You quoted macro data implying all those jobs are from outsourcing by US companies. There are many things going on there e.g. House building, road building, bridge building, port building, airport building, retail, restaurants,… all domestic not relating to manufacturing.
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Consumers were happy, because they got lower prices. Eventually enough jobs started to vanish that people realized lower prices aren’t useful if you don’t have a job. Not everyone has the skills to take advantage of the newer jobs that are high paying. A huge percent of our job growth is low paying service jobs. They pay quite a bit less than the manufacturing jobs did, so it’s a net loss for a lot of Americans.
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India/China created more new jobs than total US employment. If US companies do not outsourcing the jobs, Americans will earn a much high pay and there would be very few underemployed.
Employment is such an important social issue that Midwesterns have abandoned democrats. It’s amazing that people keep denying and using automation as excuses.
From all these narratives, I can see Trump wining the next election easily. It takes many years to change people’s opinion since most people do not have time or courage to think.
Easy to understand.
Countries are like people. There are different stages of development. Children grow faster than adults. So is it weird that a kid can grow from 1ft to 6ft in a span of 20 years and we adults don’t grow at all?
Similarly, China in 1980 is a very backward country. You can grow at breakneck pace just by doing a few things right, and Deng Xiao Peng did just that. Growing from a small base is easy. Just watch Apple. Easy to grow from a 100M company to 1B then 10 and 100. But from 100B to 1T? It’s a lot harder.
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China would absolutely LOVE to be in America’s position. It’s trying all its might to steer the economy AWAY from manufacturing towards services. Exactly what we have done. Does anyone here aspire to work in a factory? Which job is better? The one designing the chips and writing software for iPhone? Or the ones who put them together.
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Basically Trump is right about outsourcing and jobs. Most of the “poorly educated” people agree with him.
The highly educated people have read too much fake elite talk. I think that the highly educated people are wrong on this issue.
Do not make it complicated. Keep it simple!
No, they are wrong. These people are poorly educated for a reason.
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In that case, Trump will have a 8 year term. People have 8 years to figure this out.
When these “poorly educated” people voted for Obama, when many other “poorly educated” people voted for Hillary, are they also poorly educated for the same reason?
I dare to say it won’t happen as you wish because your assumption is that other nations would buy those expensive made in US stuffs. I think you need to consider demand and supply wrt price, and their interaction.
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They can vote for whatever reasons. But to say their candidate won so their diagnose is automatically correct is wrong. People vote for all kinds of reasons. Some rational, some less so. Fear of irrational mob democracy goes way back to the founding fathers time.
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Was Republican Party more a elite party in the past?
Seems that Republican Party is going grass root and Democratic Party so going to elitist route.
The founding fathers did not give voting rights to renters. Are renters more like mobs? Haha
Seem logical explanation. Pretty sure outsourcing was viewed as win-win during the boom time… last 1-2 decades? Somewhere along the line, something changed and those left behind and severely disadvantaged by the change are not very happy. I doubt bringing the factory floor manufacturing jobs back is the answer.
Many people do not have a voice in the media and in the political arena. People are not dumb, but they are ignored by the media, the academia and the government. These little people have no lobby power. Nobody cares to listen to them.
Democrats have been adamant and ignoring them. Republicans have also been ignoring them since they support democrats. Trump is smart to pick up these people and they became the most loyal Trump supporters.
I think republicans will hold onto these people. Republicans were doomed by the exploding illegal immigration. But Trump has discovered the winning formula for them. Now, democrats are doomed.
It’s amusing that people focused on Trump’s words literally. His words are not best chosen but the message is not lost. He is the smartest politician in the world even though his words were worst chosen.
It’s very difficult to convince all of you who live and breathe the great San Francisco wind, but it’s the reality. Denial is useless.
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We import $482B from China. That’s ~3% of our economy. We typically create 1 job per $80k of GDP. In theory, that’s costing us 6M jobs. We do export $116B to them, so it’s a net loss of 4.6M jobs.
I want to know if we’ll address how China treats out internet companies. They love to either ban or heavily restrict google, Facebook, twitter, etc. It’s extremely anti-competitive and is not fair trade.
Import from Chinese companies are fair trade, it’s not outsourcing. That’s the trade policy issue.
The job outsourcing is done by Ameican multi-nationals. Many high pay jobs were outsourced to other counties, including software engineering.
Illegal immigration is the most direct reason for job loss and income reduction. The jobs done by 10s of millions of illegal immigrants could be going to blue collar workers at higher pay.
If you disallowed 20 million illegal immigrants in the past 40 years, American blue collar workers will earn good income and have secure jobs.
If you allow 20 million illegal high income professional immigrants, many of you will suffer from joblessness and lower income.
Just imagine that H1b is becoming unlimited and you can hire anyone from foreign country, no need to go through any procedure, just allow anyone come to US and apply for jobs at your company. Will you still have a job? How much will be your pay?
Competition is the best way to lower your pay and take away your job.
What do you call all the iPhones build in China and imported to the US? Those count in the import numbers. It’s not only goods from Chinese companies. It’s goods made in China regardless of the company.
I agree illegals are hurting blue collar wages in the US. They help keep prices down, so most people like it until it’s their job that’s taken away.
Illegal immigration is the most important political issue. It’s the biggest reason for income inequality. Not only doe it create a low income population that’s larger than African American population, it also depresses the blue collar wages and made many blue collar workers out of job and depend on disability income. Trump used this issue to launch his campaign, it was apparently a bold and smart move. This issue is black and white. It was very hard to justify encouraging illegal immigration and the open border liberal policies.
Trade issue is more complex. I think as a whole, US companies might get the same or even more profit from the trade than Chinese companies. Much of the high profit margin import from China is actually from American companies such as Apple, Mattel etc. Problem is that the profit from the trade mostly goes to investors and a lot of the profit is parked and invested overseas due to our high corporate tax. Not only do the American workers lose jobs, part of the profit is not even re-invested in US.
Illegal immigration is easy to stop, it only requires a political will.
Trade is hard to tackle. We still have to participate the global trade, but we also need to lead the global trade. You may need to use both carrots and sticks, and I think carrots work better. If I were the president, I would remove the corporate tax and try to attract corporations to set up shop in USA and create jobs. There can be also some policies to encourage companies to keep jobs in US. Also I would add some conditions to unemployment benefit and welfare checks. You have to go to job training, school or start a business or self-employed work to accept unemployment check. Trump is also using verbal threat to persuade companies to keep jobs in USA, which may not be sustainable. He has to come up with good policies and deliver on corporate tax reduction.
I think job outsourcing is starting to hit the professionals now with the widespread internet connections. Programmers, software engineers, online teaching, medical imaging, paralegal, and many white collar jobs can now be outsourced easily. The larger the organization is, the easier to outsource jobs. Software companies can now easily set up an Indian development center and replace local workers. Same thing can be done by big hospitals if some of their regulations are relaxed. These endangered professionals have a lot of voice and they may make a lot of noise.
My last x-ray was read remotely. I have no idea where the person reading it was, but it made me think that’s a pretty awesome job. Yes, it’s a lot of schooling, but now you can literally live anywhere in the world and get a notification when there’s an x-ray to read. That might lower the pay of the job, but I think the education requirements create a good barrier to entry.
I wonder if there will be an onshoring revolution though. We tracked productivity of engineering teams at one of my prior employers. The US teams were far more productive, so it was actually cheaper to have a US based team. The end conclusion was it only made sense to offshore sustaining support of existing products. Doing product development offshore was a great idea to save money but horrible in practice. I think that’s especially true in faster paced industries where time-to-market is critical.
Also, engineering wages in India and China are increasing at 10% a year. The price gap is getting smaller and smaller. If you look at fully burdened costs, then we could afford 1.5 in China or 2.5 in India for every US person at the individual contributor levels. There’s a lack of management talent in those countries, so as you move up the ranks the pay difference shrinks. We actually got better results not backfiring director and above levels and using the budget to hire college grads in the US.
Another big one is the entry level accounting, payables, payroll, receivables, etc going to low cost countries. The Philippines is a big one for that stuff.
For trade, we need to stop China from blocking our internet companies from doing business in their country. I’m not sure what the correct response is, but we need one. Maybe the answer is we ban them from listing on our stock exchanges. That’d deny them funding they need to grow their businesses.
China’s ban of US Internet companies is not due to economic reasons, it’s for political reasons. That’s a little similar to US’s ban on export to China due to military reasons.
I guess Yelp can operate in China. Yahoo was allowed in China but it failed to do well. Google was allowed but Google can’t accept the local policing requirement. Facebook/Twitter were banned from the beginning due to the fear of a similar event of Arabian Spring?
I suspect that Facebook and Twitter may not do well in China even if it’s allowed. But politically American voters do not care about FB/TWTR losing market opportunity in China. They care more about the cheap imports and illegal immigration taking away their jobs.
Understand what you say till the last sentence. How you conclude that American workers lose jobs? Are you counting those guys in China’s Apple retail stores, customization of software for China market, MIS teams in China… as rightfully American jobs?
[quote=“BAGB, post:57, topic:1369”]
…a lot of the profit is parked and invested overseas
[/quote]Held in US Treasuries not invested overseas.