StrangerThan
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quote:
ORIGINAL: FirstQuaker
But much of the problem seems to be the US itself -
quote:
Chinese workers earn far less money than Americans, allowing local and American companies that moved manufacturing operations to the country to sell goods on the global market at lower prices. Chinese citizens are less likely to buy as many U.S.-made goods because on average they are far poorer than Americans.
Those nuances have at times been brushed aside, with talk on China focused more on finger-pointing than serious discussion over ending Washington's overreliance on Beijing for purchasing American debt or supplying the economy with cheap consumer goods.
The part above sums the problem up nicely for me.
I see it like this. Take two buckets, one nearly full of water, the other nearly empty. Attach a hose with an on/off valve at between the buckets near the bottom of each.
Then open the valve. Bucket 1 will drain into bucket 2 until both reach equilibrium. The amount of water in bucket 1 will be less. The amount in bucket 2 will be greater.
That's the global economy in a nutshell.
I told my brother a long time ago that the status of living in the US had no where to go but down. There's a lot of ranting and raving about the widening gap between rich and poor, but it seems simple to me. When you ship your manufacturing base out of country, a lot of jobs that would have grown here, grow there. Business is like electricity and water. It will migrate to the path of least resistance, and you can't blame them in many respects - if for no other reason than the need to be competitive enough to stay in business. Not only do you lose the jobs that would have grown here, but you lose the base behind those jobs as well.
I know... get retrained... gotcha. Even if you could retrain every living soul in the US, where are they then going to work? I mean hell, half of what you're retraining them for is moving as well because companies have discovered there are programmers, analysts, database people there too, all of whom will work for less money.
Those functioning in the global economy, at least have the opportunity to do well. Those who aren't, namely the people who live and work here, will face an ever decreasing number of good jobs, a shrinking number of places to find them, and a growing service industry as their only option.
I've never been one to believe too strongly in coincidence, but about the same time trade barriers started falling, credit started opening up. Credit financed us through the transition. Where we are now is a place where the jobs aren't coming back and we're starting to realize it. The vast sea of credit that opened up in the late 80's and 90's has been tapped into, fed our economy, and is now kind of like the Aral Sea. It's either dried up or you have folks who bought into it and are now strapped to keep up.
It's why I don't see any real solutions that aren't going to be painful. The banks and big corporations will do well. The people won't, but even if you over throw all the banks and big corporations, the problem is still sitting there. I get it. I do. I swear. Tax the rich. But here's the deal. If you think simply raising taxes on them is going to cure the problem, you're forgetting that the only real monetary input from the whole shebang comes from you. You pay taxes. You pay bills. You buy the goods. Pretty much everyone else plays with your money. If that isn't simple enough, what it boils down to is if you increase anything up above you, you're the one who ends up paying for it.
Firm wrote a post here a while back talking about deep structural change. It is, what is needed, from how global companies work, all the way through politics and politicians. A good bit of America can get on board that general idea. Where it has a huge potential of failing though - and failing in terms of social unrest, social confrontation - is in the details.
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--'Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to reform' - Mark Twain
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I have read the same thing about other types of farms too, like dairy farms which would have full-time year round jobs available, no one wants to work on farms. We will see what happens to food prices across the board, it wont be just paying more for apples, it will be paying more for everything you eat. And not because you are paying more for farm labor, it will be cuz of supply being way down so charging more for less.. 
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