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Post by panzerman on Sept 1, 2011 19:56:49 GMT -8
Some predictions....
Germany will finally get fed up with giving economic "welfare" too Countries like Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, and thus the EURO will become extinct. Germany then will retain either the mark, or thaler as official currency. The USA with a debt of 15 TRILLION$ will under Obamas watch exceed 18 trillion$ by 2012. This means the US will devalue the US$ too junk status, this is the only way they can repay their immense debt with of course worthless $. All this will mean that gold will keep going up, soon to be valued in either UK Pounds, German Marks, Chinese Yuans.
John
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Post by nomihoudai on Sept 1, 2011 22:35:02 GMT -8
German Marks,... I lol'd   |
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Post by wollastoni on Sept 2, 2011 2:04:51 GMT -8
John < problem is Germany has no interest to see Euro disappearing. Mark would be far over-valued in comparison with current Euro and it would undermine German industrial exportations which are the basis of German economic health.
+ Germany does most of its exportation towards other European countries (France, Italy...). If France and Italy returns to Frenck Franc and Lira, these moneys will be devaluated in comparison with German Mark... and Germany will have even more difficulties to export.
THUS nobody in Europe have interest to kill the euro. And nobody in the West has interest to see US economics collapsing.
THUS the only solution is stop spending more than we earn... in Europe and in the US.
Otherwise the Champs Elysees would soon be bought by Qatar and the Empire State Building would be renamed "China Empire State Building" to pay our debts...
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Post by starlightcriminal on Sept 2, 2011 4:55:46 GMT -8
I agree wollastoni- economies took a long time to evolve into what they are, it's not so easy to disentangle them. How can China, for example, take over world economy when their own economy is based largely on the West's excessive consumption of their products? They don't really have much of an empowered middle class that is buying that many products- this is why "luxury" items that are standards here as still very expensive in China even though they are made there in the first place. No demand, so higher price. I doubt that the British economy will be so huge and glowing either, what industry is really left there either? We've sort of divided out in the world into those who make things and those who buy them. The people who make them can't afford to buy the products and the people who buy the products really don't have the money but in order for the people who make things to continue to survive we still have to buy things so concessions are made to ensure that the makers can still sell to the buyers. Imagine what would happen to the economy of China if just the US alone paid our debts and quit buying foreign products. Then there would be an economic collapse there, with suddenly much of China find itself unemployed as we are here. The whole thing chases it's tail, it's not as simple as who has the most gross income.
Notice though that the only major player with any money to back itself up is the frighteningly strict and Communist Chinese government. So is less regulation going to somehow encourage our companies to do the right thing and take care of the country? I think not, it's not in their immediate interest and they are not known for being good at thinking long term. Yes China is a sort of hybrid capitalist country, but there is not an industry in China that isn't extremely regulated by the government- maybe not quality control, but certainly in terms of gains.
Same thing functions in Germany, production based economy that is highly regulated by the government. Taxes are high there too on the global scale. Most notably though, our taxes for middle and lower classes in the US are higher. But we have virtually no regulation of industry at all (hence our jobs all migrated overseas), only regulation of butterfly collectors it would seem.
Unfortunately it doesn't look very promising- we have crack pots on one side that want to convert the US into Iran, a shining example of an unhealthy economy and backwards thinking, by becoming an old-testament based society and on the other side we have an incumbent that has holes in his pockets so big you could fit the economy of China through them. Give him a penny and he'll spend a dollar. I hope things are looking a little more promising in Europe and everywhere else. *sigh*
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Post by jshuey on Sept 2, 2011 10:22:25 GMT -8
Some predictions.... The USA with a debt of 15 TRILLION$ will under Obamas watch exceed 18 trillion$ by 2012. Just think that 10 years ago we had no deficit and a president that was actually paying down the US debt - and who thought it could be eliminated in about a decade... What a difference 8 years of corporate welfare makes... |
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Post by wollastoni on Sept 5, 2011 1:05:30 GMT -8
I am afraid recent wars costed millions of dollars everyday.
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Post by entoman on Sept 5, 2011 20:32:13 GMT -8
I don't think that a lack of regulation is to blame for American jobs moving over seas, starlightcriminal. Rather, I'd say that over regulation of industry is the prime cause of outsourcing. Now there may be regulations that would be beneficial that are not in place, but the vast majority of regulations currently present are not beneficial and primarily serve to render it unrealistically expensive to produce products in America. Were their fewer regulations, or at least more beneficial ones and fewer destructive ones, American industry would function much better I believe.
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Post by starlightcriminal on Sept 6, 2011 4:09:40 GMT -8
That's because we have virtually no regulations, there is no "vast majority"- has to do with taxes associated with doing the larger part of your business overseas vs. here, which are all but non-existent. You are right in that we do not have appropriate regulations and we do have some silly ones but they are in the minority and are not big motivators one way or the other because they have to do with the end products not the process of manufacturing and vending them. I can't agree that forcing a company to pay it's employees a minimum wage is "over-regulating" and that is precisely what causes our jobs to leave. What employee in the US survives on this meager income happily (not to mention that roughly 30% is taken back by the government anyway)? And what buying power does an individual like this have? How does that feed a healthy economy? The only reason why jobs moved over seas is because you can pay pennies on the dollar for the same labor, with no oversight and no responsibility to your employees. There is no benefit to speak of otherwise, in fact there is only the added cost of having to deal with another government, with transportation, and so on. The point is paying a worker less an average of less than $2.00 a week is what saves the big money, it's the lone motivator. Imagine if you could employ an entire factory worth of people for less than $100K annually. That might get you three workers here, five or six if they are minimum wage and are offered no benefits.
Proof positive- jobs really started to move overseas once they were more or less completely de-regulated, not before. It would be reversed if the opposite were true, no? Now they can't stop pouring out the door, moving all the time to the cheapest country to get labor reliably. Not that I am at all in support of a Chinese system, I just use as example because that system is supposedly diametrically opposed to ours, but that country allows virtually no jobs to leave and has heavily regulated industries (with poor QC). Why is that they have to artificially devalue their money so we can keep buying the things from them we used to make ourselves? Obviously regulation does something for keeping jobs around and economies afloat, the archetypal example of this exercising this is thriving right now with a rapidly expanding consumer class, consuming items manufactured domestically. On the other hand I can't even think of an example of a specific regulation that caused any single one of our industries to immigrate to China, India, and so and so on, despite it being cited as the major cause for corporate disinterest in American employees all the time.
Oh wait, yes I can- the American minimum wage. So you're saying our labor isn't even worth that?
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Post by wingedwishes on Sept 6, 2011 6:02:15 GMT -8
Minimum wage is moot. Any business will pass increased costs to consumers and thus, you pay more when you are paid more. The United States has the highest corporate tax rate in the world and the most regulations. Use our own hobby as an example of regulations being out of control. The Chinese pay little with no benefits. They are a huge polluter. You can't think of an example of regulations causing a job to leave? You have not looked. It is easy to find.
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Post by wingedwishes on Sept 6, 2011 6:20:42 GMT -8
The Federal Registry (search), which records all of the regulations the federal government imposes on businesses (all of which carry the force of law), now exceeds 75,000 pages. The Office of Management and Budget estimates that merely complying with these regulations — that is, paying lawyers to keep educated on them, interpret them and implement them — costs U.S. business another $500 to $600 billion per year.
So regulations do help the lawyer industry, clerical workers, paper industry, computer makers, enforcement officers, etc.. I was wrong.
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Post by starlightcriminal on Sept 6, 2011 10:27:41 GMT -8
Well, yes winged, you are right. There are some regulations that help encourage business to leave- clean water, for example. Much easier to business in China where they don't care if we dump our industrial waste into their environment than it is here where we have had law suits involving public health and environmental contamination attributed directly to poor disposal mechanisms of our waste. So if you count those things which improve our life, there are some indeed. But I don't think moving our waste elsewhere is a real solution.
The minimum wage, or just our relative standard for workers (which is obviously not sufficient for a family of four which is what some of those "regulations" dictate) is paramount though, there you are not correct. It is for exactly the reason you mention- that the cost is deferred onto the public- that we relocate our jobs in favor of cheaper labor. It in fact ties directly into the first comment by entoman, that it makes it so expensive to operate nationally that we just do it internationally. If these companies had to pay people reasonable salaries that would provide for their lives, their families, and the economy at large by giving us back our buying power, then we would have a bunch of products we currently could not afford. Or at least we couldn't afford if we worked for minimum wage. So in order to keep us consuming at the outstanding rate that we are, we make sure our labor costs are low by outsourcing all of them- we would never think to simply shrink our profit margins slightly instead, by taxes or certainly not by volunteering. The largest single investment all business that operate on a scale large enough to be international will make annually is in labor, both the administrative positions which you mentioned and those above and below. This story chases its tail- you either give us our buying power back or you are a obligatorily part of all the pollution in China you mention because you have purposefully moved your business (and all the respective associated jobs that are not executive) to a place where no one regulates it so you don't have to do anything but pay the lowest man on the totem pole a few pennies to dump it in a river.
Those figure would be staggering if a single business had to take care of them but considering the annual cost is less than a single quarter of profit in the life of an oil company it is actually quite small. Apple alone could pay that for the entire country, with its liquid assets.
Regulations as far as science and things go is out of control often because we are a tiny group of people that are easy to make examples of. Regulating the world's lumbering industry to prevent the death of all plants Lauraceae because pallets of wood carrying the Red Bay Ambrosia beetle and associated fungal pathogen steps on the toes of big business, so it doesn't happen. Now we are risk of losing all the world's avocados, not to mention one of the most important families in tropical hardwood hammocks in the New World.
Holistically quoting a few numbers that summarize the total number of regulations in meaningless because it doesn't demonstrate the target of those regulations- there could easily be 74,999 pages directed at butterfly collectors and one page that discusses everyone else (obviously I know this isn't true, but I'm demonstrating how to approach that type of data). We are not talking about a person who imports even a few thousand butterflies, we are talking about businesses that can actually employ people on a significant scale. Those business were loosed in the 80's, that was our big period of deregulation. It was at this point that our jobs began to 'trickle' out of the country. More like a flood really. These two events are concurrent, the second the downstream effect of the first. That is also when we converted from the largest creditor to largest debtor on earth. Clearly it is not a healthy path to follow.
I'm not blaming business for doing what is best for business, as you would expect it to do so. I'm merely pointing out that if we expect to correct our economic problems then we need to think about reigning in our largest businesses so that they operate for the long term health of our countries, not for the short term gain of the current model of each company. Ultimately it isn't healthy for either the people or the industry as we are experiencing the end result of this right now.
So yes, it is directly related to the amount of money we expect to be paid for our labor, and considering that our wages did not really rise since the same time in the 1980's that we lost regulation and jobs, it doesn't seem unreasonable to require at least maintained levels of pay. Now the policy is officially just to lay everyone off and then hire a few back as contract employees.
A side note- China is the world's leading, by leaps and bounds, investor in 'Green' technology. We don't need to get into the history of China as it is much more recently evolved than even our own short history, but considering the amount of time they have been so-called industrialized, it really isn't as bad as you paint it. We know better and still do virtually nothing about it and we don't have such a large population to take care of either. There are lots of benefits to being Chinese if you are the right kind of Chinese, just as in America. Moreover, Chinese have health care, public education, virtually guaranteed employment, and so on. China's problem is and probably always will be a population size dilemma. Plus there's that whole nasty lack of free information, etc. There are many things wrong with the administration of every country because money and power is always involved. Rather than impugning one because it functions differently than your own, look at what things are working and why and what things are not and why and then chose accordingly. No argument that the Chinese economy works very very well, better than any other around at the moment. Will it always? Remains to be seen of course.
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Post by wollastoni on Sept 6, 2011 10:51:40 GMT -8
China's growth is based on its population slavery and its environment destruction. Certainly not a model for Europe or the US... even if I understand our hedge funds and banks love that model.
Hope one day some Chinese people will be courageous/crazy enough to defend their human & environmental rights. Those who try nowadays are prosecuted...
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Post by wingedwishes on Sept 6, 2011 11:13:17 GMT -8
How many McDonalds workers do you know that are supporting a family? I worked in McDonalds as a kid and that's who worked there. Kids and seniors supplementing their income. Opps - my mistake - McDonalds pays more than minimum wage because of competition. Competition for workers causes wages to go up. If you make a product and your business is unfettered by onerous regulations, you can make a product for less. The money you would have to hire a lawyer to keep up with the myriad rules could be used to improve your product, sell more of it, then hire more to make it. Other businesses would be competing for your skilled workers and then there would be a competition for the people. OR, you could just be like one of China's worst environmental polluters who manufactures SOLAR PANELS. Last I checked, that was a green technology (and it is destroying the planet). www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.htmlChina's model is a toxic path to follow but when you control the media and the military at the same time..... Wollastoni - maybe enough Chinese will stand up like the student in front of the tank one day. BTW - I called 7 businesses in the last hour. All are "big." NONE pay minimum wage even in this tough time. I say again, minimum wage is a moot point. |
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Post by starlightcriminal on Sept 6, 2011 11:48:59 GMT -8
Ok, so I guess we want to talk about China a little. It deserves great ambivalence and is very interesting to study, especially in our current crisis. Yes, China is not a model for handling their people either, socially. Not saying it is a model of anything other than the only healthy economy on earth- why? Because they keep the vast majority of their jobs at home. Nothing helps an economy more than people buying your stuff, no? What do we sell from here in the US? And in Europe? A car or two maybe?
Environmental destruction is not a unique fault among faults, all countries ruined their environment during their assorted growth phases. How many piddly acres of virgin forest are left in Europe? It's a joke, really. Just because they were cut down hundreds of years ago doesn't mean we are somehow superior in our curation of the earth because we ran out of forest to chop. There are still days in the US when LA is almost invisible as a result of air pollution and it isn't the only city in this condition. It's easy to scowl at China because they have been going through what most of our countries went through quite some time ago. Major overhaul. But Europe already chopped down all but a postage stamp worth of forest and the US is quickly behind, looking more and more every year like we might want to "investigate" the Everglades for oil. Much more people, much more technology now so the impact is bigger, faster and right in our faces these days. So Europe and US are no model for China to follow in terms of environment either, and that's not what we're asking. There's a lack of regulation in that area, very limited in China no doubt, but that we also enjoy the benefits of here in the US and in Europe. China, and India, take our garbage to put in their land, for a fee of course. We use their land to do our worst manufacturing and take advantage of the minimal laws guiding appropriate disposal, even though we know for certain we are causing damage. Just so long as it isn't directly in our country, that makes it ok? I don't think we are any less guilty here, we just make our problem their problem and then say "ewww, look at your filthy country" even though we pay them to hide our mess there too. So not sure who is really better on that front, depends if you mean only now and today or if you are thinking cumulatively and keeping in mind the industrial revolution which happened over one hundred years ago, before the dawn of modern medicine when populations were far far smaller anyway. I think you must think of the whole story or we can't really compare because our baselines are so different to begin with.
It's the throwing of dissenters in prison with no hope of release that is most frightening about China. There's something fascinating and terrifying about a monolithic government like China's, which is able to act and implement change extremely rapidly but because it is done with absolute authority. It's an interesting place, lots of complicated issues surrounding it and I think it is very important to understand and try to treat objectively because of its obviously large role in the future. Most of the world's countries have gone through similar phases, China simply didn't really leave the feudal system behind until about 60 years ago so they're... late bloomers shall we say?
I'm not trying to argue a pro-Chinese policy towards the environment or anything else, my point is simply this:
You can't say that de-regulation is good for the economy because of the following evidence- de-regulating spurred the major surge in outsourcing of jobs in the US in the 1980's. Lack of jobs and hence of consuming is what prevents our economies from recovering, no one can afford or has the will to buy anything. China, a country riddled with regulations especially in regard to their economic interests, is doing perfectly well, if not too well. Thus regulation is not the cause of economic decline, rather the inverse. That's really all you can draw from the information available, it makes no comment on the quality of any of the involved parties.
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Post by starlightcriminal on Sept 6, 2011 12:00:36 GMT -8
All businesses have minimum wage employees winged, you are very mistaken. They keep them off their books by contracting out so they technically don't employ the people in the books and instead have a large bill for a contract with a private company that doles out the labor. But it is their work which the employees jobs depend on, so they really are employed. That is the modern work force, contract employees. They don't pay all people minimum wage, but most. Or they don't have a job at all. It makes them have no benefits, no retirement, no healthcare. None of that adds up to economically stable countries. And no one has to compete for these kind of workers, they are the kinds that have no other option. If you can work at a University or a private firm, why the heck would you walk into a McDonald's to put in an application? The people who work there don't have other choices except other low paying, non-benefit holding, insecure jobs. And it never empowers them enough to become a functioning part of our economy, they simply are barely able to scrape by.
The whole pretty ideological story you tell about getting rid of corporate lawyers and making a fantastically improved product that would just sell itself right off the shelf is absurd. It's always about profit for business, that is always the bottom line. Why would a business improve anything that is already selling and why would it want to ever let that profit go to anyone else, especially people on the low end of the pay scale who are completely expendable because they are unskilled labor? No reason to pay them for retention, it just cost more in the end than training a new guy every year or two to take their place. Training is a week or two at best and companies are allowed to pay you less during that period anyway.
Most companies practice this contracting whether you are aware of it or not, increasingly so as the years progress. And frankly, minimum wage or even a few extra dollars over that is still ridiculous. It gives no one buying power, does not protect them against any catastrophic unforeseen events and ultimately just makes more people a burden on the rest of us who have to float their unemployment, welfare, emergency healthcare, and so on. All of that is a drain on the economy just as much as someone hording the billions of dollars they make is.
You can make a product cheaper if you make no control over it, like China, with poison baby food. Sure. But you also are presuming that somehow the company will want to share those benefits with their clients. They do not, this is proven over and over. Cost stays the same, profits just go up for the company and they say "wow, what a great year for the company's earnings, our wealthy investors who are living off the capital gains of our stock will be delighted- bonus check for the CEO's!!" The banks just did the exact same thing, and threw a party to boot, which we all witnessed on national television. They even were closing banks the whole while.
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