewable energy is going to be a long term win, whereas coal, gas, and petroleum are on their way out.
We also have hydro and nuclear, and both have their problems. Hydro is nice when combined with water storage in California, but it has a large environmental impact. Nuclear is potentially very clean as far as emissions, but people still don't know what to do with the waste except to find a state that wants the money and bury it all underground, it has a very high cost of operation. Geothermal is too localized.
Every energy source however still needs a lot of research. It would be great if the US was still in the forefront of science.
And economically, if you look at the long run, petroleum will come to an end. Sure, it screws up the short term profits which is why this issue has become a political one instead of merely economic. But think back, we nearly caused many whale species to become extinct because of reliance on whale oil before we switched to petroleum. Do we really need to get those oil wells as dry as a bone before we switch to something else?
Granted, there are a lot of other things not great about biodiesel at the moment. But in terms of economics we do need to find an alternative to non-renewable energy and fuels.
You still haven't read about this case. McDonald's had been warned several times about the danger and they ignored it. Their coffee was served much hotter than other places. Most coffee will not cause severe enough damage from an accidental spill to require skin grafts.
You need to find another example for an "all lawsuits are stupid" campaign.
However I did notice within the last decade that there are more complex pieces out there, which surprised me. Complex melodies, interleaving melodic lines, interesting harmonies, needing real musical training to play. Granted, this could all just be from someone with etensive musical experience writing songs for kids to perform...
San Francisco yes, but head south to Silicon Valley where google is. Still extremely high housing costs but unlike San Francisco you will still have some money left at the end of the month. And yes, I know S.F. has become merely a new expensive residential suburb for those who work in Silicon valley.
We get a choice of Macbook Pro or Macbook Air at work. Generally only people who travel a lot prefer the Air, because the screen is so tiny, the keyboard is cramped, it's not nearly as powerful.
Governments have very little power to get funding, if the citizens bother to vote. They have to get permissions to do almost everything, especially in a city that generally has to live by county, state, and federal rules.
A true free market fan should logically be angry if private industry gets special favors from government; like cable, oil, coal, farming, steel, oh, never mind, I guess everyone sucks at the goverment's teat.
Generally, the city pays for the infrastructure but outsources the operation. Yea, so it'll be as awful as the outsourced garbage, the outsourced water, the outsourced electricity, and the gawdawful city provided monopoly to the cable company.
Seriously, you'd get better customer service with a backalley unlicensed visectomy than by calling up a cable company. If that's the service level you're comparing the city too, that's a pretty low bar.
But precious milliseconds! This will help since the pages are taking many seconds to load already, what with all the javascript sucking up my cpu, and the slow as hell response the back office servers are providing at the moment.
Unemployment is a statistic to beware of. The US and many other countries do not include people who are not actively looking for work in their unemployment numbers. It also does not include people who are underemployed (engineers who are bagging groceries for example). Right now the economy in the US sucks, and you can see this with the increased number of homeless people and workers who have stagnant wages or who do not feel that their jobs are secure. And yet the official figures show that the US economy is going great, which is opposite of what the person on the street says.
True, but it still contributes to 1/7th of the US GDP, larger than any other state in the union, and larger than the proportion of its population would suggest.
There are people who cannot work. Welfare traditionally has been about those people; the elderly, disabled, orphans, widows (back when women didn't typically work).
Ie, the changs in Medicaid to encourage more people to get back to work to continue to receive those benefits really won't have a big change in California, as most Medicaid recipients who can work are already working. The stereotype that the typical welfare recipient stays at home and watches Jerry Springer all day is a myth.
And the snag with "promote jobs that pay sufficient to achieve and sustain financial stability" is amazingly difficult. There is immense political pressure to not do this; ie, don't raise minimum wage, repeal rent control, etc. Fact is, trickle doesn't doesn't happen very often. When a company's profits go up, the majority of that goes to the shareholders rather than adding jobs or increasing wages. The system is built that way legally, the shareholders call the shots and they demand maximized return on investments even if the CEO wants to spend the money elsewhere.
Note also that California is roughly 11% of the population of the US as a whole. It is the most populous state in the union. So the number of welfare recipients, if evenly distributed, would already be very high. But of course the numbers are not evenly distributed. Some states work very hard to keep people out of the system and California is not as picky. Ie, Texas is second largest state, but it grants benefits for far fewer people than would qualify under federal guidelines, so that increases the percentage in all other states
Plus these statistics aren't distinguishing between all the various types of programs (food stamps, child programs, medicaid, etc), so I'm sure some people are out there stuck with Reagan's mythical "welfare queen" image in their heads for all of them. And the statistics don't take into account actually dollars being given out - which in California has been cut a few times in the last decade. Average cash grant is less than $500 for a typical family.
Then, how many welfare recipients in the US are there? Seem like roughly 67 million. 30% of that is more than HALF of the population of California, which clearly is not true. So that 68 million number and the 30% number are coming from different sources that aren't agreeing with each other. There are so many ways to churn these numbers that it's difficult to compare. Ie, do they include medicaid, or healthy families program (discounted insurance), or access to public housing?
Finallly, pay attention to other numbers. California gives more taxes to the Federal government than it gets back in return. One chart puts California as 47th in the list of states using Federal assistance. And California contributes the largest share in federal tax dollars (which makes sense as it has the largest GDP), but gets back proportionally much less in federal assistance or contracts.
Agreed, California schools on average are not very good. The biggest problem I think is that schools are not equitable, which means if you're in a poorer area then your schools are going to be much worse. The residents know it's a problem; prospective parents will spend more money than they can afford to move into better school districts. We're more diverse here so you can't really call it "white flight" but the principle is very similar. There has been a large migration to private schools for those who can afford it. It's a big change for me, since when I grew up people went to the same schools, rich or poor.
There is also the problem of funding. I think it really took root after Prop 13 passed which limited increases in property taxes. That's a divisive issue by itself, with many supporters and detractors with very good reasons on both sides. Within a year or two of that passing I saw big changes because funding was scarce everywhere. Richer areas did better because they also had more support from the community with money and volunteers; poorer areas had to cut programs and increase class sizes. The exodus from public schools has only exacerbated this problem. Of the years California has not really come up with a workable scheme for improving the schools and bringing them back to where they used to be.
So compare to Massachussets. Just as blue or bluer than California, same high state and local taxes, very similar all around except for having more snow days. And yet Massachussets comes out number one in schools and California was 10th from the bottom.
People love to blame the unions and the teachers but I don't think that's where the bulk of the blame lies.
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No, they're not going to give up on all those Chinese factories. It means that they may set up a new plant, either for new work, or to augment existing work. I doubt it will replace anything though. If you're manufacturing in bulk and it requires a lot of labor, then the US is not a good place to do it. But there's still demand for US manufacturing in other areas; automated plants for parts, or building/assembling items with smaller quantities (macbooks maybe). For manual labor, most companies want cheap labor, non-union labor, and labor that doesn't go whistleblowing to the government.
Yup. The common reason to hire more workers is if your company is expanding. And they never hire more workers than they actually need. In boom times they may make less prudent hiring decisions (witness the dotcom), but generally they're always paying attention to the bottom line. Extra revenue coming from company growth is likely to mean they want to expand. But extra revenue coming from a tax break is different - it doesn't mean the company is growing, they don't have a larger market, they haven't reduced their operating expanses, the margins remain the same. So it's highly likely that in this case that extra revenue will be funneled back to the investors and shareholders.
Now the tax cuts may help a few businesses survive that otherwise wouldn't. That's a good thing. But the giant increase in the deficit probably balances that out. A deficit can hurt a business as well as they may feel pressure to provide more servicesm to employees (growing health care costs, a better retirement plan, etc).
Which is probably still more than most companies will do. It's the way companies work in real life. If they become more profitable, the share holders make more money and the employees may get a thank you. If profits go down, some of those employees will lose jobs and salaries will be frozen across the board. Trickle down always stops a few feet outside of the board room.
Yup. I'd rather get cash myself. Sure, I still get some cash bonuses, but for awhile most of it was RSUs with strings attached. Every few months I'll get an email that says something like "7 shares have vested!"
And remember, we're not supposed to worry about the war, and just pretend that everything is normal and spend money instead of save it, otherwise the terrists win.
Of course, not necessarily Bush's fault either. Rumsfeld was trying to shrink and optimize the military. And then you back to earlier presidents and the earlier, and the chain keeps going back a long ways. Anyone blaming a deficit on a single president is deluded. But in the game of Us Versus Them, you're required to blame Them.
Also remember, government mispending depends upon what your politics are. Pork barrel spending is bad, unless it's your own representative who promises to add 100 temporary jobs. Both major parties are guilty of overspending in order to appease their voting base, and both are guilty of increasing the deficit to record highs. What we've got are two school boys with bloody noses pointing to each other and saying "he started it!"
It's only a labor shortage for certain types of employees. Meanwhile there are many unemployed or homeless people who will only ever see the wrong kind of trickle down.
Economically you need to do this at scale. Ie, have utilities do this, not individual homes. But solar is focusing on homes right now. And indeed storage is one of those issues involved.
When my grandfather set up his ranch in the hills, he had no electricity at the start. So he had to make his own with a generator when it was needed, and that could be expensive and inconvenient. When the power lines ran to his house things improved and were cheaper. Today solar is a bit similar. Having each homeowner be responsible for their own solar is inefficient. It's used mostly to augment existing electricity from the grid.
And you augment this with energy storage. Which on a large scale will make commercial wind and solar farms more reliable. Right now I think the reason solar is big on homes and not very big commercially, is because of the storage problems. Solar is great for the extra energy boost on a home when the air-conditioner is running, it's moderate to good for providing extra daytime power to the grid (enough so that utilities don't want to buy that power anymore), and it's bad to moderate on cost (everyone buy individually.
Ultimately we need to be trying all these things, any sort of renewable energy is going to be a long term win, whereas coal, gas, and petroleum are on their way out.
We also have hydro and nuclear, and both have their problems. Hydro is nice when combined with water storage in California, but it has a large environmental impact. Nuclear is potentially very clean as far as emissions, but people still don't know what to do with the waste except to find a state that wants the money and bury it all underground, it has a very high cost of operation. Geothermal is too localized.
Every energy source however still needs a lot of research. It would be great if the US was still in the forefront of science.
And economically, if you look at the long run, petroleum will come to an end. Sure, it screws up the short term profits which is why this issue has become a political one instead of merely economic. But think back, we nearly caused many whale species to become extinct because of reliance on whale oil before we switched to petroleum. Do we really need to get those oil wells as dry as a bone before we switch to something else?
Granted, there are a lot of other things not great about biodiesel at the moment. But in terms of economics we do need to find an alternative to non-renewable energy and fuels.
You crazy. But this is slashdot and so it's easy to pass for normal here.
I suggest you spend next Christmas in Uruguay or Australia.
You still haven't read about this case. McDonald's had been warned several times about the danger and they ignored it. Their coffee was served much hotter than other places. Most coffee will not cause severe enough damage from an accidental spill to require skin grafts.
You need to find another example for an "all lawsuits are stupid" campaign.
However I did notice within the last decade that there are more complex pieces out there, which surprised me. Complex melodies, interleaving melodic lines, interesting harmonies, needing real musical training to play. Granted, this could all just be from someone with etensive musical experience writing songs for kids to perform...
San Francisco yes, but head south to Silicon Valley where google is. Still extremely high housing costs but unlike San Francisco you will still have some money left at the end of the month. And yes, I know S.F. has become merely a new expensive residential suburb for those who work in Silicon valley.
We get a choice of Macbook Pro or Macbook Air at work. Generally only people who travel a lot prefer the Air, because the screen is so tiny, the keyboard is cramped, it's not nearly as powerful.
Governments have very little power to get funding, if the citizens bother to vote. They have to get permissions to do almost everything, especially in a city that generally has to live by county, state, and federal rules.
A true free market fan should logically be angry if private industry gets special favors from government; like cable, oil, coal, farming, steel, oh, never mind, I guess everyone sucks at the goverment's teat.
Generally, the city pays for the infrastructure but outsources the operation. Yea, so it'll be as awful as the outsourced garbage, the outsourced water, the outsourced electricity, and the gawdawful city provided monopoly to the cable company.
Seriously, you'd get better customer service with a backalley unlicensed visectomy than by calling up a cable company. If that's the service level you're comparing the city too, that's a pretty low bar.
But precious milliseconds! This will help since the pages are taking many seconds to load already, what with all the javascript sucking up my cpu, and the slow as hell response the back office servers are providing at the moment.
Unemployment is a statistic to beware of. The US and many other countries do not include people who are not actively looking for work in their unemployment numbers. It also does not include people who are underemployed (engineers who are bagging groceries for example). Right now the economy in the US sucks, and you can see this with the increased number of homeless people and workers who have stagnant wages or who do not feel that their jobs are secure. And yet the official figures show that the US economy is going great, which is opposite of what the person on the street says.
True, but it still contributes to 1/7th of the US GDP, larger than any other state in the union, and larger than the proportion of its population would suggest.
There are people who cannot work. Welfare traditionally has been about those people; the elderly, disabled, orphans, widows (back when women didn't typically work).
Ie, the changs in Medicaid to encourage more people to get back to work to continue to receive those benefits really won't have a big change in California, as most Medicaid recipients who can work are already working. The stereotype that the typical welfare recipient stays at home and watches Jerry Springer all day is a myth.
And the snag with "promote jobs that pay sufficient to achieve and sustain financial stability" is amazingly difficult. There is immense political pressure to not do this; ie, don't raise minimum wage, repeal rent control, etc. Fact is, trickle doesn't doesn't happen very often. When a company's profits go up, the majority of that goes to the shareholders rather than adding jobs or increasing wages. The system is built that way legally, the shareholders call the shots and they demand maximized return on investments even if the CEO wants to spend the money elsewhere.
Note also that California is roughly 11% of the population of the US as a whole. It is the most populous state in the union. So the number of welfare recipients, if evenly distributed, would already be very high. But of course the numbers are not evenly distributed. Some states work very hard to keep people out of the system and California is not as picky. Ie, Texas is second largest state, but it grants benefits for far fewer people than would qualify under federal guidelines, so that increases the percentage in all other states
Plus these statistics aren't distinguishing between all the various types of programs (food stamps, child programs, medicaid, etc), so I'm sure some people are out there stuck with Reagan's mythical "welfare queen" image in their heads for all of them. And the statistics don't take into account actually dollars being given out - which in California has been cut a few times in the last decade. Average cash grant is less than $500 for a typical family.
Then, how many welfare recipients in the US are there? Seem like roughly 67 million. 30% of that is more than HALF of the population of California, which clearly is not true. So that 68 million number and the 30% number are coming from different sources that aren't agreeing with each other. There are so many ways to churn these numbers that it's difficult to compare. Ie, do they include medicaid, or healthy families program (discounted insurance), or access to public housing?
Finallly, pay attention to other numbers. California gives more taxes to the Federal government than it gets back in return. One chart puts California as 47th in the list of states using Federal assistance. And California contributes the largest share in federal tax dollars (which makes sense as it has the largest GDP), but gets back proportionally much less in federal assistance or contracts.
Agreed, California schools on average are not very good. The biggest problem I think is that schools are not equitable, which means if you're in a poorer area then your schools are going to be much worse. The residents know it's a problem; prospective parents will spend more money than they can afford to move into better school districts. We're more diverse here so you can't really call it "white flight" but the principle is very similar. There has been a large migration to private schools for those who can afford it. It's a big change for me, since when I grew up people went to the same schools, rich or poor.
There is also the problem of funding. I think it really took root after Prop 13 passed which limited increases in property taxes. That's a divisive issue by itself, with many supporters and detractors with very good reasons on both sides. Within a year or two of that passing I saw big changes because funding was scarce everywhere. Richer areas did better because they also had more support from the community with money and volunteers; poorer areas had to cut programs and increase class sizes. The exodus from public schools has only exacerbated this problem. Of the years California has not really come up with a workable scheme for improving the schools and bringing them back to where they used to be.
So compare to Massachussets. Just as blue or bluer than California, same high state and local taxes, very similar all around except for having more snow days. And yet Massachussets comes out number one in schools and California was 10th from the bottom.
People love to blame the unions and the teachers but I don't think that's where the bulk of the blame lies.
Thank you for your links.
Why would that affect Canada?