...That Ted Cruz is going to have 95 reasons to rue having ever said "New York values" in a pejorative sense.
Frankly, I think Mr. Cruz should just withdraw his name from the NY GOP primary. Though I hold politicians seeking high federal office to a high and pretty strict set of standards, I am also somewhat forgiving if/when they earn my forgiveness. (I'm that way largely for me not for them.) But were I a New Yorker, there's no way this soon after that remark I would have found it within myself to forgive Mr. Cruz.
Were I unwilling to vote for Mr. Kasich, I'd just stay home because there's today no way in hell I'd vote for Trump. I find it hard to believe enough New Yorkers feel positively enough about Mr. Cruz to give him their GOP primary vote. But maybe I'm wrong.
FWIW, I don't care if I'm right or wrong about how New Yorkers feel as goes that remark. The above is merely an expression of what I think about the upcoming NY GOP primary election.
Are there any New Yorkers here who have a broad-based sense of what most other New Yorkers think of that remark and Mr. Cruz in light of his having uttered it? The few New Yorkers I know well all are Manhattanites who weren't going to vote for any of the GOP candidates in the first place. Accordingly, Mr. Cruz's remark merely moved him a bit farther from being certain they wouldn't support him and closer to "not in this lifetime" will they support him. LOL
You set high and pretty strict standards for politicians, but then you say that in no way would you vote for Trump. But he's the only candidate who's
first allegiance isn't to big buck donors, of which he has none. That should be the first hurdle a candidate gets over before being considered a choice, at least for a person who values high and strict standards. Well, I forgot about Sanders. He could be a choice for you. Trump, Sanders, or don't vote, it looks like. No offense, just saying.
That may be your first priority, but it's certainly not mine. It's not because there are plenty of past Presidents who did good things, who were good/effective, and who did have big-buck donors supporting them.
BTW, has it not occurred to you that
Trump has big buck contributors to his cause? Their names are Trump, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, etc. News agencies have contributed nearly $2B in media coverage to Trump.
These so called contributors are usually anti Trump from what I can see. Have you noticed how the entire establishment is anti Trump? Could be because they think he's a whacko. Also could be that
his stances on immigration and trade are anti big business. I'd like to see taxpayer funded elections. Democrats have put forth legislation to get money out of politics, but republicans have always fought back on this.
Lord, have effin' mercy! What will it take for folks to actually understand how trade works? I've had folks on this forum and outside it engage me and remark that in their opinion, I "can't see the forest for the trees." Well, guess what, with economics and business, one must see the forest
and the trees, and seeing both is what drives my remarks and position on this.
It's not that I don't see that the jobs have left. It's not that I don't understand why they are in China and elsewhere and not in the U.S. It's that I know that forcing them to come back isn't going to be better; it's just going to give folks something different to gripe about.
Anyone who has studied so much as the bare minimum of high school macro and micro economics can see why Trump's and Sanders' remarks about trade won't amount to a hill of beans as goes increasing job opportunities in the U.S. They won't because free trade is a thing that affects prices; the point of free trade is to lower prices, or keep them lower than they would be without free trade. Producing things people want to buy is what generates jobs. So, if the trade policies being bandied about this campaign cycle be implemented, within a lustrum all we'll hear is complaining about how high prices are, and how "everything" is too expensive, and how producers are "gouging" consumers. People will then advocate for price caps, which are just another artificial constraint.
- Trump wants to bring manufacturing back to the U.S. Nobody has a problem with that as an objective.
- In an of itself, nobody gives a damn where their goods are manufactured. Not the manufacturers. Not consumers of the goods produced. The goods are neither better nor worse on account of where they are fabricated.
- As go prices, goods producers don't care what they have to charge for their good. They can produce fewer "widgets" and sell them at higher prices or they can produce more "widgets" and sell them at lower prices. They can achieve the same profit margins (earning 50¢ on the dollar or earning 30¢ on the dollar) either way, and so long as they make whatever they deem to be the "minimum absolute quantity of 'profit-dollars,' that is the minimum threshold of profit volume has been reached, it doesn't matter to them." Producers' first goal it to make a profit, and that depends on profit margin, not on the overall volume of profit.
The matter of profit volumes (whether one in total earns $1B or $5B) isn't a factor for the size of companies Trump is talking about. Yes, of course if they can earn the $5B they would prefer that, but if the marketplace has constraints on it that make that impossible, they can live with that so long as they are earning a good enough profit margin. That is because they are already large enough that the quantity of dollars overall is enough.
- Producers/sellers care that what they must charge in a given market is comparable to what their competitors have to charge. In a market the size of the U.S., or even a region within the U.S., what a producer charges will be comparable to the prices charged by his competitors. That will be the case for commodities as well as for branded goods and seemingly branded goods. It already is that way now. There's nothing that's going to alter that phenomenon.
- Automation/technology, no matter where things are produced, performs the labor of many of the so-called displaced workers in the U.S. who used to toil with their hands. Were the factories that left the U.S. to return, what is going to keep the factory owners from using the very same, if not more advanced and more capable, robots to do the work? Nothing! Quite simply, one could bring all the factories back to the U.S. and the jobs that folks once had would not come back with them because now, robots do a large share of the work.
There’s an even bigger problem for those who want to restore U.S. manufacturing employment (now 12.3 million) to its 1979 peak of 19.6 million: Technology has taken many of those jobs for good. Today’s high-tech factories employ a fraction of the workers they used to. General Motors, for example, employed 600,000 in the 1970s. It has 216,000 now — and sells more cars than ever. Additionally, the cars GM today produces are better cars than they produced in the 1970s.
So what does that get one? Higher prices and still no more job opportunities, not enough of them to satisfy the folks bitching and crying about "exported jobs."
- Companies shifted low-skill jobs to China in the 2000s because American workers couldn’t compete with Chinese workers earning around $1 an hour. Now China itself is losing low-wage manufacturing jobs to poorer countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.
- If America tried to block foreign-made products and make everything at home, prices would skyrocket and foreign countries would likely retaliate by blocking U.S. goods from their countries. “You can’t turn back the clock"
The short of it is that going forward and into the foreseeable future, the jobs created in the U.S. aren't going to be manufacturing jobs. Although some jobs may be manufacturing jobs, not enough of them will be. Deal with it. What the electorate needs to be pressing for is for the government to assist them in securing the kinds of jobs that the U.S. can support/create, not the ones that it cannot. If the electorate wants manufacturing back, it needs to articulate a willingness to accept a far lower wage for performing that work. I don't see that happening.
