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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOffshoring and the myth of the "added value manufacturing industries".
I'm just going to cut to the chase.
Free traders think that we should abandon the production of cheap toys and gadgets - the plastic spoons, the USB memory sticks and even the iPads - and go for "higher value items".
What "higher value items" means today is irrelevant - because whatever is higher value today, is low value / commoditized tomorrow.
The relevant point here is that "higher value manufacturing" is not a big creator of jobs - not in a country with 300 million citizens (and growing). If you send out low end manufacturing jobs and attempt to cram all those people into high value work, you will always end up with the dark side of Comparative Advantage - a bunch of people freed up not to do "other" kinds of work, but rather, a bunch of unemployed people competing with others for lower-paying non-tradable jobs.
We need both higher-value jobs and lower-value jobs in order to keep people employed and keep America agile. The argument that a glut of factories producing plastic spoons and USB memory sticks keeps America from transitioning to building the newest high-value stuff, is an absolute fallacy.
In fact, spending a few years building iPads at an American factory would pay your college tuition to learn all the Six Sigma Black Belt skills and other things you'll need to work in the factory that builds that Next Big High Value Thing[tm].
Getting rid of low value manufacturing does nothing but make a country of 300 million Americans poor.
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Sen. Walter Sobchak
(8,692 posts)Human hands don't touch the product until a consumer maims themselves trying to open the styrene anti-theft packaging.
Total staff, about 40. Production will either be automated or off-shored to peasants. This was recognized by most policy makers fifty years ago. The Europeans and Japanese embarked on a successful collection of industrial policies. We decided to get into the peasant labor business.
And the Japanese were the first to recognize that their immediate post-war emphasis on low-value junk for export was a tremendous drain on their economy when the same resources could be part of the supply chain of the commanding heights of their economy. Korea learned the same lesson about twenty years later.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)especially when the alternative is unemployment.
How many people can you employ doing higher-value stuff? This is where your theory falls apart. You cannot employ a large number of people doing that... not 'large' in the context of a nation with 311 million citizens.
Works fine for smaller countries. Germany's populace is but a fourth of ours. Let them get up to 300 million and see how that works.
Sen. Walter Sobchak
(8,692 posts)At the memory card and usb stick factory the only production workers were about a dozen people who ran between machines changing out the component reels and about half a dozen technicians waiting for something to jam and trying to look busy as they went through every possible chart template in Excel. So how precisely does bringing this work to the US result in a windfall of employment - unless you are a southern republican neo-feudalist intent on matching the wages and regulations of the third world?
But for instance at the begging of the IT revolution most American vendors had to go to Taiwan for PCB's and other components because the manufacturers in the US were tied up making components for consumer electronics and couldn't be bothered with a bunch of bearded nerds from San Jose. Foxconn got their big break making components for Atari that they could not source in the US. Others went to England and West Germany for the same reason. Founding the industry that would define the last twenty years of the 20th Century and creating the Taiwanese based conglomerates we know today in the process was a tremendous drain on the economy. The up and coming industry was hindered by a substantially waning industry - even then. In Europe and Japan national industrial polices strongly encouraged companies to make the right decisions. Free Market America in this period batted 1000 on making the wrong ones.
You insist on trying to impose an economic paradigm that was build on having bombed the rest of the industrialized world except for Canada, Australia and South Africa into rubble and predated modern automation. Further the idea that any tangible number of Americans would embrace or even tolerate a tariff regime that would decimate their material quality of life is laughable.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)We, the growing anti-offshoring majority, will force an end to the economic paradigm that discriminates against American workers.
Have I made this perfectly clear to you yet? Tariffs will come. We will put an end to the ongoing decimation of our quality of life through all the unemployment created by offshoring.
We will force corporations to hire Americans to produce goods for America. No more discrimination against American workers. Do you get it yet? If not, you soon will, because the voters are ready to force the issue.
I don't think you realize just how late it is for globalism.
Sen. Walter Sobchak
(8,692 posts)Again, the spectacular post-war prosperity came from the total military destruction of every other significant industrial power on earth. That is going to be a very difficult policy to sell internationally.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)We don't have to bomb anyone. We just need to slap large tariffs on China. Large enough that making the goods here is cheaper than importing it.
By the way you do realize that most Americans now support tariffs? Not sure how you're going to stop it from happening now.
Of course you also have no answer for what'll happen when we run out of places to look for cheap labor. Which is why I'm putting this out there, to await your non-answer. 
Sen. Walter Sobchak
(8,692 posts)Anyone who thought that a situation in which the rest of the populated world would by necessity import almost everything from the US and export little in return was going to persist for any length of time, particularly in the context of the Marshall Plan was insane.
Tariffs are an abstract concept in the United States since practically speaking since they have never been applied in a way that was particularly inflationary across the economy as a whole. Your great tariff wall of China would be hyper-inflationary and the backlash would wipe out whatever party advanced it for a generation or longer. And like the corrupt Republican championed Smoot Hawley tariffs you fetishize the retaliation will be devastating.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)We don't export anything. Hello, our exports are NEGATIVE.
You are absolutely wrong about tariffs. First of all, China has tariffs against US goods and that's not inflationary. Second of all, your Smoot Hawley boogeyman is a myth that free traitors use to scare Americans.
Moreover, I noticed you absolutely avoided the point that we WILL run out of places to look for cheap slave labor anyway - which means OFFSHORING OF AMERICAN JOBS IS UNSUSTAINABLE ANYWAY.
I also know you won't answer this, either: why do you keep supporting an economic paradigm that discriminates against American workers?
Another one you won't answer: you talk about hyperinflation, but it is a well-known fact that outsourcing jobs DEVALUES THE DOLLAR. We are headed for hyperinflation anyway because our huge trade deficit automatically adds to the debt and devalues our currency. Oh, I know you have no answer for that. No free trader has answers for that.
Sen. Walter Sobchak
(8,692 posts)Are the "job creators" on side with you? Are they going to raise salaries so that people might afford to buy these goods at the new price floors you intend to establish?
And you imagine those people who have their savings, purchasing power and quality of life obliterated by such a policy won't take their grudge to the polling station?
The challenge with US trade policy is rather than aggressively advancing the WTO process in ways favorable to US exports, the long standing preference has been for bilateral free trade agreements. This disconnect results in unbalanced trading relationships where one sides exports have preferential treatment under the WTO and the others do not. This is largely the case with China - while many US made intermediate goods that find their way into IT products are tariff free - other US exports, particularly agricultural do not enjoy the same treatment. None the less China has been unilaterally lowering their tariffs and exceeding their obligations to the WTO.
I support free trade because in its absence industry and innovation atrophies and opportunity is passed on to others. If you believe that a new age of prosperity will be built on manufacturing styrofoam plates and tube socks in the most labor intensive way possible... knock yourself out.
And advocating for a strong dollar is the antithesis of what you are arguing for. A strong dollar places imports at an even deeper discount over US goods and makes exports unaffordable to the world market - while a weak dollar has the opposite effect.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)Again, you are still wrong about tariffs. China has had 25% tariffs against the United States and it didn't harm them - in fact it led to years of near double digit growth for China.
Once again, you you absolutely avoided the point that we WILL run out of places to look for cheap slave labor anyway - which means offshoring of american jobs is unsustainable anyway.
You talked about hyperinflation, but it is a well-known fact that outsourcing jobs reduces the value of the dollar. We are headed for hyperinflation anyway because our huge trade deficit automatically adds to the debt and devalues our currency. Oh, I know you have no answer for that. No free trader has answers for that. I don't have a problem with the dollar losing value - after all, it makes offshoring less feasible. However, the very thing you have wasted your time defending is the very thing that will create the hyperinflation that you claim to fear. No wonder you have no answer for this.
Once you're done answering that, please show where I ever said I support a strong dollar, for one. Undercutting China's currency would skyrocket our exports.
Moreover I would see the US getting the hell out of the WTO... or any other organization that DARES tell America what laws they can pass within their own borders. Example:
http://www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/press-releases/2012/january/us-appeal-wto-dolphin-safe-tuna-labeling-dispute-m
Perhaps you don't want to answer these things because you know you are supporting an economic paradigm that discriminates against American workers?
Do note that I will be repeating these issues with you until you do answer them. Or you could simply accept that America has no more tolerance for free traitorism and step aside and let us fix this problem.
Response to Zalatix (Reply #28)
Sen. Walter Sobchak This message was self-deleted by its author.
pipoman
(16,038 posts)the realignment will require trade partners to either have worker protections in place or have a time certain for worker protections to be in place to avoid exorbitant tariffs making manufacturing in oppressive, 3rd world nations economically impossible.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)Offshoring a nation's jobs elsewhere inherently leads to that country's currency being debased.
Eventually the snake will eat itself.
Vincardog
(20,234 posts)paid labor workers in the Common Market.
The rest of the world is looking at them to bail out Greece.
See any lesson?
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)
...then raise the minimum wage to $15 or $20 an hour and you can keep the spoon factories. Problem solved!
there would be no manufacturing jobs left because we have allowed our leaders to sign us up for trade agreements which forbid us from protecting our markets or requiring some sort of labor parity from our trading partners..
What does that have to do with raising the minimum wage?
Was this a response to the OP?
If a small manufacturer has 50 $10 hr employees, a move to $15 would cost them $40k month, or around half million per year. This would likely make Mexico or China pretty attractive. After all, our elected officials have made it easy and cheap to move out..
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)pipoman
(16,038 posts)except we can't put tariffs on because of trade agreements (mostly backed or pushed through by Dems) which makes tariffs impossible...
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)Nothing that a good voters' revolt can't fix.
pipoman
(16,038 posts)...has nothing to do with raising the minimum wage. It's at a little over $7 and what you describe is already occurring. It would keep happening unless there's a change, but it has nothing to do with the minimun wage. It's all about greed. If the minimum wage was $4 dollars, it would still happen.
What you described is an excuse corporations use for greed. Another is regulation.
Selatius
(20,441 posts)If an object can be made at a fraction of the cost in China, it's probably going to be made in China at some point if the situation isn't addressed.
The point is putting Chinese and American workers on the same footing and let the two workforces compete on turning out the better product. That's not really what's happening. When I say "same footing," I'm not advocating a system of prohibitively expensive tariffs that force the United States to basically isolate itself from the world but just enough tariffs that would actually give employers an incentive to invest in research/development and manufacturing here, as opposed to some country thousands of miles away that may or may not be democratic or even friendly to the United States.
Global labor arbitrage would actually be a more apt term to describe what is happening.
Populist_Prole
(5,364 posts)High tech is now low tech to them. They've been bullshitting us for so long now that everyone has been touched, and nobody believes them but they themselves and their ilk.
There's no such thing as true comparative advantage anyhow: Too many externalities, and what is seen as an advantage is just the lobbying muscle for more rent-seeking.
Lydia Leftcoast
(48,223 posts)until the greedheads decided they could skim off more money for themselves (not that they were hurting to begin with) by sending the work to be done by Asian and Mexican teenagers.
KT2000
(22,180 posts)My SIL works for an American company that was purchased by a holding company. The holding company has bought over 100 manufacturing companies. When they buy a company, the workers are fired and the work is sent to China. My SIL goes to the newly purchased company and learns from the one or two employees that are left, what needs to be put on the holding company's computer system.
Voila! The company exists in the US only through the computer system.
Now, some of the Chinese employees are coming to the US to learn the computer system from SIL and her co-workers. She is training them in aspects of her job because they will be done in China.
I suppose they will still be considered American companies because the owner lives in Washington DC and maintains a stellar art collection there.
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)Drag them up before Congress and televise it.
America will deal with this when we see the CEOs who do this shit, face to face.
pipoman
(16,038 posts)by determining how many jobs their agreements costs the US. This is a political issue, not a business issue...except the only reason we have these trade deals is because of corporate funding of politicians who back them..
It is fucking Congress who enables this..haven't you heard free trade with 3rd world countries with no worker protections in place are good for the US..we can compete with any workers in the world...we may be living in straw huts too soon, but by god we can compete..fuckers
Zalatix
(8,994 posts)She spent over a hundred mil to buy California and got KO'd pretty much after it got out that she outsourced 30,000 jobs.
Everything else that got thrown at her was pretty superfluous. The outsourcing issue was the stake through the heart.
KG
(28,797 posts)Zalatix
(8,994 posts)One of these days they're going to realize free trade isn't wanted here anymore, and go find another country to poison with their globalist kool-aid.