How do we bring manufacturing back to the US?

[dank69]

Well, some times short term fixes are needed. So, if we did those things, and in 100 years it falls apart, would it be worse than it is now?

Short term fixes are what we call 'bubbles.' And yes, it can always be worse, and it doesn't take 100 years for it to get worse.

 

[1prophet]

A modest amount of protectionism is alright. There are enough services needed to provide jobs. Tariffs can be created with the environment in mind. But if you want to prevent consumer products from low wage countries where there is no pollution regulation what so ever and employee abuse , you must first look at what is happening in your own country. If you set tariffs this way, automatically the products will rise in price and local manufacturing will be more desirable. In the end, quality will mean more then quantity and then you are automatically entering the rhineland model. Your workers feel an obligation towards the company as if it was their own company. And when the country is seen as part of the company, pollution is also automatically not desirable. What politics and economy misses in the world, is the scientific method. There is no feedback to perform corrective measures. There is none to hold responsible. A CEO and his or hers managers can bankrupt a company but cannot be held responsible. A politician can endanger lives of people but cannot be held responsible. For me personally it is fine if a CEO or a president earn tens to hundreds of million of dollars or euro's a year. But the other side of the coin should then be that they can be held responsible in the case of of negligence. If someone creates long term stability then it is fine with me if that ceo receives a billion dollars or euro's over the course of a decade. But only if it means that a lot of people will have a living and an earning for that same decade and decades to come.

Intermezzo :
An electronic circuit called integrator is able when placed in a feedback loop to perform corrective measures when the measured output is not equal to the desired output.

One could argue that a manager in a company is such a feedback instrument. But that is not always the case because more then often, a career manager only looks at his or hers own career. A company does not benefit from people who only plan to enrich themselves at the costs of others. Interim ceo's and manager that are pulled in externally from other companies do not want the best result for the company. They want the best for themselves. By nature they will reduce efficiency because of the greed they have. A real manager is as much interested in the work that the employees perform as the employees themselves. Only then optimizations can be made.

The basic flaw in politics and economics is that there is no true corrective measure, no true feedback. The most basic electronic circuits are circuits that perform a feedback function to minimize any errors that may occur. But these circuits need a reference and what is the reference needed for politics and economic policies ?
End intermezzo.

When economic policies are created, then automatically the policy makers must ensure that the economy works as a giant flywheel. Stability and minor upsets do not cause massive failures. Integration and differentiation. I cannot find it in politics and economics. But it must become part of it. theoretical math models are of no use. The scientific method is all that counts.

Everything you said there about selfish short term thinking management was said by this man.
Dr. Deming - The 5 Deadly Diseases 1984
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ehMAwIHGN0Y


Pay attention to the second deadly disease and how it contradicts the "profit only matters" mentality parroted by so many here.

 

[kage69]

I understand your point and agree that it might not have brought a substantial amount of jobs back to the US. However, that does not take away the fact that the GOP voted to continue to reward companies that offshore jobs and not reward companies that do bring jobs back. How can any American agree with this vote?

Thank you. The intent here cannot be changed, no matter the spin.

 

[Infohawk]

Protectionism works.

Yes. Protectionism has costs but they are outweighed by the massive societal and national security issues faced with continuing with unfettered free trade (which is only a one way-street anyway). The real issue would be in the implementation.

Pretty sure there are constitutional protections against this presently so to do that, assuming it would be the right course of action, would require an amendment. I could be wrong on this.

There are no constitutional limits on tariffs, if that's what you are suggesting.

We can try to mask the situation by subsidizing it, giving tax breaks, imposing tarriffs, pretending we dont live in a global economy. But long term that will become too costly and fail.

How would tariffs fail long term?

 

[Genx87]

Thank you. The intent here cannot be changed, no matter the spin.

There was no spin. Honestly, how many jobs do you believe would come back if the tax code was changed?

 

[Ausm]

What field is this? I'd be interested in hearing more.

Tooling for the Plastic Injection molding technology field.

 

[dank69]

There was no spin. Honestly, how many jobs do you believe would come back if the tax code was changed?

The spin is analogeous to this:

Someone left the faucet open, we should turn it off.
That faucet leaks even when it is closed so we should just leave it open.

 

[woolfe9999]

One thing I see stated over and over on these forums is about the "growing wealth gap" in the US. If this is true or not, I don't know. A perhaps obvious issue is that the retail service industry pays very little which could be to blame as more people are employed in the retail service industry than just about anything else.

An obvious solution to this is to bring back the middle class manufacturing jobs which we have lost over the last 40 years.

The question is, how do we do this? What would it take to bring companies back to the US, or even North America.

We can try pushing alternative energy technologies so that we are leading edge in the world. Our trade imbalance is mainly due to imported petroleum. The technologies that we develop can then be exported for profit, and the installation of said technologies in the U.S. would have to be done domestically. And even if portions of the parts manufacturing were done elsewhere some will still undoubtedly be done here. Unfortunately pushing these technologies requires some government spending, which many other countries are doing right now, and at the moment we have no taste for increasing government spending in any area.

 

[Genx87]

The spin is analogeous to this:

Someone left the faucet open, we should turn it off.
That faucet leaks even when it is closed so we should just leave it open.

Why is it my question hasnt even been guessed at?

We can close that tax code. I dont really care. But that hardly means jobs will come back. You even admitted so in your response to me.

 

[dank69]

Why is it my question hasnt even been guessed at?

We can close that tax code. I dont really care. But that hardly means jobs will come back. You even admitted so in your response to me.

Because you seem to be making the argument that since we can't fix everything 100% we might as well do nothing. Is this what you believe? I don't think you do. So why are you even continuing this train of thought?

 

[Siddhartha]

US citizens and government have to buy products that are produced in the US. They will probably have to pay more but if businesses realize they will make more money producing and selling products made in the US they will do it.

 

[kage69]

There was no spin. Honestly, how many jobs do you believe would come back if the tax code was changed?

Bullshit, spinning headlines for the GOP is what you do. You can't dispute what I provided, so now you're falling back to the worn out "speculation is my answer" tactic. Weak.

We need to make it more attractive for companies to stay here. We need to close loopholes that they take advantage of. Repubs disagree, voted accordingly, and provided me with support for my initial comment. Honestly, you think there will be any change without providing incentive to stay in the States?

Making excuses for this kind of behavior is why issues like this take decades to address. Some fights aren't ended with a coups de grace, sometimes it takes a multitude of small hits.

But I guess any step in the right direction is a bad step if it leads to the economy improving while Obama's in the White House. Whatever concern the GOP had for the middle class evaporated many years ago.

 

[dank69]

US citizens and government have to buy products that are produced in the US. They will probably have to pay more but if businesses realize they will make more money producing and selling products made in the US they will do it.

That sounds nice but isn't anywhere close to realistic. The average American isn't going to quadruple (actually more than that) his expenses in order to buy American.

 

[Ausm]

Bullshit, spinning headlines for the GOP is what you do. You can't dispute what I provided, so now you're falling back to the worn out "speculation is my answer" tactic. Weak.

We need to make it more attractive for companies to stay here. We need to close loopholes that they take advantage of. Repubs disagree, voted accordingly, and provided me with support for my initial comment. Honestly, you think there will be any change without providing incentive to stay in the States?

Making excuses for this kind of behavior is why issues like this take decades to address. Some fights aren't ended with a coups de grace, sometimes it takes a multitude of small hits.

But I guess any step in the right direction is a bad step if it leads to the economy improving while Obama's in the White House. Whatever concern the GOP had for the middle class evaporated many years ago.

:thumbsup::thumbsup:

 

[senseamp]

Devalue the dollar. We need to devalue it for other reasons as well, but this is one.

 

[Craig234]

US citizens and government have to buy products that are produced in the US. They will probably have to pay more but if businesses realize they will make more money producing and selling products made in the US they will do it.

That just doesn't work. Remember Kruschev's line, 'you will sell us the rope we will use to hang you'. People buy from Wal-Mart if it's cheap no matter the negatives.

You might not shop there, I might not, but many will. It's like private charity - important and useful, but not a solution alone.

People and companies want others to pay more and protect the US economy.

 

[Throckmorton]

We can start by not having our fucking monuments built by CCP propagandists out of granite mined by Chinese labor from Chinese quarries.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

We can try pushing alternative energy technologies so that we are leading edge in the world. Our trade imbalance is mainly due to imported petroleum.

Our trade imbalance is also in the area of manufactured goods. When was the last time you purchased an American made television or computer component? Home appliance? Almost every consumer good I purchase does not say "Made in America" on it.

 

[WaTaGuMp]

We should allow large corporations to get HUGE tax breaks resulting in paying ZERO taxes. This will free up working capital which will make them be able to afford to pay people in this country. WE NEED TO TRY THIS IT WILL WORK.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

No, $30 an hour is not an unreasonable wage for skilled labor, but how much labor in the manufacturing sector was skilled vs. unskilled? Obviously, some manufacturing tasks like welding take actual skill, but something like putting nuts on bolts all day on an assembly line is a task which you could teach a monkey to do. That does not take skill, and is NOT worth $30/hr.

I bet you'd get tired real quickly if you had to spend 8 or 12 hours a day putting nuts on bolts. Your arms and hands would probably hurt after 20 minutes of it. Is the ability to be able to do that for 8 or 12 hours a day thus a valuable skill of some sort?

I've never done that sort of work before, and I have three college degrees, but I don't want to become an education snob and look down upon that sort of work and disparage it. The actual doing of the work over a long period of time is probably not nearly as easy as it seems.

Someone once posted a story on here about a stuck-up homeowner who looked down upon a guy that was digging up a foundation or something or other for a contractor in his backyard and couldn't understand why the guy was paid as much as he was or didn't appear to be working as hard as he was. It turned out that the guy could dig much much faster and more efficiently than the silly homeowner.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

2. Efficiency Is very good and there is lots of benefit to being efficient. However, efficiency doesn't "make jobs". Efficiency kills them. Suppose you have 100 workers. A method is implemented that reduces your labor need to 50 workers. Are you going to keep them if you can make more $$$ by getting rid of them?

This is the same mythological notion that technological advance destroys jobs. It's become increasingly popular as people look for excuses to blame our economic and employment problems on anything other than global labor arbitrage (foreign outsourcing, H-1B and L-1 visas, mass immigration).

Let's suppose that as a result of innovation it only takes 50% as much human effort (an increase in productive efficiency) to produce Good X. The price of Good X should then decrease since less human effort is required, which means that consumers will have more money to spend on Good or Service Y, which means more people will end up being employed to produce Good or Service Y.

That's the reason why the invention of the automobile and the end of the horse-and-buggy industry or the invention of the light bulb and the end of the candle making industry didn't sink our economy.

Over the past century there have been so many technological and efficiency advances that according to the "Technology kills jobs" theory no one should be employed at all.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

And welding can be done better and faster by machines.

Wouldn't that depend on what specifically is being welded and where? You can't just have a machine do a custom job or move the robotic welder to wherever the welding needs to be done. Robotic welding might work well for repetitive tasks on an assembly line, but not necessarily for other welding jobs.

 

[WhipperSnapper]

I think there are an awful lot of overpayed people in this country.

In your view, do any of those overpaid people have college degrees or advanced professional degrees, or is the overpayment strictly limited to blue collar laborers and other working class fields?

 

[WhipperSnapper]

I disagree. But for the sake of argument, let's say I did agree. How could our government possibly do this?

Tariffs or an Import-Credit type of system (like what Warren Buffet proposed).

 

[BoberFett]

Devalue the dollar. We need to devalue it for other reasons as well, but this is one.

Inflation always works out well. For the wealthy.