And then, once the cheap loans and subsidies have been eaten up, the companies that were bought off still move to Mexico...
Handing subsidies to companies to keep their facilities in your area is just another iteration of the race to the bottom. If the only way a job can be tenable is by handing company money (directly or indirectly), then the job isn't really tenable at all, and all that happens is that other sectors of the economy have to underwrite untenable and unsustainable jobs.
Look at Venezuela. That's the best example of how throwing money at non-viable sections of the economy ends up. Simply put, a responsible government and a responsible society recognizes when buggy whip manufacturers need to be allowed to die. That's not to say that money can't be spent to help the people, which is why most countries have job retraining programs.
Thank you! Detroit is a symptom of the same deindustrialization pressures that hit parts of Canada and the UK. There are other rust belts over the last three or four decades who have been hit by severe declines. The notion that you can blame what is an issue suffered by a number of industrial areas in a number of different countries on an American political party is stunningly absurd. I'm sure there are many Thatcherites that would be thrilled to blame the industrial decline in Northern England on the Democrats of the 1980s!
The Black Death created one of the largest labor shortages in the history of the world. It was so disruptive that the English Crown actually passed laws forcing laborers to stay at their place of employment, because the shortages were so severe that poaching of workers was making the shortages even worse.
Japan is going through a somewhat slower version of the same phenomenon, and everyone, even the conservatives and nationalists, privately know that at some point very soon they'll have to allow some form of immigration or face a protracted economic crisis.
The reason many of these workers don't have jobs is because they don't have the skills needed for a changing workforce. Creating what amounts to a planned economy where the government creates factory positions that have no other reason to exist than to keep people employed is an absolutely insane solution, one that even China has been steadily moving away from.
It's ironic, but in a strange sort of way, the Republican President Elect is almost advocating for a sort of industrial Communism, and like late stage Communism in the USSR, what happened in many cases is that workers were going to factory jobs that existed simply so they would have a job to go to.
We may need less people in an economic sense, but if we set a decent rate of taxation on corporations, then fund UBI, we don't need some bizarre march towards forced sterilization. Besides, almost all industrialized nations are suffering pretty serious demographic declines, to the point where countries like Spain and Japan, probably the two most effected, are facing some serious medium and long term economic woes.
Automation has never meant an end to workers, but it has meant that workers have had to learn new skills. The steam engine and the cotton gin didn't just throw a whole lot of jobs on the scrap heap, it also opened up jobs for different kinds of workers. And thus far that is what automation has done, pushed more blue collar jobs into the white collar and service industry worlds.
Now, in the long term, those workers are going to face a similar scenario, but the only reason I can think of to depopulate the world is because corporations that have moved to automation don't want to pay more tax, but then again, if you allow major population declines, those companies won't have anybody to buy their goods. A falling population is just as bad as a population that is rising. The balance in a modern economy is to have fertility at a replacement level (about 2.1 children per female), and the fact is most developed economies are well below that, some of them, like Japan, so far below it that it is creating a labor shortage crisis that not even major pushes towards automation can adequately deal with.
An interesting statistic that was rattled off during the election was that 38 US states have Canada as the largest foreign trading partner. You start creating any kind of pinch points in that economic pipeline, you will end up with a whole lot of people in a helluva lot worse position than they are now.
With Trump's commitment to roll back abortion and gay rights, he's speaking right over top of any GOP modernizers at the social conservative wing. Now maybe Trump, who I figure at his age is only likely to be a one-termer anyways, won't give a damn who he pisses off, but I'm sure there are a lot of RINOs and other centrists and modernizers rather fearful that these commitments to the social conservative wish list will tie their hands. I'll be blunt, there's a whole section of the GOP that now expects it will be able to ban transexuals from their gender-identified washrooms, will be able to throw the local town homosexuals out of their businesses, and that abortions will now be heavily restricted, if not outright banned, largely by way of putting as many Scalia clones in the Supreme Court as possible. If Trump proves as unable or unwilling to actually hold to that social conservative agenda as George W Bush, or hell, every Republican president since Roe v Wade, then the GOP has a real problem.
Do you really think most public servants, even elected ones, are crooks? And if you create a banana republic style of succession, you will get a banana republic.
Thanks for this! This is a really neat writeup. I'm going to go through it later with a bit of a fine tooth comb, but I think you're making a damned good point about the state of modern manufacturing, and one I've tried to make. What Trump has promised idled Rust Belt workers (and by extension other idled groups like coal miners) is that somehow he's going to magically turn back the clock half a century.
I have a feeling that in some ways the Trump presidency will resemble the GWB and Reagan presidencies, in that it will be the VP, advisers and chief allies in Congress that do much of the actual leg work. I don't think Trump really has the intellectual or emotional capacity to be a president in anything but a nominal way. He'll come into the office much like Woodrow Wilson left it.
Exactly. What's happening now is a sort of Industrial Revolution Mark II, and in this iteration, it is automation that is playing the starring role. And if anyone feels grumpy about a dozen robots with one guy sitting at a console making sure the gears turn, jump ahead ten or fifteen years, when that level of automation means even cheap labor in China, India, Mexico and probably by that point Africa can't undercut the robots.
The fact is that the world is going through a manufacturing revolution, and has been for about three decades now, and the only way to restore manufacturing jobs wouldn't be to get rid of NAFTA or throw up massive tariffs on goods manufactured in China, it would be to have the National Guard walk into every working factory in the United States and smash all the computers and robots, and then go into almost every major R&D department and University, and throw all the engineers, programmers, technicians and other people working on next generation automation out on to the street, and then pass a law banning robotics.
Of course, no one else in the world would do that, so the net effect would be for all of US's trade partners and competitors to make massive gains in automation, which means that the US would then have to institute unbelievably large tariffs to prevent these ultra-cheap goods from putting all those make-work factories open.
This is an extreme and hyperbolic line of reasoning, but really, the fact is that cheap labor in countries like China and Mexico will soon be yesterday's problem, and even all those Mexicans and Chinese that rely on their miserly wages in industrial complexes will find themselves out on the unemployment line just like the folks who have been put out of work in the US. The fact is that human-dominant manufacturing probably only has a few decades left, and there is absolutely nothing Trump, the Alt-right, or a bunch of angry rust belt voters will ever be able to do about it. The game is up. Manufacturing is simply never going to be a major source of employment in the industrialized world again, and it won't be a major source of employment in developing economies in the not-so-distant future.
If Trump and Congress actually want to help Americans who find themselves out of work as factories close or lay off large portions of their work force, what they should do is start funding more post-secondary education, more job retraining, and probably start taking the first tentative steps towards Universal Basic Income. After all, the one thing you can do about companies that move into automation is start taxing them to pay for the needs of the citizens of the United States.
You don't think liberal access to foreign markets helps the average person in the exporting nation? For chrissakes, the US has been a merchant power since its inception, and yet you still have people that believe it is best served by starting trade wars with trading partners?
And again, Presidents have done this before. FDR effectively started an unofficial naval war against the German Navy during WWII, if you want to talk about overstepping authority and breaking the rules.
If Trump creates the precedent of a new President going after his predecessor, Trump may want to ponder that it isn't as if he doesn't have legal problems of his own, and perhaps he would invite the same treatment. And then where does it end?
I will repeat, in a democracy, departing leaders are allowed off the stage and permitted to, like Cincinnatus, go back to tilling their fields. To pursue prosecutions against your predecessor would invite future retaliation, and would undermine the whole notion of peaceful transfer of powers.
The US unemployment rate is hovering somewhere around 5%. Now we can quibble over what that means exactly, but in general, the US has not seen a drop in unemployment due to liberalized trade agreements.
If you look at the auto industry in particular, it has been in trouble since the 1970s. The idea that NAFTA or any other trade agreement somehow created this crisis is absurd. Detroit has been in a decline for about 40 years. The Rust Belt is hardly the first industrial area in an industrialized country to go into decline, and such declines almost inevitably occur because of national and global issues for which there is no actual solution. The real solution is for such areas to diversify their economy, and where the economic engine cannot sustain population levels, for those areas to depopulate, just as happened to Detroit.
The reason Japan's unemployment rate is so low is because it is a demographically shrinking nation. It is at a tipping point where even its drive towards automation cannot make up for the overall losses of workers due to an aging population.
Describing Japan's policies as some sort of economic success is like describing the Black Death as a great boon for Medieval workers rights. While true on a superficial level, neither claim bears much scrutiny.
The powers of Congress were designed explicitly by the Founding Fathers to deal with a president like Trump. You may call it dysfunctional, I call it it the ultimate check on power. If Trump tries to push through the more absurd aspects of his agenda, Congress will do what the Constitution intended it to do, prevent him from doing significant harm to the interests of the people of the United States.
He can gang up all he wants, for the next two years at least he'll have damned little leverage. And even in two years, what's he going to do, campaign for third parties and Democrats?
The system has been set up so that while a President is very powerful, he is also very vulnerable, and if he decides to make enemies of the majority of those folks on the Hill, they can make his life an absolute misery. While someone like Obama has the wit to navigate an unfriendly Congress to at least get something done, if Trump is as idiotic a blowhard as he acted on the campaign trail, he'll find his nominal position of head of the GOP to be a pretty worthless coin.
So let's get this straight. The man the American people just elected President has no actual intention of being a functional President? So this really is going to be like all Trump's other endeavors, he'll be the face of the endeavor, the guy that comes in, shakes hands, inks the deal others have negotiated, and then is ushered out the door while the actual people running his companies go about doing the actual work.
So if this is the case, what the Americans actually have done has elected a 21st century version of a post-stroke Woodrow Wilson.
And wiping out one of the US's major manufacturing industries would help your wages how?
You understand that what tariffs actually do is raise prices for consumers. Now there may be times when tariffs are useful, particularly in response to a foreign country dumping, or where they started throwing tariffs on first, but tariffs as a general trade practice don't help the average family one little bit, and usually harm average citizens.
And as the other poster pointed out, what happens when some of these countries being targeted start throwing up retaliatory tariffs? What happens to US industries that rely on exporting?
I get it. You are very angry. You voted for Trump because your mad and you're not going to take it any more. But there are reasons the trade systems work like they do, and it is because the alternative never ultimately helps the average citizen.
Without significant alterations to various trade agreements, including the WTO agreements, how would Trump start nailing such companies with a 35% tariff. This would almost certainly need Senate approval, and it isn't terribly clear that the Senate would be all that interested in basically tearing up the US's international trade agreements just so he can punish Ford and GM.
Except he's made commitments to tear apart much of what the Obama Administration had done, not to mention making all kinds of promises to various groups like Social Conservatives to permit them wider freedom to discriminate against all those undesirable gay people, and anyone with a womb who wants to control their own reproductive organs.
One of the critical aspects of a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power. Going after your predecessor is the kind of thing rulers of banana republics do. Even worse, it encourages what we're seeing in Venezuela, where the current government, fearful of being torn from power and put in the dock for its crimes real and perceived, will do everything up to fighting street wars to prevent itself being held accountable.
When a leader is defeated or leaves office, as grating as it may be, in a democracy the best solution is to let them go. That's why Ford pardoned Nixon, not necessarily because he believed Nixon didn't belong behind bars, but because the alternative would have been a dangerous precedent.
And really, considering the number of presidents who have played fast and loose with the rules (Lincoln, for instance, basically had every telegraph line coming into the US at that point wiretapped), why would you hold Obama for special consideration?
Slashdot Mirror
How much do you want to pay for a tomato?
And then, once the cheap loans and subsidies have been eaten up, the companies that were bought off still move to Mexico...
Handing subsidies to companies to keep their facilities in your area is just another iteration of the race to the bottom. If the only way a job can be tenable is by handing company money (directly or indirectly), then the job isn't really tenable at all, and all that happens is that other sectors of the economy have to underwrite untenable and unsustainable jobs.
Look at Venezuela. That's the best example of how throwing money at non-viable sections of the economy ends up. Simply put, a responsible government and a responsible society recognizes when buggy whip manufacturers need to be allowed to die. That's not to say that money can't be spent to help the people, which is why most countries have job retraining programs.
Thank you! Detroit is a symptom of the same deindustrialization pressures that hit parts of Canada and the UK. There are other rust belts over the last three or four decades who have been hit by severe declines. The notion that you can blame what is an issue suffered by a number of industrial areas in a number of different countries on an American political party is stunningly absurd. I'm sure there are many Thatcherites that would be thrilled to blame the industrial decline in Northern England on the Democrats of the 1980s!
The Black Death created one of the largest labor shortages in the history of the world. It was so disruptive that the English Crown actually passed laws forcing laborers to stay at their place of employment, because the shortages were so severe that poaching of workers was making the shortages even worse.
Japan is going through a somewhat slower version of the same phenomenon, and everyone, even the conservatives and nationalists, privately know that at some point very soon they'll have to allow some form of immigration or face a protracted economic crisis.
The reason many of these workers don't have jobs is because they don't have the skills needed for a changing workforce. Creating what amounts to a planned economy where the government creates factory positions that have no other reason to exist than to keep people employed is an absolutely insane solution, one that even China has been steadily moving away from.
It's ironic, but in a strange sort of way, the Republican President Elect is almost advocating for a sort of industrial Communism, and like late stage Communism in the USSR, what happened in many cases is that workers were going to factory jobs that existed simply so they would have a job to go to.
We may need less people in an economic sense, but if we set a decent rate of taxation on corporations, then fund UBI, we don't need some bizarre march towards forced sterilization. Besides, almost all industrialized nations are suffering pretty serious demographic declines, to the point where countries like Spain and Japan, probably the two most effected, are facing some serious medium and long term economic woes.
Automation has never meant an end to workers, but it has meant that workers have had to learn new skills. The steam engine and the cotton gin didn't just throw a whole lot of jobs on the scrap heap, it also opened up jobs for different kinds of workers. And thus far that is what automation has done, pushed more blue collar jobs into the white collar and service industry worlds.
Now, in the long term, those workers are going to face a similar scenario, but the only reason I can think of to depopulate the world is because corporations that have moved to automation don't want to pay more tax, but then again, if you allow major population declines, those companies won't have anybody to buy their goods. A falling population is just as bad as a population that is rising. The balance in a modern economy is to have fertility at a replacement level (about 2.1 children per female), and the fact is most developed economies are well below that, some of them, like Japan, so far below it that it is creating a labor shortage crisis that not even major pushes towards automation can adequately deal with.
An interesting statistic that was rattled off during the election was that 38 US states have Canada as the largest foreign trading partner. You start creating any kind of pinch points in that economic pipeline, you will end up with a whole lot of people in a helluva lot worse position than they are now.
With Trump's commitment to roll back abortion and gay rights, he's speaking right over top of any GOP modernizers at the social conservative wing. Now maybe Trump, who I figure at his age is only likely to be a one-termer anyways, won't give a damn who he pisses off, but I'm sure there are a lot of RINOs and other centrists and modernizers rather fearful that these commitments to the social conservative wish list will tie their hands. I'll be blunt, there's a whole section of the GOP that now expects it will be able to ban transexuals from their gender-identified washrooms, will be able to throw the local town homosexuals out of their businesses, and that abortions will now be heavily restricted, if not outright banned, largely by way of putting as many Scalia clones in the Supreme Court as possible. If Trump proves as unable or unwilling to actually hold to that social conservative agenda as George W Bush, or hell, every Republican president since Roe v Wade, then the GOP has a real problem.
Do you really think most public servants, even elected ones, are crooks? And if you create a banana republic style of succession, you will get a banana republic.
Thanks for this! This is a really neat writeup. I'm going to go through it later with a bit of a fine tooth comb, but I think you're making a damned good point about the state of modern manufacturing, and one I've tried to make. What Trump has promised idled Rust Belt workers (and by extension other idled groups like coal miners) is that somehow he's going to magically turn back the clock half a century.
It might have worked better if the VP wasn't the proverbial Whore of Babylon.
I have a feeling that in some ways the Trump presidency will resemble the GWB and Reagan presidencies, in that it will be the VP, advisers and chief allies in Congress that do much of the actual leg work. I don't think Trump really has the intellectual or emotional capacity to be a president in anything but a nominal way. He'll come into the office much like Woodrow Wilson left it.
Exactly. What's happening now is a sort of Industrial Revolution Mark II, and in this iteration, it is automation that is playing the starring role. And if anyone feels grumpy about a dozen robots with one guy sitting at a console making sure the gears turn, jump ahead ten or fifteen years, when that level of automation means even cheap labor in China, India, Mexico and probably by that point Africa can't undercut the robots.
The fact is that the world is going through a manufacturing revolution, and has been for about three decades now, and the only way to restore manufacturing jobs wouldn't be to get rid of NAFTA or throw up massive tariffs on goods manufactured in China, it would be to have the National Guard walk into every working factory in the United States and smash all the computers and robots, and then go into almost every major R&D department and University, and throw all the engineers, programmers, technicians and other people working on next generation automation out on to the street, and then pass a law banning robotics.
Of course, no one else in the world would do that, so the net effect would be for all of US's trade partners and competitors to make massive gains in automation, which means that the US would then have to institute unbelievably large tariffs to prevent these ultra-cheap goods from putting all those make-work factories open.
This is an extreme and hyperbolic line of reasoning, but really, the fact is that cheap labor in countries like China and Mexico will soon be yesterday's problem, and even all those Mexicans and Chinese that rely on their miserly wages in industrial complexes will find themselves out on the unemployment line just like the folks who have been put out of work in the US. The fact is that human-dominant manufacturing probably only has a few decades left, and there is absolutely nothing Trump, the Alt-right, or a bunch of angry rust belt voters will ever be able to do about it. The game is up. Manufacturing is simply never going to be a major source of employment in the industrialized world again, and it won't be a major source of employment in developing economies in the not-so-distant future.
If Trump and Congress actually want to help Americans who find themselves out of work as factories close or lay off large portions of their work force, what they should do is start funding more post-secondary education, more job retraining, and probably start taking the first tentative steps towards Universal Basic Income. After all, the one thing you can do about companies that move into automation is start taxing them to pay for the needs of the citizens of the United States.
You don't think liberal access to foreign markets helps the average person in the exporting nation? For chrissakes, the US has been a merchant power since its inception, and yet you still have people that believe it is best served by starting trade wars with trading partners?
And again, Presidents have done this before. FDR effectively started an unofficial naval war against the German Navy during WWII, if you want to talk about overstepping authority and breaking the rules.
If Trump creates the precedent of a new President going after his predecessor, Trump may want to ponder that it isn't as if he doesn't have legal problems of his own, and perhaps he would invite the same treatment. And then where does it end?
I will repeat, in a democracy, departing leaders are allowed off the stage and permitted to, like Cincinnatus, go back to tilling their fields. To pursue prosecutions against your predecessor would invite future retaliation, and would undermine the whole notion of peaceful transfer of powers.
The US unemployment rate is hovering somewhere around 5%. Now we can quibble over what that means exactly, but in general, the US has not seen a drop in unemployment due to liberalized trade agreements.
If you look at the auto industry in particular, it has been in trouble since the 1970s. The idea that NAFTA or any other trade agreement somehow created this crisis is absurd. Detroit has been in a decline for about 40 years. The Rust Belt is hardly the first industrial area in an industrialized country to go into decline, and such declines almost inevitably occur because of national and global issues for which there is no actual solution. The real solution is for such areas to diversify their economy, and where the economic engine cannot sustain population levels, for those areas to depopulate, just as happened to Detroit.
The reason Japan's unemployment rate is so low is because it is a demographically shrinking nation. It is at a tipping point where even its drive towards automation cannot make up for the overall losses of workers due to an aging population.
Describing Japan's policies as some sort of economic success is like describing the Black Death as a great boon for Medieval workers rights. While true on a superficial level, neither claim bears much scrutiny.
The powers of Congress were designed explicitly by the Founding Fathers to deal with a president like Trump. You may call it dysfunctional, I call it it the ultimate check on power. If Trump tries to push through the more absurd aspects of his agenda, Congress will do what the Constitution intended it to do, prevent him from doing significant harm to the interests of the people of the United States.
He can gang up all he wants, for the next two years at least he'll have damned little leverage. And even in two years, what's he going to do, campaign for third parties and Democrats?
The system has been set up so that while a President is very powerful, he is also very vulnerable, and if he decides to make enemies of the majority of those folks on the Hill, they can make his life an absolute misery. While someone like Obama has the wit to navigate an unfriendly Congress to at least get something done, if Trump is as idiotic a blowhard as he acted on the campaign trail, he'll find his nominal position of head of the GOP to be a pretty worthless coin.
So let's get this straight. The man the American people just elected President has no actual intention of being a functional President? So this really is going to be like all Trump's other endeavors, he'll be the face of the endeavor, the guy that comes in, shakes hands, inks the deal others have negotiated, and then is ushered out the door while the actual people running his companies go about doing the actual work.
So if this is the case, what the Americans actually have done has elected a 21st century version of a post-stroke Woodrow Wilson.
And wiping out one of the US's major manufacturing industries would help your wages how?
You understand that what tariffs actually do is raise prices for consumers. Now there may be times when tariffs are useful, particularly in response to a foreign country dumping, or where they started throwing tariffs on first, but tariffs as a general trade practice don't help the average family one little bit, and usually harm average citizens.
And as the other poster pointed out, what happens when some of these countries being targeted start throwing up retaliatory tariffs? What happens to US industries that rely on exporting?
I get it. You are very angry. You voted for Trump because your mad and you're not going to take it any more. But there are reasons the trade systems work like they do, and it is because the alternative never ultimately helps the average citizen.
Without significant alterations to various trade agreements, including the WTO agreements, how would Trump start nailing such companies with a 35% tariff. This would almost certainly need Senate approval, and it isn't terribly clear that the Senate would be all that interested in basically tearing up the US's international trade agreements just so he can punish Ford and GM.
Except he's made commitments to tear apart much of what the Obama Administration had done, not to mention making all kinds of promises to various groups like Social Conservatives to permit them wider freedom to discriminate against all those undesirable gay people, and anyone with a womb who wants to control their own reproductive organs.
One of the critical aspects of a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power. Going after your predecessor is the kind of thing rulers of banana republics do. Even worse, it encourages what we're seeing in Venezuela, where the current government, fearful of being torn from power and put in the dock for its crimes real and perceived, will do everything up to fighting street wars to prevent itself being held accountable.
When a leader is defeated or leaves office, as grating as it may be, in a democracy the best solution is to let them go. That's why Ford pardoned Nixon, not necessarily because he believed Nixon didn't belong behind bars, but because the alternative would have been a dangerous precedent.
And really, considering the number of presidents who have played fast and loose with the rules (Lincoln, for instance, basically had every telegraph line coming into the US at that point wiretapped), why would you hold Obama for special consideration?
Even though one of your own is President Elect, you're still a vile racist.