popeye1250
Posts: 18104
Joined: 1/27/2006
From: New Hampshire
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Termyn8or
"We're a commercial nation, and should be pro-commerce. "
Then we have to accept the fact that labor has been overpaid for decades.
China is very pro commerce, for good reason. There is money to be made. They have a billion people, and the ones who live in caves would like to be able to afford one of them fancy grass huts, or matbe they can get an adobe shack, like down in the southwest here.
Over here now we had people of suburbia, I guess they were living high off the hog. I'm not being sarcastic, it may be true. But if we were overpaid, that fueled the internal economy, back when you could actually "buy American". People from Europe tell me how different it is. I don't know if they were overpaid in the old country, but the fact is they're here. Now they have to mow the lawn. Over there, people don't generally have the normal US house. These things are viewed as spacious, and I mean houses that I would call a shoebox.
Their wages, and the pursuit of the American dream - to own a house, fueled the construction industry, and therefore all the dependent industries. Now we find that even buying a home is not necessarily buying American. (chinese drywall i.e.) There is no vehicle made in this country totally to my knowledge. These are the mass market items, and we lost our own market.
How much cheaper does labor have to be to make it economical to ship all the raw materials across the ocean and then the finished product back ? How overpaid were we ?
It was already going down the drain I think, with the decline only forestalled by engineering and high tech. But now computers design things. Also, others have caught on, or caught up, whichever you prefer. We lost our edge, and in a global market we might just be forced back into grass huts, adobe shacks or even caves.
Is this our destiny ?
T^T
Term, correct. And they just keep telling us how great this "global-economy" is!
It's nice to have cheap consumer goods but not when you're at subsistance level wages of $15 an hour now when ten years ago you were making $30 an hour in manufacturing that's moved to China now.
Now the M.D.'s seem to think they're worth $300-$500k per year or more because they went to medical school.
My doctor at the V.A. is from India and I was asking her about that country and it's medical schools and doctors over there and she said the schools over there graduate "many many more doctors than in the U.S." I think there's only 770,000 (?) active "physicians" in the U.S.
Now the law of supply and demand being what it is why don't we import enough M.D.s from India to double the number we have now and get the salaries lowered so that people can afford to pay for a doctor's visit? We could do it with Dentists, Accountants, Lawyers wouldn't be neccessary as there's so many of them they're falling out of trees now, and any other high-paying profession.
I don't think any of those groups should be sheltered from this global economy.
With a country like India at close to a billion people they must be graduating M.D.s by the hundreds of thousands! And then there's China! And Maylaisia. It's a simple distribution problem.
People who make $15 an hour can't afford doctors, lawyers, accountants, dentists.
There's an old black guy a couple miles away from here who pulls teeth for $25 and from what I was told does pretty well for himself. Many people simply can't afford $150-$ 250 for an extraction by a dentist and instead go down to "George's."
Now there's an entrepreneur who saw his opportunities in this global economy and took em!"
Everytime I hear the terms, "global-economy" or "free-trade" I automatically think of that movie "Mad Max!" lolol It just pops right into my head!
It's very obvious that *our govt* isn't doing what The People want but what big business wants! We used to call that "corruption." "Graft."
When this thing comes crashing down and all it takes is one spark, buy stock in guillotine makers.
You know, anytime the govt or big business tries to tell us that something is "good" for us why do I think I'm listening to a used car salesman?
And why are we in a global economy if noone out here seems to want it?
Like you said a few weeks ago, "Do you know one person who is in favor of NAFTA? Me neither." And you're right about that!
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"But Your Honor, this is not a Jury of my Peers, these people are all decent, honest, law-abiding citizens!"
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