U.S in decline

[Tech_Esq]

I concur. Much of the industrialized world was in ruins. plus our allies were basically broke, and they owed the USA enormous debts, too

Ok

Good theory, not really supported by the trade numbers though.

For a VERY LIMITED number of industries, yes they did get stuff from us.

All I was talking about here was the 1950s and 1960s. This was a time when quite a lot of what we made was shipped overseas and our manufacturing base was still healthy.

Which ones?

Mostly our arms industries. But no real benefit came of that because we the US taxpayers (many of who were working in those antiquated US industries at the times) PAID for that hardware they were buying from our arms merchants, even while those same American Taxpayers were ALSO paying for those nations security, too.

That explains some, but not all by any stretch, of what was going on.

Nice for Japan and Germany but one that was terribly, expensive for us as a whole.

That depends on your perspective. If you grant that the Truman Doctrine was what we should have been engaged in at the time, then choices were to arm Germany and Japan to the extent that they represented a credible obstacle to a surging Soviet Union. A militarily strong Germany and Japan was not anything anyone was interested in in the 1950s and 1960s and maybe not now. Even if they were "within and international framework of collective security." Our other choices were, do it ourselves just occupying their country (an option close to what was done in Japan). Or, a half measure, where the country is rearmed to a point and occupied (like we did with Germany). Given our options, I'm not convinced we made the most expensive choice.

If you reject the Truman Doctrine, then we have a different discussion on our hands.

Inefficient? We had the most efficient industries on earth until we BOUGHT other nations their newer industries. We could have invested that money in the USA but that didn't jibe with our foreign policy.

I was using the term "efficient" in an economic sense. I wasn't talking about efficient industry, I was talking about labor. We pay an increasingly inefficient amount for our industrial labor force. While I'm all for people making as much as they can, it must comply with the laws of economics. I'm pretty convinced at this point that it is a fantasy to wish the rest of the world away. If we did isolate ourselves so we could continue the inefficiencies, our products would eventually suffer and we would suffer an equally hard landing as our fantasy castle fell down.

WE BOUGHT most of the so called allies we had during the cold war. We bought them by giving away our industrial base.

Pretty much, yep.

You mean EXACTLY like they did and STILL do to us, you mean?

It's a matter of degree.

Oh boo hoo hoo. Look at the balance of trade and get back to me would you?

LOL...settle down.

The percentage of industrial workers in America was 30% then. It's 6% now.

Yeah, apparently the brainiacs decided that we don't want industrial workers that why they want to send every fucking body to college.

Everything you say makes sense except it is not supported by the numbers, amigo. It's a grand theory, but its not true.

Where the fuck is it written that its the reponsibility of some machinist in Indiana to give up his job so that a machine in Yokohama can have it?

I believe that would be the "Invisible Hand" at work but on a global scale. This is the effect of increased communications and shortened distance in space and time between global locations. The fact that I can pick up a phone and get something to virtually any part of the globe within a week has had a huge impact on jobs.

You then get into your standard "highest and best use" analysis. Is it really the highest and best use of the American work force to be turning a single nut on a bolt 8 hours a day for $50 per hour? Is that really an economic argument you want to have?

The fact really is that we are being let down by our business and government leaders. (Or is it just being let down by ourselves?) At this point in our development, we need to be on to the next thing. Manufacturing was it for really about 150 years. It's over. We have spent untold riches to be far beyond any other country with our technological infrastructure. We practically have "last mile" fiber optic cable in every major city and suburb in the country. We have high speed multi-gigabit routers interconnecting the entire thing. To what end? So we can watch porn faster? Hopefully not. We need to take advantage of our assets and our differentiators and stop looking back at the past. We are no more going to have 30% of our workforce involved in manufacturing again than we will have 30% involved in agriculture. The family farm will never return. The days of masses of laborer going to steel mills and auto plants will not return either. It's just facts. We need to stop being nostalgic for a by-gone era and get on with our migration to new technologies or we will get our ass handed to us.

Didn't allow us to stay ahead, it merely give us still another industry to ship overseas after we'd perfected it.

How many computer chips or computers are actually made here, now?

I'm not sure, but I have a Micron chip plant 5 miles from my house sitting right in Manassas, VA. So, we're making some of them here.

Does it? No the profits return to a very very select number of Americans...who may or may not actually pay any taxes on it.

The average American gets diddlie-squat from those Tiwanese widgits

And then what? Does the money evaporate? Do these few people hold it in off-shore accounts? If it is held in US banks, (in normal times) it allows banks to lend capital at a 9-1 ratio of funds held to loans out. It is likely also spent in the US for R&D efforts and other non-manufacturing business efforts.

They don't huh? In most cases they own more than 50% of those industies, and now they OWN the skilled work force because their workers are doing the jobs instead of American workers.

It helps their industrial base, and the multiplier effect which an industrial base creates. The multiplier effect is even greater than the industrial base, and we don't get SHIT from that, do we?

Meanwhile their workers do NOT pay US taxes, our workers lose those VITAL SKILLS, and whole regions of our nation sit and rust.

Galling isn't it? Every argument you make here, you are making for the US position vis-a-vis Toyota, Honda and all the other overseas companies that manufacture in this country. So they chose to leave Michigan and Ohio and go to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee etc. Even GM built their Saturn plant in Tennessee.

Where are the PARTS for their cars made, champ? In America? No. All that happens is their cars are ASSEMBLED here. They're STILL mostly making the parts in Japan and Germany and Korea, amigo.

Ok, well you have some wiggle words in there so it probably doesn't matter that Dana and Spicer are still producing parts in the US Plants in Jonesboro, AR But I'm not going to search out the production facilities of every parts manufacturer. There are some that are in the US and some that are overseas. Freund.

Why? Because their leaders are nationalists, that's why.

More like because we are pussies.

Good advise. Shame we bankrupted ourselves instead of investing in America, huh?

Yes

Why should they? They realize that American leadership is going to do that for them.

Doubt it, we'll be too broke. We may want to, but we will not be able to. The real problem is that nature abhors a vacuum. This will all a new power or several to rise. That will be to our peril no doubt.

Pal I fear we are all going to live long enough to see that happen.

How long do you suppose we can be a world power with no industrial base, bankrupted governments, Federal state and local, one of the the worst edcuational system in the first world, no health care for our people and so forth?

Pull up! Pull up!! LOL... you're in a death spiral. We do have some industrial base, but more importantly, we could have one if we needed one. It isn't like we don't know how to do it. If we had the need to create robotic assembly lines we could do it. For example, needed to create the capacity to manufacture the MRAP armored vehicle and deploy them to Iraq. It took about 6-8 months to put it together and ramp up, but by the time we hit 12 months we were exceeding production schedules. So, we can if we need to.

Yes, the government is bankrupt (not our state and not our local, so you must be speaking parochially) The other levels have financial challenges, but we are meeting them with cuts in services and layoffs in our state.

Education is our worst problem. As long as the NEA lives and breathes it will never improve either. All of the high schools in the county I'm in are in the top 5% nationally. Since I'm not overly impressed with our schools, the rest of them must just suck.

It's not that we don't have health care. There is a specious number of 47 million people that don't have health care, but like frictional unemployment, this is frictional uninsurance. I agree we need to do better but meet me on another channel for that discussion. I have a GREAT plan to fix it! It's a cool little bit of everything solution.

What many of us have been mistaking in some others of us here as socialism has really been our raging NATIONALISM.

I agree, that's why on trade issues the left ends up agreeing with Pat Bucannan. He's a nationalist and a populist first.

But many of us have been poisoned with a load of economic horseshit disguised as ADAM SMITH economic wisdom.

Likewise I not the enormous kneejerkly stupid anti-government, anti-democratic Randian blather still enthralls many of you as being great wisdom, too.

Many of our fellow American have not only bought into that horseshit, but they're absolutely THRILLED that MOST Americans are going broke, just because we're not (not yet at least)

Shadenfreuden much?

Your meds are over there ----->>>
LOL....so I'm guessing you aren't a big Ayn Rand fan, is that right? Most Americans are going broke????? Really? And yet 93% are paying their mortgages on time every month. That is a shocking statistic? They must have save a butt load to be able to do that while going broke. Kinda makes me feel like a slacker.

You bet your ass that's exactly the vile conceit that many of us right here on this board examplify every damned day.

And the masters play on these class traitors' childish conceit like a Strataverious, too don't they?

A lot of us have bought a very complex theory which is completely and totally WRONG.

We haven't read Adam Smith, yet we can quote a parced out sentence or two which supports something that ADAM SMITH did NOT support.

ADAM SMITH was an economic nationalist, folks.

ADAM SMITH no more believed in FREE TRADE than King GEORGE III did.

When he talks about free trade what he's REALLY talking about is not trying to make ENGLAND a nation which grows its own cork, or grows its own GRAPES.

But he was a member of the government of England.

The very same government which OUTLAWED INDUSTRY in Nother America.

Why?

Because he KNEW what apparently some of us do not...that a nation needs to foster its own industrial development.

Not ship it to another nation as we have been doing, but protect it for its own development.

I'll have to chew on this one for a while. My knee jerk reaction is that technological innovation creating shorter trade routes modifies some of what Smith wrote. But, it has been a while since I read the Wealth of Nations, so I might have to go home and dust it off and take another peek.

Enjoyed the post!

 

[William Joyce]

I sincerely doubt that. We've shipped most of our factories overseas. What saved us during WWII was that we were able to refit our factories so fast and we were basically self sufficient. We rely too much on imports now. Plus most of our government and private business are run by computers, those computers go down and everything comes to a halt. All it takes is one big EMP, and we are back to the stone age. Sadly our educational system is so bad that most highschool kids can't even add and subtract without a calculator.

Yes. I think it's funny that we even talk about military conflict with China. All China needs to do to wipe our asses out is 1) call the loans 2) stop shipping us stuff. They needn't fire a single missile!

 

[Old Rocks]

Yes. I think it's funny that we even talk about military conflict with China. All China needs to do to wipe our asses out is 1) call the loans 2) stop shipping us stuff. They needn't fire a single missile!

They do not even have to call the loans, just start selling the debt for less than face value.

 

[Missourian]

that and being unemployed and getting evicted. The mind does not create "reality" only responds to it

I would beg to differ. Only the human mind could take a shiny yellow metal with no practical application and back an entire monetary system with it. When you break down and vigorously inspect the building blocks of our so called reality, it is nearly entirely contrived.

 

[editec]

Ok
All I was talking about here was the 1950s and 1960s. This was a time when quite a lot of what we made was shipped overseas and our manufacturing base was still healthy.

Fair enough. I concur.

That explains some, but not all by any stretch, of what was going on.

Granted. We also sold a lot of food, and machines which were used to create the factories that now produce the goods we once produced. What we did not sell enough of was manufactured consumer goods in comparison to the manufactured consumer goods that were flooding back into the USA.

The balance of trade numbers started to really fall apart for us in the early 1970s. Note please how many "recessions" have happened since that time.

That depends on your perspective. If you grant that the Truman Doctrine was what we should have been engaged in at the time, then choices were to arm Germany and Japan to the extent that they represented a credible obstacle to a surging Soviet Union.

Understood. Our EMPIRE builders needed allies. We paid for those allies with American industrial might.

A militarily strong Germany and Japan was not anything anyone was interested in in the 1950s and 1960s and maybe not now.

Yet ironically, we will see those nations develop their own military as ours collapses due to the economic disaster that we've been creating for this nation one stupid tax or trade policy at a time over the last 40 years.

Even if they were "within and international framework of collective security." Our other choices were, do it ourselves just occupying their country (an option close to what was done in Japan). Or, a half measure, where the country is rearmed to a point and occupied (like we did with Germany). Given our options, I'm not convinced we made the most expensive choice.

We'll never know, will we?

If you reject the Truman Doctrine, then we have a different discussion on our hands.

I object to how it was paid for, that's for damned sure.

I was using the term "efficient" in an economic sense. I wasn't talking about efficient industry, I was talking about labor. We pay an increasingly inefficient amount for our industrial labor force.

And now that we are paying an efficient amount those workers don't pay taxes, cannot support their local state or federal government.

Efficiency doesn't just stop at the COMPANY'S books, it continue to flow into society via the MULTIPLIER EFFECT.

American workers have been the highest paid workers in the Western World since BEFORE the American Revolution.

That is exactly why the USA because the wealthiest nation on earth, ya know? Apparently you have yet to believe that, but it is the truth.

No society comprised of superweathy and peasants has EVER become as wealthy and powerful as ours did.

While I'm all for people making as much as they can, it must comply with the laws of economics. I'm pretty convinced at this point that it is a fantasy to wish the rest of the world away.

If we did isolate ourselves so we could continue the inefficiencies, our products would eventually suffer and we would suffer an equally hard landing as our fantasy castle fell down.

Nobody is wishing the rest of the world away.

Let's not insult one another by mischaracterizing the other's point, okay?

I am not an isolationist, I am a nationalist. There's a big god damned difference.

Yeah, apparently the brainiacs decided that we don't want industrial workers that why they want to send every fucking body to college.

And then sent everybody's jobs offshore to pay from friends at about the same time, you mean?

I believe that would be the "Invisible Hand" at work but on a global scale.

I believe that would be the Invisible DOPESLAP" at work on a global scale.

This is the effect of increased communications and shortened distance in space and time between global locations. The fact that I can pick up a phone and get something to virtually any part of the globe within a week has had a huge impact on jobs.

Yes it does.

You then get into your standard "highest and best use" analysis. Is it really the highest and best use of the American work force to be turning a single nut on a bolt 8 hours a day for $50 per hour? Is that really an economic argument you want to have?

Yes, I do. The argument of highest and best use is specious IF you stop the equation at the COMPANY level, and don't follow it through to the IMPACT on society.

We are MORE than a business. We are a nation. Apparently our masters of the universe have forgotten that. THAT or they are planning on ending nation states entirely.

The fact really is that we are being let down by our business and government leaders. (Or is it just being let down by ourselves?) At this point in our development, we need to be on to the next thing.

What is the next thing?

Manufacturing was it for really about 150 years. It's over.

Poppycock.

That's the conceit of the digital/higher tech class speaking. The one which is ENTIRELY dependent on the manufacturing world, AND the agricultural world to survive.

We have spent untold riches to be far beyond any other country with our technological infrastructure. We practically have "last mile" fiber optic cable in every major city and suburb in the country. We have high speed multi-gigabit routers interconnecting the entire thing. To what end? So we can watch porn faster? Hopefully not. We need to take advantage of our assets and our differentiators and stop looking back at the past.

Ah yes, the desire to imagine that the world starts TODAY, and that all history is merely prologue which can be forgotten or ignored.

The Libertarians' delusion is that history is irrelevant, but it isn't.

Every one of us is where we are today, because of what happened yesterday.

This absurd notion that history is irrelevant, and that we can turn our back on it is the anti-intellectualism of the technical class, speaking you know.

We are no more going to have 30% of our workforce involved in manufacturing again than we will have 30% involved in agriculture.

Then we'd best figure out, and figure out pretty god damned fast, what exactly that 30% of our population is going to do to become a productive member of this society.

What we think we can do, but cannot, is let social Darwinism solve the problem.

We are TODAY, just beginning to realize that, you know.

Every economic and social problem facing this nation can be laid at the feet of that entirely mistaken notion.

NO, if you bankrupt the bottom half of you population they will NOT go gently into the dustbin of history.

I know you gun toting, MRE saving, gated community SURVIVALISTS think that is what's going to happen, but that is not what EVER happens when societies forget about a huge segment of the populations.

What does happen?

The society begins to fail EVERYONE because the problems of that neglected segment of the population becomes EVERYONE'S problem.

The family farm will never return. The days of masses of laborer going to steel mills and auto plants will not return either. It's just facts. We need to stop being nostalgic for a by-gone era and get on with our migration to new technologies or we will get our ass handed to us.

No argument from me on that.

Sadly we are NOT migrating into new technologies.

Fewer and fewer or us are included in that migration, chum.

And that problem is NOT going to be solved by casually dismissing the LOSERS as irrelevant just because some of us are still okay.

Fewer and fewer of us are okay today than were okay yesterday.

Where the tipping point is where the society stops working for you or I is not clear.

Depending on individual circumstance, it is going to be reached today or tomorrow, or next year, but the numbers of people for whom this system is no longer working cannot continue at the rate it is ALREADY manifesting.

I'm not sure, but I have a Micron chip plant 5 miles from my house sitting right in Manassas, VA. So, we're making some of them here.

Not enough. Not even enough to keep our own highly technically dependent military afloat. THAT is madness.

And then what? Does the money evaporate? Do these few people hold it in off-shore accounts? If it is held in US banks, (in normal times) it allows banks to lend capital at a 9-1 ratio of funds held to loans out. It is likely also spent in the US for R&D efforts and other non-manufacturing business efforts.

What money the monies classes gain from OFFSHORE is miniscule compared to the money which is NOT in our society because of offshoring our industry.

You are a smart person, Tech. Smart enough to understand that profits are NOT the entire story of industry. COSTS are ALSO beneficial to a society because costs are really SALARIES which get spend HERE.

The Two words which our internationalist laissez fair, Randian nitwits keep forgetting when they dismiss the working class as being relevant to their well being are these:

MULTIPLIER EFFECT.​

Ship the bottom jobs offshore and that multiplier effect goes to help OTHER societies.

Galling isn't it? Every argument you make here, you are making for the US position vis-a-vis Toyota, Honda and all the other overseas companies that manufacture in this country. So they chose to leave Michigan and Ohio and go to South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee etc. Even GM built their Saturn plant in Tennessee.

Why are they here to begin with, do you actually know?

I'll tell you...because the government FORCED THEM to assemble their cars here, that's why.

In other words, left to their own devices, not a single foreign car maker would be here.

Not one.

It took a KIND of TARIFF (actually a limit on the number of cars they could import, one the voluntarily agreed to because otherwise there might have been REAL problems for them) to make them put ANY plants here.

I will remind you that at one point the trade imbalance in AUTOS between Japan and the USA was 1000 to 1.

NOT because American workers were inefficient, but because Japan was DUMPING cars here to gain market share.

It cost less to buy a Toyota in New York City than it cost to by the same car in JAPAN.

What did Japan know that apparently we forgot?

That the health of a nation's economy depended on putting its OWN people to work.

Ok, well you have some wiggle words in there so it probably doesn't matter that Dana and Spicer are still producing parts in the US Plants in Jonesboro, AR But I'm not going to search out the production facilities of every parts manufacturer. There are some that are in the US and some that are overseas. Freund.

I'll be interested in discoing what percentage of foreign made cars is actually made here.

More like because we are pussies.

The American people are not pussies. They are being mislead though by the masters of deceit.

Doubt it, we'll be too broke. We may want to, but we will not be able to. The real problem is that nature abhors a vacuum. This will all a new power or several to rise. That will be to our peril no doubt.

Yes, power abhors a vacuum. And FWIW as long as we're being pithy, bad business practices drive out good ones.

Pull up! Pull up!! LOL... you're in a death spiral. We do have some industrial base, but more importantly, we could have one if we needed one. It isn't like we don't know how to do it.

You really do believe that, don't you? You really do believe that a factory is only about having people with the brains to design it. Do you honestly think that you or I could become precision machinists in a week or two?

Do you honestly think that you or I could become tool and die makers in a month?

You're classist prejudice is showing, sport.

If we had the need to create robotic assembly lines we could do it. For example, needed to create the capacity to manufacture the MRAP armored vehicle and deploy them to Iraq. It took about 6-8 months to put it together and ramp up, but by the time we hit 12 months we were exceeding production schedules. So, we can if we need to.

Good luck with that. Let me know how well that will work out in a time of national emergency, would you?

Yes, the government is bankrupt (not our state and not our local, so you must be speaking parochially)

You are not paying attention if you imagine that to be true. In fact our states and local government, now having the FEDS dumping social problems on them are in worse shape than we are nationally.

The other levels have financial challenges, but we are meeting them with cuts in services and layoffs in our state.

And you really do think that those cuts and layoffs won't be effecting the lives of the people in this nation, right?

Yes, you are a social Darwinist. I remember when I was a social Darwinist.

Man that was a comforting world view.

Education is our worst problem. As long as the NEA lives and breathes it will never improve either. All of the high schools in the county I'm in are in the top 5% nationally. Since I'm not overly impressed with our schools, the rest of them must just suck.

They do more or less. But the problem isn't the NEA...it's what's happening to the families these kids are coming out of.

It's not that we don't have health care. There is a specious number of 47 million people that don't have health care, but like frictional unemployment, this is frictional uninsurance.

Great news. I don't want to debate the HC issue in this thread, but I am happy that you still have decent health care. I do not.

I agree we need to do better but meet me on another channel for that discussion. I have a GREAT plan to fix it! It's a cool little bit of everything solution.

You have a plan to fix our health care problem?

I'd love to see it.

I agree, that's why on trade issues the left ends up agreeing with Pat Buchanan. He's a nationalist and a populist first.

Oh I doubt most of the "left" even knows what Pat Buchanan thinks about anything. Most of the "left" is as clueless as most of the "right" in my never humble opinion.

Your meds are over there ----->>>

Now was that actually necessary?

LOL....so I'm guessing you aren't a big Ayn Rand fan, is that right?

Oh, I loved her books when I was 13 years old. She's a conceited idiot, but I can understand why an apologist for greed appeals to many people still making it in America today.​

We ALL want to believe that we are morally correct and she provides an excuse for thinking that our good fortune is entirely because of our personal merit.​

Most Americans are going broke????? Really? And yet 93% are paying their mortgages on time every month. That is a shocking statistic? They must have save a butt load to be able to do that while going broke. Kinda makes me feel like a slacker.

Yeah just keep telling yourself that the trend lines of the personal and corporate bankruptcies aren't significant or important.

FYI, the last thing people stop paying is their mortgages.

I'll have to chew on this one for a while. My knee jerk reaction is that technological innovation creating shorter trade routes modifies some of what Smith wrote. But, it has been a while since I read the Wealth of Nations, so I might have to go home and dust it off and take another peek.

Yeah, take another peek and get back to me.

Meanwhile study what the government who paid his salary was doing in terms of FREE TRADE while he was penning that completely outdated book on international trade, would you?

Enjoyed the post!

So did I, as I usually do, whenever you and I discuss these kinds of issues.

It is always a pleasure to discuss these kinds of issues with somebody who actually thinks deeply about them.