[UnderseaLcpl]

Originally Posted by Ducimus

You know what, i don't give a rats ass about all this lofty BS pro suspender man wallstreet job robbing talk.

There are a lot of people who have felt the same way throughout history. Their jobs are all gone now. Back in the day, it was the peasants and sharecroppers and later the mill-workers and who were getting all bent out of shape about mechanization stealing their jobs.

As it turns out, all their whining didn't change a thing, and thank God it didn't. Labor-intensive agriculture was eventually streamlined, making food cheaper and more readily available. The mill staff got smaller and smaller, and the textile industry has pretty much ceased to exist in the US, though the battered remains of their once-mighty lobby of dinosaurs still manage to extract tariff and subsidy concessions from Washington when they run sob-story ads about the mill closing in some bass-ackwards town.

Now we get most of our clothing from CAFTA countries, China, Indonesia, India, and Taiwan; places that actually appreciate textile jobs and can use them as a way to climb out of poverty in the same way western nations once did. The US remains a leader in agriculture, but now machines do most of the work, and it's the agriculture conglomerates like Archer-Daniels Midland, Conagra, and Monsanto that control the industry and give us affordable and plentiful food.

Is the country worse off for that? No, not even close. There are a lot more jobs now then there were when the heel-draggers first started protesting industrialization and mechanization and the jobs pay a lot better.
Here's what i know and what i see.

Manufacturing jobs have been, are, or are going. Being outsourced , or "offshored" or "3rd partied" to places like China. IT jobs along with them from where im sitting. My own job is liable to be "3rd partied" before too long.

That may be what you see, but it's what you and others with similar opinions don't see that will cost you your job. Manufacturing jobs have been lost in the millions in the US because the firms became complacent. The US auto industry is a great example. After ww2, the US was the premier auto manufacturer in the world. It was already heavily unionized, and the industry was primarily concerned with making cars bigger, faster, more stylish, and more luxurious. The industry was rich and the workers did well.....for a while.

What US automakers failed to realize was that the world does not stop turning just because they're on top. While they stuck to their business modeland kept churning out battleships on wheels, the rest of the auto world was quietly innovating. We all know what happened after that, of course. Once the gas crisis manifested itself in the late 70's and fuel prices rose, the industry tanked because it didn't change quickly enough. Foreign automakers gained tremendous market share over the subsequent few decades, and still maintain control over large amounts of it. When you snooze, you lose.

My father's workplace is a great example of SKILLED CRAFTSMAN being replaced by cheap specialized labor all so boardmembers and executives can have HUGE f*cking salaries and bonuses. Let me rephriase that. Americans are losing their livelyhoods so this upper 1% can get paid more.

And that's as far down the road as you can see? It's true that there are "corporate raiders" who sit on some boards and sell off assets or downsize solely for the purpose of enhancing their bonuses, but the companies they lead don't last for long unless idiotic and/or unethical policymakers bail them out. Case-in-point, American Airlines. That company should have been dufunct years ago, but the government has saved it on several occassions, the most recent being the $15 billion bailout after 9/11.

The rationale behind this was the too-big-to-fail argument coupled with an emphatic argument that the airline's insolubility was not its own fault. The complete opposite was true. American was a lumbering, unionized, failure that should have gone out of business and been replaced by an efficient airline where former employees could have attained jobs. Instead, we're still stuck with AA and the board members are still a bunch of counterproductive a-holes. Most recently, there was a dispute between labor and management when the company returned to profitability but voluntarily lowered union wages were not increased, though the board got huge bonuses. Capitalism and progress didn't do that, the government is what made it possible.

Your father may be a skilled craftsman, but if his industry can't compete, or a machine can do his job, or no one wants to buy the things he crafts, there is no point in keeping his job around. It would be like paying to keep boilermakers around after we quit using steam engines; just economic dead-weight.

I don't know what your father's situation is, or yours for that matter, but you should also consider that whatever firms employ you, unless they're just closing entirely, may actually be preserving jobs by outsourcing yours. If the firm can remain competitive, it can remain in business, and at least some people won't lose their jobs. The ones who will get your job need it more than you do, anyway, because they're poorer and they don't live in a rich country.

Of course, if you really don't give a crap about the guy in India whose malaria-ridden family is starving in a crowded hovel with sewage for a front lawn, there is a way to end this recession and bring good jobs back to the US and create newer, better ones in very short order. All we have to do is cut corporate taxes to 0%, disband some expensive regulatory frameworks, sclae back anti-business legislation, and remove tariffs. Lots of outmoded and uncompetitive industries would die immediately, but the move would create a lot of jobs as firms from other nations flocked to the US and new businesses sprang up. It would be like Switzerland or Hong Kong, but on a world-dominating scale. To put it another way, who cares if the factory is in China if the company owns China?

Over the years, I've see cost of living increasing, jobs decreasing, no raises and stagnant income, all the while executives see increased salary and bonuses. I see more and more people sharing apartments because they can't afford to rent their own apartment, let alone buy a god damn house.

Can't really argue with that, but I think you're misidentifying the causes of it. When Wal-Mart or whoever runs a successful business, it does not make the standard of living decrease. It's easy to see how one could think that just by looking at a Wal-Mart greeter working for $8.00 an hour, but what you don't see is the 75-yr old guy sitting at home and going bankrupt with no way out because he planned poorly for retirement and has no job and no way out because there is no job. You don't see the 16-yr old kid not bagging groceries to save money for a car because he has no skills worth more than 8 bucks an hour. Wal-Mart creates employment for the otherwise unemployable, and creates services for the consumer of little means. Their motto, "Save Money. Live Better", is actually true.

By contrast, when the government taxes people, and when it agrees with heel-draggers who whine about their jobs being lost and steals money from others to keep them unproductively employed, the economic pie really does get smaller. The income does allow them to buy things and particiapte in the economy to a degree, but overall they create a net loss. That's why the government is so heavily in debt, and why companies get so spendthrift; they have to keep pace with the costs of doing business.

Written language does not adequately describe my disgust for this. Sure, go walmart, go ahead and put Americans out of good jobs while your exeuctives clean house. Yeah.. aren't we so F*cking lucky to have them, and their pro company men to explain to us. Brav F'ing Oh!

Wal-Mart execs, like most execs, get payed the big bucks because they do big things. The arguments have already been made that their salaries are a drop in the bucket, comparitively speaking, and I mentioned corporate raiders, but I'd also like to mention "caring capitalism" and CEO bonuses. Ben and Jerry's ice cream company tried limiting CEO income on the grounds that they could not justify the wealth disparity between execs and line workers. They limited the salary to five times the wage of the lowest paid workers. They got exactly what they paid for; the absolute worst execs caring capitalism could buy, and ended up paying a CEO 14 times what the lowest-paid worker earned. He wasn't good enough either, so they ended up paying another CEO even more and then they sold the company.

I understand how frustrating it can be to live in a world where your livleyhood can vanish in an instant; whisked away to some foreign shore because you were too expensive while the big-wigs make obscene salaries. It seems wrong on the face of it, but that's the way forward. You can choose to hang on to your lousy, endangered job and cost everyone else or start playing the same game that the execs do and think ahead. Innovate. Make sound, long-term investments in commodities or education. Discover the miracle of compound interest. Make your income count.

Admittedly, the state is making that harder and harder to do with the increase in capital gains tax, inflation, and taxes, taxes, taxes, in general, but there are still a lot of opportunities out there if you work hard and plan wisely.