MJC

WHAT WILL IT TAKE!

Look folks…progress happens. It’s not the fault of the Chinese. WE obsolete businesses every time we create something new. 8-tracks nearly wiped out vinyl. Cassettes wiped out 8-tracks. CD’s wiped out cassettes. iPods are wiping out CD’s. And now we don’t actually “make” anything anymore. Music is beamed effortlessly around the globe at the touch of a button. It’s just the way things go if we want to live in a world of progress. We continually learn to build things faster and, usually, better at a lower cost. Sometime we figure out how to not build anything at all (besides a server farm to store music for download) That often means some competitors lose, and jobs are temporarily lost. This speeds up during recessions. It’s just the way it is.

When the 8-track tape became unpopular (because it sucked), the plants simply converted to cassettes. The same people continued to work. When DDT was banned, the plants converted to other chemicals, malathion, methyl-isocyanate, etc. The same people kept working.

When the Chinese started shipping ceiling fans to the United States, at one third the cost, the people who made ceiling fans were out of work, permanently. The factories were closed. The machines were sold for scrap metal. Those jobs will not be back and there is nothing we can retool for that the Chinese can’t produce and deliver at one third the cost.

Everything that can be manufactured can and will be manufactured in Communist China at one third the cost. Every service that doesn’t involve direct contact with the customer, or the customer’s car, cat or cheeseburger, can and will be done in India at one third the cost.

Those “promising” biotech, nanotech and “jobs as yet to be invented” will also be done in China or India.

Manufacturing creates wealth by adding value to raw materials. This process requires massive amounts of labor. When we were manufacturing products here, we had to pay middle-class wages and benefits to people with only a high-school education. Now those people are earning a fraction of what they were earning in manufacturing. Many of them are working two or three jobs as they try to hang on to their middle-class lifestyles. Most of them were forced to “start over,” at a point in their lives when it was most painful.

The only way to save or bring back manufacturing jobs would be to impose import duties on goods from Communist China. This would have to be done strategically, over a long enough period to allow U.S. manufacturing to rebuild and ramp up.

This is not going to happen. The Progressive Obama administration has no intention of allowing the middle-class to return. That would work against their goal to make more people reliant on the government and would thwart their plans to turn this country into a socialist Utopia.

Bruce Bishop

I could not agree more. Strategy is the key. EIC has shown how to achieve this. Unfortunately, the same workers in the government that survived many Presidencies are dumb enough to understand this. The two groups in our country are polarized to extreme left and right and causing the havoc you see. One group wants to increase government jobs like Greece because they have no idea how to create private and value added jobs. The other group wants massive private contractors so that they can be one after retirement making many times the money (see Washington Post article ‘Top Secret America’). The same group also do not understand true production philosophy and hence supporting the outsourcing of America.

There are few smart people left in the government that wants a better America and influence the outcome.

The death of Ohio steel isn’t Obama’s fault. It’s not the media’s fault. Grow up.

Unless, of course, you think President Obama was in the White House in the 1970s and 1980s. By the way, do you like to ride the short bus. Do the kids pick on you? They don’t make fun of your dragging knuckles and unibrow?