There was a massive expansion of the money supply in the 1920s (never properly measured in the government's published figures), a severe asset price bubble (never properly measured by official inflation figures, but at least see stock market up to 1929), then a severe asset price crash (see 1929 Wall Street Crash), and then perverse severe tightening of credit by the Fed and other central banks, which enormously compounded the problems. This is analogous to what is happening now.
You were correct up to the last part. There is no Fed tightening of credit. Those bail-outs are expanding credit (at the expense of some moral hazard), and I doubt the fed would let the money supply dry up by 2.6% like they did in 1929. We've still got a reasonable amount inflation, not deflation, and unlike in 1929, I don't see commodity prices dropping because of global economic growth.
On the other hand, I do not trust the legislature. We may see new "bank/mortgage regulations" that do dry up credit, or perhaps another Smoot-Hawley tariff Act and a global protectionist trade war.
One more idea, if we legalized all the illegal aliens, and eliminated laws about large numbers of unrelated people living in a house, we could probably get the real estate market prices back up...
It came as quite a shock to me that the new multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chips are only good to 10,000 - 100,000 write/erase cycles, compared to the old single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash that were good for 1,000,000 or more write/erase cycles.
This may not affect you if you are buying flash memory for a consumer camera and you take a few shots per day, but if you are buying a solid-state hard drive you intend to fill with video and erase every few hours, be careful!
It's not "idiotic" but some of the more rapid free-market types repeat it as though it is a physical law of the universe. In the case of the last eight years we've tried to combine spending increases and the need to fund two wars with massive tax cuts on the rich. How well has that worked out for us?
Most true "free-market types" didn't want to go to war (as they say, Google Ron Paul)...plus the tax cuts were not on "the rich", the cuts were for everyone, and most people making under $20K/yr earn negative income tax through EITC. Still the Top 5% of taxpayers pay 50% of all income tax revenues.
Most true "free-market types" also realize that running a deficit is inherently raising taxes on future generations.
It should also be noted that while military costs are expensive (~$700 billion/yr) , they are about half of Social Security and Medicare outlays ($1.2 trillion / yr.) which of course are paid for in non-progressive payroll taxes. States also pay out $350 billion/yr. in their own health care costs. We already have 50% socialized medicine if you count up all the dollars.
The "Laffer Curve" is inherently true at the extremes, but the details are very complex. It is clear that dropping top tax rates from 90% increased revenue collection from the rich because it cost less for them to pay more tax than hide their income. Does a percent up or down from where we are now matter though? Who knows.
Any income tax is a deadweight loss to the labor economy, but if tax dollars raised are effectively solving economic externalities a rise in income taxes may balance that out. Of course, the question is whether $700 billion in bombs is really helping externalities. Or if paying rich old people's medical bills is better than them saving up for their retirement medical bills themselves (possibly through investing in the capital economy and creating jobs).
Let's put some numbers on it: bulk satellite transponder time is going to cost you $100 to $200 per hour depending on band and desirability of satellite.
If you go with DVB-S2 on 36 MHz transponder Ku satellite, I'm assuming you can generally get by with 8PSK 2/3 modulation (except when it rains very hard), about 7.1 dB Es/N0, for a data rate of ~60 Mbps.
To just break even on $100/month service, you need to revenue of around $100k a month (add in uplink equipment depreciation, internet access costs, to transponder costs), and that means you need at least 1,000 subscribers.
Average data rate of 60 Mbps / 1000 subscribers is 60 kbps. Yes, Internet use is bursty, but this is a worst-case scenario.
I suspect most of these systems probably have 10,000 subscribers for a 10:1 oversubscription on a typical 60 kbps end-user capability.
Note that I've ignored any return satellite bandwidth.
The Ka band satellites do have the ability to have smaller spot beams, and they may use DVB-S2 variable bitrate to ramp up on cells that have no bad weather, but I don't think the SpaceWay sats are actually being used in this fashion right now.
The verdict I've heard from everyone using satellite internet: better than dial-up (but with more latency for games), but that's about it.
What free trade also does for third world farmers is encourage them to grow for export rather than for the local markets. There are countries with plenty of farms, but starving populations, because the farmers are growing fancy stuff for us rather than staples for their neighbors.
Show me a country that has solid private property rights and starving people. For example, the government owns all land n Ethiopia, and land cannot be bought and sold. Or Zimbabwe, which just split up all the major productive farms in the country and gave them to soldiers.
The path to agricultural development is that farms get large and then they can achieve economies of scale, including increasing productivity because they get big enough to be able to purchase capital items like tractors and combines. Even the non-owner farm workers earn more because they are more productive.
For example, in Brazil, only 21% of farms are under 2 Ha, meanwhile in Ethiopia it is 87%.
Please explain what TED is supposed to do about US import/export policy
TED should teach people economics instead of BS stargazing at technology that is useless to most people on the planet without actual pro-market political change.
I suggest letting the market take its course and combining them to obtain economies of scale.
Unfortunately, the US limits the amount of foreign ownership in its domestic airlines to a maximum of 49%, with a maximum of 25% of direct control. That's why Virgin Atlantic couldn't just buy a US airline, it had to start a new US company called "Virgin America". Similarly they had to start airlines in Australia (Virgin Blue) and Nigeria (Virgin Nigeria).
. Hydro. yeah, you lose a valley, but it's better than those lower in the list. You at least get reliable power as long as you continue to get rain./I.
Unfortunately, hydropower releases CO2 and also Methane (a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) from rotting biomatter. Hydro takes a stream and turns it into a decaying swamp, then the swamp water gushes out and release its gasses.
So, as a resident of Montreal, I have to ask, does anyone know how well electric cars are supposed to fare in cold-weather conditions? How about hybrids?
Sorry, because of the Global War on CO2, all you Canadians are going to have to move south. UN Resolution you know. It is the right thing to do for the planet!
The oil price has more than doubled in the last year, and quadrupled in the last three years. There has never before been such an extreme, sustained increase in the oil price. This will cause severe inflation, and the economic consequences will be severe....The economies of the world are in the early stages of heading into a very severe inflationary recession. Some people go further and anticipate economic collapse, others fear something similar to The Great Depression. The technical term for it is stagflation.
As Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, once said: "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
Commodity shocks (like we are seeing in oil) are a very different kind of inflation than government expanding the money supply. It affects some sectors, but not all sectors equally.
It does happen that the US government is expanding the money supply now, but not by a lot (IHMO, others disagree). On the other hand, vis-a-vis to other currencies the dollar is experiencing a decline because of our large trade deficit (supply and demand at work, the world is getting more dollars from the US than the world needs to purchase from the US).
Now granted, once high oil prices find their way into other "core" goods through transportation and energy costs, it becomes tougher to split out what is commodity-induced inflation and what is monetary expansion inflation. Of course, for a lot of people, it might not matter, but for policy makers the differences are very important.
The Great Depression was very different from Stagflation. Monetarists, including current Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, feel the Great Depression was a standard business cycle recession made incredibly worse by overly tight monetary policy - and in fact massive deflation occurred during the Great Depression, leading people to hoard cash (as it was rising in value) and reduce consumption.
Stagflation is a period of combined lower growth and inflation. In the 1970's, it was probably due to a combination of a real commodity shock of higher oil prices amplified by ever tightening regulation on business (Nixon even imposed "wage and price controls"). Carter began de-regulation of industries, and Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker cranked up interest rates to kill off stagflation.
The US is less sensitive to commodity price spike shocks today because we are way more efficient in their use than we were in the 1970's. That said, between the housing credit problem and high commodity prices, the Fed has some tough decisions to make over the next few months.
I think the best TED talks have been Steven Levitt talking about crack dealer business, and Paul Collier on the Bottom Billion.
All the technology in the world isn't going to fix developing countries where the laws, regulations, and corruption will keep the economies from growing to the point where the technology can be used efficiently. Once those barriers are gone, it isn't like people are stupid, they'll immediately use the appropriate needed technologies.
I suggest:
Michael Walker talking about his work on the Economic Freedom of the World index, and how economic freedom correlates with GDP, life expectancy, and other variables.
Karol Boudreaux from GMU's Mercatus Center talking about African governments bear much responsibility for driving formal-sector entrepreneurs out of the housing market and for driving their citizens into slums.
Don Boudreaux from GMU about the issues he has interviewed people for on Econtalk: car salesmen, signaling through educational diplomas, whether the gold standard is a good idea, challenges in health care, and much more.
Or a Nicholas Stern versus William Nordhaus debate on global warming costs versus benefits and their viewpoints on appropriate discount rates for the calculation?
All those reports that complain about IT job losses since 2001 are reflecting the dot-com implosion. I know hundreds of IT workers laid off during that time, none were laid off because of outsourcing, they were all laid off because of bad business decisions in a time of easy of capital.
Most IT folks I know have been re-employed since 2001. Currently across all unemployed, long-term unemployment is only 8% of unemployed.
I find it difficult to believe that there are currently 656,000 unemployed IT workers in the U.S - there are only 1.4 million unemployed Management, professional, and related occupations. I would not be surprised that short-term unemployment of IT workers is higher than others because of the rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I doubt they represent half of all office workers unemployed.
As of 2003, only 3% and the short-term unemployed and 4.2% of the long-term unemployed were in the Information sector.
At the same time, I know several recent Indian immigrants who started a company which created many new IT jobs in the US.
I agree that H1-B is silly. Anyone with a college education should be allowed to immigrate to the US and become citizens. They should come to the US where they can make use of our state of high economic freedom to generate wealth for all.
That said, I'm not going to slit my throat for the benefit of some poor people half a world away I'll never meet. Do for your own first.
I don't suggest you slit your throat. Don't waste your money on purchasing american goods if they are more expensive that foreign ones. For that matter, don't bother buying Windows and supporting the hard working people in Redmond if you think Linux is good enough.
If you look at the trends, there won't be too many people in absolute poverty (under $1 per day) in China fairly soon. By 2030, China will probably be economically indistinguishable from South Korea (a country that went from large amounts of absolute poverty in the 1950's to fairly advanced economy by the 1980's). By 2050, i suspect China will be indistinguishable from the US. India will probably be behind them by about 10-20 years.
Much of Africa will probably be in poverty for a long time until they give up their ethno-centric / nation-centric / anti-trade / anti-capitalist models. At least India and China are trying.
At this point, one stops looking toward other countries and at saving one's own country.
The global economy is not a zero-sum gain. Improvements in production and techniques in one country help people in other countries. We would all be better off if everyone on the planet was rich.
By the way, if we want to save the US, we should end the war on drugs and consider privatizing our socialist monopoly school system.
Short version is automotive jobs of the big 3 slowly started heading south after its passing.
So you are sure this had nothing to do with:
1) Crazy union rules that paid people to work even when there was no work for them 2) Crazy union pensions and health benefits 3) Lame products
And why are Nissan and Toyota opening plants in the US?
Keep in mind Chrysler almost went under in the 1980's, long before NAFTA came along.
Face it, the "big three" failed because of a combination of bad deals with unions (many dating from when Europe was still recovering from WWII), a long-term quality problem, and lack of innovative products.
The chance that NAFTA had much to do with the failure of the "big three" is questionable.
I actually live in Europe, but I often have the same question over here. We have laws and regulations that offer our own workers protection, but then we go and buy goods and services from countries that don't have such protections. Isn't that the height of hypocrasy?
Yeah, why do the French allow imports from countries that don't take all of August off of work???
(Actually I saw a French company software company fired from a job in the US because we couldn't get good support during summer vacation)
Besides, imports help Americans (especially the poor) save billions of dollars per year by dropping prices of many good by 25%-50%. Even if our income was to come down, we still end up spending our money more efficiently.
Does that mean we also kick out everyone who has offshored to the US?
Yes, in fact we should also kick out everyone who outsourced to Georgia. Or California! That way, we, the people of New York State can be free of the the unfair competition from those other states!
We are gutting good jobs from our economy at a time when we truly can't afford it.
Where is your definition of "good jobs", and where is your data on this?
How do you feel about how Toyota will start building the Prius in 2010 at a new factory in Blue Springs, Miss? Or should the Japanese stop "outsourcing" as well?
They will catch up eventually, but why on Earth would you help your competition?
Because they are not the competition. More rich Indians means more innovation, more cures for cancer, more advances in computing, more solutions for energy problems. More minds freed from the daily toil of working in small, unproductive farms and able to go to school, college, graduate school, become researchers, business people, etc. The human mind is the ultimate resource.
If you are in a particular company, you may be in competition with a small number of companies. But if you are a human, you will benefit from a large, rich ecosystem of thinking people.
I was wondering the other day why no one has proposed an outsourcing tax, at least not that I've heard of?
Because it would hurt the US economy. Outsourcing means american consumers get more for less. Moreover, it would encourage other countries to take similar actions against us, and we've been in a 50 year effort to drop tariffs against American products through GATT and now the WTO. The US exported $65 billion in products to China in 2007, up from $14 billion in 1998. US exports to India in 2007 were $17 million. And these are going to go up year after year.
However, despite that, the US already has a domestic production tax deduction (this is one of those "oil company tax breaks" people complain about).
Slashdot Mirror
There was a massive expansion of the money supply in the 1920s (never properly measured in the government's published figures), a severe asset price bubble (never properly measured by official inflation figures, but at least see stock market up to 1929), then a severe asset price crash (see 1929 Wall Street Crash), and then perverse severe tightening of credit by the Fed and other central banks, which enormously compounded the problems. This is analogous to what is happening now.
You were correct up to the last part. There is no Fed tightening of credit. Those bail-outs are expanding credit (at the expense of some moral hazard), and I doubt the fed would let the money supply dry up by 2.6% like they did in 1929. We've still got a reasonable amount inflation, not deflation, and unlike in 1929, I don't see commodity prices dropping because of global economic growth.
On the other hand, I do not trust the legislature. We may see new "bank/mortgage regulations" that do dry up credit, or perhaps another Smoot-Hawley tariff Act and a global protectionist trade war.
One more idea, if we legalized all the illegal aliens, and eliminated laws about large numbers of unrelated people living in a house, we could probably get the real estate market prices back up...
It came as quite a shock to me that the new multi-level cell (MLC) NAND flash chips are only good to 10,000 - 100,000 write/erase cycles, compared to the old single-level cell (SLC) NAND flash that were good for 1,000,000 or more write/erase cycles.
This may not affect you if you are buying flash memory for a consumer camera and you take a few shots per day, but if you are buying a solid-state hard drive you intend to fill with video and erase every few hours, be careful!
It's not "idiotic" but some of the more rapid free-market types repeat it as though it is a physical law of the universe. In the case of the last eight years we've tried to combine spending increases and the need to fund two wars with massive tax cuts on the rich. How well has that worked out for us?
Most true "free-market types" didn't want to go to war (as they say, Google Ron Paul)...plus the tax cuts were not on "the rich", the cuts were for everyone, and most people making under $20K/yr earn negative income tax through EITC. Still the Top 5% of taxpayers pay 50% of all income tax revenues.
Most true "free-market types" also realize that running a deficit is inherently raising taxes on future generations.
It should also be noted that while military costs are expensive (~$700 billion/yr) , they are about half of Social Security and Medicare outlays ($1.2 trillion / yr.) which of course are paid for in non-progressive payroll taxes. States also pay out $350 billion/yr. in their own health care costs. We already have 50% socialized medicine if you count up all the dollars.
The "Laffer Curve" is inherently true at the extremes, but the details are very complex. It is clear that dropping top tax rates from 90% increased revenue collection from the rich because it cost less for them to pay more tax than hide their income. Does a percent up or down from where we are now matter though? Who knows.
Any income tax is a deadweight loss to the labor economy, but if tax dollars raised are effectively solving economic externalities a rise in income taxes may balance that out. Of course, the question is whether $700 billion in bombs is really helping externalities. Or if paying rich old people's medical bills is better than them saving up for their retirement medical bills themselves (possibly through investing in the capital economy and creating jobs).
Let's put some numbers on it: bulk satellite transponder time is going to cost you $100 to $200 per hour depending on band and desirability of satellite.
If you go with DVB-S2 on 36 MHz transponder Ku satellite, I'm assuming you can generally get by with 8PSK 2/3 modulation (except when it rains very hard), about 7.1 dB Es/N0, for a data rate of ~60 Mbps.
To just break even on $100/month service, you need to revenue of around $100k a month (add in uplink equipment depreciation, internet access costs, to transponder costs), and that means you need at least 1,000 subscribers.
Average data rate of 60 Mbps / 1000 subscribers is 60 kbps. Yes, Internet use is bursty, but this is a worst-case scenario.
I suspect most of these systems probably have 10,000 subscribers for a 10:1 oversubscription on a typical 60 kbps end-user capability.
Note that I've ignored any return satellite bandwidth.
The Ka band satellites do have the ability to have smaller spot beams, and they may use DVB-S2 variable bitrate to ramp up on cells that have no bad weather, but I don't think the SpaceWay sats are actually being used in this fashion right now.
The verdict I've heard from everyone using satellite internet: better than dial-up (but with more latency for games), but that's about it.
What free trade also does for third world farmers is encourage them to grow for export rather than for the local markets. There are countries with plenty of farms, but starving populations, because the farmers are growing fancy stuff for us rather than staples for their neighbors.
Show me a country that has solid private property rights and starving people. For example, the government owns all land n Ethiopia, and land cannot be bought and sold. Or Zimbabwe, which just split up all the major productive farms in the country and gave them to soldiers.
The path to agricultural development is that farms get large and then they can achieve economies of scale, including increasing productivity because they get big enough to be able to purchase capital items like tractors and combines. Even the non-owner farm workers earn more because they are more productive.
For example, in Brazil, only 21% of farms are under 2 Ha, meanwhile in Ethiopia it is 87%.
Meanwhile, while Brazil's first-quarter agriculture exports reach $27.2 billion which is more than the entire GDP of Ethiopia at official exchange rates, meanwhile Ethiopians brace for new famine
Please explain what TED is supposed to do about US import/export policy
TED should teach people economics instead of BS stargazing at technology that is useless to most people on the planet without actual pro-market political change.
Should we consider the airlines worth rescuing?
I suggest letting the market take its course and combining them to obtain economies of scale.
Unfortunately, the US limits the amount of foreign ownership in its domestic airlines to a maximum of 49%, with a maximum of 25% of direct control. That's why Virgin Atlantic couldn't just buy a US airline, it had to start a new US company called "Virgin America". Similarly they had to start airlines in Australia (Virgin Blue) and Nigeria (Virgin Nigeria).
. Hydro. yeah, you lose a valley, but it's better than those lower in the list. You at least get reliable power as long as you continue to get rain./I.
Unfortunately, hydropower releases CO2 and also Methane (a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) from rotting biomatter. Hydro takes a stream and turns it into a decaying swamp, then the swamp water gushes out and release its gasses.
So, as a resident of Montreal, I have to ask, does anyone know how well electric cars are supposed to fare in cold-weather conditions? How about hybrids?
Sorry, because of the Global War on CO2, all you Canadians are going to have to move south. UN Resolution you know. It is the right thing to do for the planet!
The oil price has more than doubled in the last year, and quadrupled in the last three years. There has never before been such an extreme, sustained increase in the oil price. This will cause severe inflation, and the economic consequences will be severe....The economies of the world are in the early stages of heading into a very severe inflationary recession. Some people go further and anticipate economic collapse, others fear something similar to The Great Depression. The technical term for it is stagflation.
As Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman, once said: "inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon"
Commodity shocks (like we are seeing in oil) are a very different kind of inflation than government expanding the money supply. It affects some sectors, but not all sectors equally.
It does happen that the US government is expanding the money supply now, but not by a lot (IHMO, others disagree). On the other hand, vis-a-vis to other currencies the dollar is experiencing a decline because of our large trade deficit (supply and demand at work, the world is getting more dollars from the US than the world needs to purchase from the US).
Now granted, once high oil prices find their way into other "core" goods through transportation and energy costs, it becomes tougher to split out what is commodity-induced inflation and what is monetary expansion inflation. Of course, for a lot of people, it might not matter, but for policy makers the differences are very important.
The Great Depression was very different from Stagflation. Monetarists, including current Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke, feel the Great Depression was a standard business cycle recession made incredibly worse by overly tight monetary policy - and in fact massive deflation occurred during the Great Depression, leading people to hoard cash (as it was rising in value) and reduce consumption.
Stagflation is a period of combined lower growth and inflation. In the 1970's, it was probably due to a combination of a real commodity shock of higher oil prices amplified by ever tightening regulation on business (Nixon even imposed "wage and price controls"). Carter began de-regulation of industries, and Federal Reserve chairman, Paul Volcker cranked up interest rates to kill off stagflation.
The US is less sensitive to commodity price spike shocks today because we are way more efficient in their use than we were in the 1970's. That said, between the housing credit problem and high commodity prices, the Fed has some tough decisions to make over the next few months.
I think the best TED talks have been Steven Levitt talking about crack dealer business, and Paul Collier on the Bottom Billion.
All the technology in the world isn't going to fix developing countries where the laws, regulations, and corruption will keep the economies from growing to the point where the technology can be used efficiently. Once those barriers are gone, it isn't like people are stupid, they'll immediately use the appropriate needed technologies.
I suggest:
Michael Walker talking about his work on the Economic Freedom of the World index, and how economic freedom correlates with GDP, life expectancy, and other variables.
Karol Boudreaux from GMU's Mercatus Center talking about African governments bear much responsibility for driving formal-sector entrepreneurs out of the housing market and for driving their citizens into slums.
Robert Anderson on his book Just Get Out of the Way: How Government Can Help Business in Poor Countries.
Tyler Cowen form GMU on almost anything in economics: the future of culture in a globalized world, How to Use Incentives to Fall in Love, Survive Your Next Meeting, and Motivate Your Dentist, and much more.
Don Boudreaux from GMU about the issues he has interviewed people for on Econtalk: car salesmen, signaling through educational diplomas, whether the gold standard is a good idea, challenges in health care, and much more.
Arnold Kling on Crisis of Abundance: Rethinking How We Pay for Health Care
Or a Nicholas Stern versus William Nordhaus debate on global warming costs versus benefits and their viewpoints on appropriate discount rates for the calculation?
All those reports that complain about IT job losses since 2001 are reflecting the dot-com implosion. I know hundreds of IT workers laid off during that time, none were laid off because of outsourcing, they were all laid off because of bad business decisions in a time of easy of capital.
Most IT folks I know have been re-employed since 2001. Currently across all unemployed, long-term unemployment is only 8% of unemployed.
I find it difficult to believe that there are currently 656,000 unemployed IT workers in the U.S - there are only 1.4 million unemployed Management, professional, and related occupations. I would not be surprised that short-term unemployment of IT workers is higher than others because of the rapidly shifting technological landscape, but I doubt they represent half of all office workers unemployed.
As of 2003, only 3% and the short-term unemployed and 4.2% of the long-term unemployed were in the Information sector.
At the same time, I know several recent Indian immigrants who started a company which created many new IT jobs in the US.
I agree that H1-B is silly. Anyone with a college education should be allowed to immigrate to the US and become citizens. They should come to the US where they can make use of our state of high economic freedom to generate wealth for all.
That said, I'm not going to slit my throat for the benefit of some poor people half a world away I'll never meet. Do for your own first.
I don't suggest you slit your throat. Don't waste your money on purchasing american goods if they are more expensive that foreign ones. For that matter, don't bother buying Windows and supporting the hard working people in Redmond if you think Linux is good enough.
They are the world's equivalent of a broken Xerox machine. Low quality copies, at a high rate.
Or maybe you are just ignorant.
For example, New generation solar cells reach new level of efficiency due to a collaboration between Swiss and Chinese scientists.
And 110 chinese scientists are exploring the Arctic right now.
Or Chinese advances in LIDAR for large area wind speed measurements.
Or Chinese transgenic cloned pigs.
They'll still be in poverty
If you look at the trends, there won't be too many people in absolute poverty (under $1 per day) in China fairly soon. By 2030, China will probably be economically indistinguishable from South Korea (a country that went from large amounts of absolute poverty in the 1950's to fairly advanced economy by the 1980's). By 2050, i suspect China will be indistinguishable from the US. India will probably be behind them by about 10-20 years.
Much of Africa will probably be in poverty for a long time until they give up their ethno-centric / nation-centric / anti-trade / anti-capitalist models. At least India and China are trying.
At this point, one stops looking toward other countries and at saving one's own country.
The global economy is not a zero-sum gain. Improvements in production and techniques in one country help people in other countries. We would all be better off if everyone on the planet was rich.
By the way, if we want to save the US, we should end the war on drugs and consider privatizing our socialist monopoly school system.
Short version is automotive jobs of the big 3 slowly started heading south after its passing.
So you are sure this had nothing to do with:
1) Crazy union rules that paid people to work even when there was no work for them
2) Crazy union pensions and health benefits
3) Lame products
And why are Nissan and Toyota opening plants in the US?
Keep in mind Chrysler almost went under in the 1980's, long before NAFTA came along.
Face it, the "big three" failed because of a combination of bad deals with unions (many dating from when Europe was still recovering from WWII), a long-term quality problem, and lack of innovative products.
The chance that NAFTA had much to do with the failure of the "big three" is questionable.
Yes, but that is because they in turn are exploiting those who are poorer than they are
Yes, you are "exploiting" them into not starving to death. Horrible!
I actually live in Europe, but I often have the same question over here. We have laws and regulations that offer our own workers protection, but then we go and buy goods and services from countries that don't have such protections. Isn't that the height of hypocrasy?
Yeah, why do the French allow imports from countries that don't take all of August off of work???
(Actually I saw a French company software company fired from a job in the US because we couldn't get good support during summer vacation)
Toyota's plants in the US are producing cars that are then sold in the US
They were, but now Toyota plans on exporting vehicles built in Indiana to the Middle East and China.
Wake up, it is a global economy!
Everyone in America will eventually be too poor to buy anything,
Given that has been growing continuously since 1991 (and basically growing since 1960 with the exception of brief blips during the mid-70's), when exactly is this going to occur?
Besides, imports help Americans (especially the poor) save billions of dollars per year by dropping prices of many good by 25%-50%. Even if our income was to come down, we still end up spending our money more efficiently.
Does that mean we also kick out everyone who has offshored to the US?
Yes, in fact we should also kick out everyone who outsourced to Georgia. Or California! That way, we, the people of New York State can be free of the the unfair competition from those other states!
[Yes, that was a joke]
i was displaced out of my career market due to NAFTA years ago
I'd like to know, how were you displaced by NAFTA?
But I think it's fair to say that IT is the field that is getting slaughtered now.
Where at your numbers on this?
The BLS has Computer and Mathematical Science Occupations at 3.1 million jobs in the US right now with a mean annual wage of $72,190.
I hear a lot of "the sky is falling" stuff, but no real data.
We are gutting good jobs from our economy at a time when we truly can't afford it.
Where is your definition of "good jobs", and where is your data on this?
How do you feel about how Toyota will start building the Prius in 2010 at a new factory in Blue Springs, Miss? Or should the Japanese stop "outsourcing" as well?
Perhaps you'd like a global trade war?
They will catch up eventually, but why on Earth would you help your competition?
Because they are not the competition. More rich Indians means more innovation, more cures for cancer, more advances in computing, more solutions for energy problems. More minds freed from the daily toil of working in small, unproductive farms and able to go to school, college, graduate school, become researchers, business people, etc. The human mind is the ultimate resource.
If you are in a particular company, you may be in competition with a small number of companies. But if you are a human, you will benefit from a large, rich ecosystem of thinking people.
I was wondering the other day why no one has proposed an outsourcing tax, at least not that I've heard of?
Because it would hurt the US economy. Outsourcing means american consumers get more for less. Moreover, it would encourage other countries to take similar actions against us, and we've been in a 50 year effort to drop tariffs against American products through GATT and now the WTO. The US exported $65 billion in products to China in 2007, up from $14 billion in 1998. US exports to India in 2007 were $17 million. And these are going to go up year after year.
However, despite that, the US already has a domestic production tax deduction (this is one of those "oil company tax breaks" people complain about).