Protectionism

[loosecannon]

You know, loosecannon, I was in a good mood last night so I figured I'd give you until this morning to come up with a response in the "Fake Jews" thread. You're OP got napalmed, and you didn't bring so much as a water balloon in defense. You failed.

Strike one.

wrongo, Bucko. I asked you if you had posted anything in that thread.

You couldn't understand the question....apparently.

About your goose-stepping in this thread:

The holocaust targeted as many poles as it did Jews, and Jews were only 1/3 to 1/2 of the victims of the holocaust.

Iow it didn't target Jews.

Those two sentences contradict each other; I even bolded the specific parts so you can understand more better-er. The Holocaust targeted the Jews, along with other people Hitler deemed inferior. It's possible to have more than one target, you know. So your last sentence would be correct if you had written "Iow it didn't target Jews exclusively." But you didn't, so it's not.

I am sorry, my point apparently sailed over your head. Try standing up.

The Jews spent the last 60 years changing the definition of "holocaust' to refer exclusively to the crimes Germany committed against JEWS.

Never mind the fact that Jews were not singled out as the only victim and were not targeted for annihilation even as much as other groups were.

Hell, Hitler even tried to deport the Jews but nobody else would take them.

Hitler didn't try to deport the Roma gypsies. Or the Poles, or the handicapped, or the Russians.

If Hitler had his way he wouldn't have run one Jew thru the gas chambers.

But nobody would take them despite efforts to ship them abroad. They were refused entry in cuba, in London, in the US, in Canada. They finally were accepted in Belgium and France and were later absorbed by the Germans as Germany advanced across Europe.

Given the fact that Jews have made it a world wide mission to redefine the holocaust to exclude reference to MOST of it's victims, it is incumbent upon honest people to deny them this ability to revise history.

Which is why i don't consider the Jews to have been "targeted".

And if you don't like it, fuck you!

 

[The Rabbi]

Hey, Loosebowel. Take that Holocaust-denial shit and stick it back where it came from.

 

[loosecannon]

The problem is that you can't wrap that little mind of yours around the concept of productivity and wages. The fact that you think Chinese workers are more productive than American workers means you know very little about this topic.

Your problem, Toro, is that you can't speak English, or perhaps you have cognitive disabilites.

In any case I never said anything that could even be reasonably confused with: " Chinese workers are more productive than American workers".

But that does sum up our discussion, you have no idea what you are talking about or what position i am taking so you persistently make ignorant assumptions.

Nobody can fix that but you.

What i did say is that if Chinese labor was less productive/dollar than US labor, then the Chinese would not be able to deliver value added goods at prices a small fraction of what we charge for the same goods.

I said that in response to your goofball assertion that labor is rewarded according to it's rate of productivity, which is obviously false.

Anybody with half a remedial sense of economics would know that wages are impacted by surplus and shortage of labor as much as they are by anything else.

China has an enormous surplus of labor while we do not.

Even in the USA wages don't keep pace with productivity increases.

No go sit down at the kids table and stfu.

 

[Big Fitz]

the idea that healthy food in the US is more expensive than shit food is bogus, too, but that is a different discussion. its not the cost that makes broke americans unhealthy, but that is the case in the undeveloped world, only that the poor there don't have money for food.

The two biggest factors as I look at them are these:

1. Convenience. People want something now, and now is affordable. They don't have time or energy or knowledge or patience to prepare something healthy so they get what they can eat fast. The wealthy can afford someone to do it for them. It used to be the job of one of the parents in the single income home, but since that's all but become a bygone concept, you have nobody preparing meals.

2. Cost. I challenge you to go to the store and for 100 bucks, get enough food for a family of four for 2 weeks. Trust me, it's going to be high in starches and fats and salt and probably processed too. Why? Because if you want to be eating healthy or worse still, ORGANIC! (pah! what a scam) you aren't doing it for 46 meals. Combine that with the previous Convenience, and there you go.

oh and the last reason which I just remembered, you have fat poor people, particularly those on welfare: Sedentary lifestyle. People don't walk. People don't go outside anywhere near as much and DO things. The world is delivered to them cheaply through the internet, Cable and the Radio. Why leave home, their Playstation's much more interesting. Rich people DO things it seems. Why don't poor people go outside and do things? because in poor neighborhoods they are not safe to do things outside many times. I live in one, and if it weren't for the fact that I have facilities in my complex, I'd be hard pressed to find a place to exercise. Rich people live in safe neighborhoods with bike trails and walking paths or have health clubs or something else, and can afford to take better care of themselves.

TO compare the poor of this nation to any other is ludicrous. I'm working poor and I have the fucking internet sure as clockwork! It's insane that we have the situation we do. Poor in other nations are starving to death or malnourished. Why? Because they don't have the same support mechanisms this nation generally does. You know, it's funny. When I had to get aid to feed myself during a long unemployment spell, I had to go to a catholic funded charity and salvation army. Their generosity saved my but. But after experiencing it... I realized something sad. I ate better on the generosity of others than I ever did on my own, because I was given things that I could not afford otherwise on my grocery budget.

Nowadays, I eat much healthier, but with my schedule, I still have to rely on conveinent and fast. And guess what? They don't make fresh and healthy and portable that way. Or if they do... it's bloody expensive for what you get.

So 4 sliders trump your single garden salad every time.

Nothing personal, just human behavior and economics.

 

[antagon]

it is a lot about convenience and price. i think the price of fast food is deceptive, however. nobody is feeding a family of four 2 weeks for $100 from mcdonalds. if they are, they are not fat. there's simply no way.

apart from that, i think the education and obsession with ambition, competitiveness, self-improvement and self-image which lends to wealth is not coincidental with those folks who aren't wealthy, nearly as much. it's circular to a certain extent. these same traits motivate healthier lifestyle.

there were just three of us, but $150 - $200 a month made for good eating growing up in the 90s as two teenaged, football playing boys and their mom. it boils down to whether or not you know how to cook and shop. i witnessed a guy who used to be on my crew shopping on his baby-momma's foodstamp card, and the $350/week allowed for her and two (maybe three) little kids didn't stretch that far buying the pre-prepped shitfood he selected. he was always griping about his kids starving near the end of the month. my mother was afraid of government assistance, although looking back, we really, really needed it. we made $350 stretch a whole month when we had to. my mother had to cook, which i'm handy with now, but she worked all day, too, 7 days per week. what are some of these benefit chix doing that they have to buy sausage pizzas and tv dinners? these prepared foods are not cheaper than making foods from scratch. especially when feeding a family, buying ingredients is cheaper than buying a bunch of tv dinners. especially enough to make your family fat.

 

[editec]

Your solution isn't a cure, its a new more serious disease, a weak dollar. I prefer that we undo the tax breaks for moving jobs overseas and modernize the US industrial base instead. The best way to reduce the trade deficit is to manufacture more US goods, that increases employment and the tax base.

You realize we manufacture more goods now than we ever have, right?

Agreed that due to productivity gains the US produces more goods in dollar value. Yet the US has lost 3,000,000 manufacturing jobs, and has a huge trade deficit. IMHO we moved way too many jobs/factories overseas. How else do you explain the massive trade deficit and the massive unemployment rate? No jobs = no money = no taxes

It's not only those 3,000,000 industrial jobs we lost in the last decade or so.

Since the FD Roosevelt admin (that's whenthis free trade nonsense really started!) the USA also didn't create about *30,000,000 industrial jobs we would have created sans this foolish policy.

And for those of you so conceited as to think that this policy isn't effecting you because you studied hard in school?

Consider how many of those jobs that were never created would have been managment jobs.

Consider also how you who are in the top 50% of income earners now have to pay the taxes of those who are now working at McJobs, too.

You cannot screw your neighors over without screwing yourselves, too.

In human economics there truly is NO FREE LUNCH.

* Where'd I get THAT number, you ask? I used that tried and true SWAG method...(scientific wild-assed guessing)

 

[The Rabbi]

You realize we manufacture more goods now than we ever have, right?

Agreed that due to productivity gains the US produces more goods in dollar value. Yet the US has lost 3,000,000 manufacturing jobs, and has a huge trade deficit. IMHO we moved way too many jobs/factories overseas. How else do you explain the massive trade deficit and the massive unemployment rate? No jobs = no money = no taxes

It's not only those 3,000,000 industrial jobs we lost in the last decade or so.

Since the FD Roosevelt admin (that's whenthis free trade nonsense really started!) the USA also didn't create about *30,000,000 industrial jobs we would have created sans this foolish policy.

And for those of you so coceited as to think that isn't effecting you because you studied hard in school?

Consider how many of those jobs that were never created would have been managment jobs.

Consider also how you who are in the top 50% of income earners now have to pay the taxes of those who are now working at McJobs, too.

You cannot screw your neighors over without screwing yourselves, too.

In human economics there truly is NO FREE LUNCH.

* Where'd I get THAT number? I used that tried and trueSWAG method...(scientific wild-assed guessing)

That reasoning is as idiotic as the post is a butchered mess of mis-spellings and bad grammar.
How many jobs "would have been created"?? There is no way to know.
How many ag jobs were lost because of advances in productivity in agriculture? Many. Consider that in 1900 a majority of people working worked in agriculture. Project that to today and we can "how many jobs would be created" if we had resisted modern farming methods.
Instead labor migrated to more value added jobs, factory work and the like.
This is the same dynamic at work here. And with an unemployment rate that has been in the 5% range one cannot argue that there aren't jobs.

 

[antagon]

editec, do you regret determining that the US should be a country with high standards of life and labor, or do you feel that we should rejoin the ranks of export-driven nations with no middle classes and polar separation of wealth? if you are going to dig back to roosevelt in your search for trade and economic policy criticism, then you paint the mutually exclusive decision between a destitute american population amid robber barons or today's dynamic economy. it cuts as clear as that.

this thread is instead about the nuance within this dynamic economy and which policies might lend to improving the mix of industrial and service employment capacity in our job market.

 

[antagon]

*initiate shift-key utilization*

Drawing back to the idea of protecting American Industry, I consider the analogy of a footrace. Some protections, like the hard protections to which I referred some time earlier, are aimed at assaulting the ability for the other runners in the trade market to compete on our turf. It is no mystery why other countries see tactics like quotas and tariffs as cheating, equivalent to tying our opponent's laces together before the start of the race, or battering them with our baton in the relay. I don't think anyone makes out well under such scenarios in terms of actual performance. This is where many of the criticisms of these crude protections come into play. Our industry turns out to be slothful, resting on the laurels of a government which would cheat them across the finish line ahead of the competition.

What about some other ways of winning the race? What about just being faster? Some have proposed that if businesses were free to determine their lot or had fewer taxes to pay that they will leap to the front of the field, but I believe that the returns on seeking a deregulated, low-tax business environment are diminishing, and that the pursuit of this policy is making our government insolvent. Indications are that we can't sustain the policy which makes the US a premier business environment, then give participation away for next to free. Notwithstanding this implication and the efforts which drive it into focus, our businesses still seek overseas labor markets as the subject of their investment. The more supply-side the policy, the more the outsourcing. So much for gratitude; they're helping other economies get a foot ahead in the race, while transferring the liability to domestically anchored incomes like small businesses and stateside workers.

Let's explore what I feel developed nations need to consider in order to get ahead in the race without trading in the high standards of living and labor which we've worked to establish in the last century. I propose exploiting dividends of the technological and resource advantages we have in an effort to win the race and revitalize the production capability which we have relegated to an unwise early retirement... Steroids... Now that's cheating, too, but the moral code in an Olympic sprint is inverse to the code governing a nation's obligation to steward it's economy -- the analogy starts to fail. Furthermore, the steroid approach does not aim to harm any other nation's chance to get ahead, it only tests their resources and their wherewithal to follow suit, a distinct advantage for the United States. What I mean by 'steroids' are soft protections, wisely applied, which can put businesses from all over the world at an advantage for setting up their operation in America. The state of the art of industrial protections in the U.S. are government/military contracts teamed with competitive barriers and unfocused agriculture quotas and subsidies; we need a revision.

If the US were to consider the sort of subsidy and support which strengthens heavy industries in developed nations like Germany, Japan and Norway, I feel that the zeitgeist of ridding our soil from production under the assumption that we are better off by letting other nations handle the manufacture of the finished goods in our market will vanish in a decade. It will be replaced with the sort of pride associated with national product, rather than 'domestic' product. Our economy will remain diverse, and undoubtedly, services and consumption will still dominate it, but a resting potential here in America would be revived, rather than put to pasture. The sort of subsidy to which I refer might entail supporting the cost of employment for workers in industries key to this revival. The regulatory advantages of rethought organized skilled labor which fosters competition between unions within the same trade, and which levels the playing field between the employee, their organization, and the company they work for. Competitive research grants which better cooperate the world's greatest industrial machine and the world's greatest university system, ensuring that engineers and managers from all over the world become our engineers and managers, rather than exploiters of our job and education market.

Lastly, as I touched on earlier, these benefits should welcome international firms to the same degree as our local businesses. Some American companies have built their business plans on turning their back on the American labor force, and America altogether. We will welcome these prodigal sons back into our favor, but by emphasizing that American soil is the land for big and small business opportunity will make more examples like American Toyota, one of the best things to happen to our domestic auto industry in decades.