Ineteresting Article: America's Has-been Economy

What makes this article interesting to me is that Mr. Roberts was the Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration.

Corporate outsourcers and their apologists presented the loss of manufacturing capability as a positive development. Manufacturing, they said, was the "old economy," whose loss to Asia ensured Americans lower consumer prices and greater shareholder returns. The American future was in the "new economy" of high tech knowledge jobs.

This assertion became an article of faith. Few considered how a country could maintain a technological lead when it did not manufacture.

So far in the 21st century there is scant sign of the American "new economy." The promised knowledge-based jobs have not appeared. To the contrary, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a net loss of 221,000 jobs in six major engineering job classifications.


http://counterpunch.com/roberts03162005.html

including accounting/bookkeeping. Even the IRS is using Indian vendors to process e-filed tax returns, something I find particularly sickening given India's lack of confidentiality statutes.

All jobs that don't involve the face to face contact of retail, restaurants, or healthcare are vulnerable to outsourcing, and we the people know it. Automation is eating away even at retail jobs, with those awful "self serve" checkout stands for fools who pay with credit cards.

I dunno about you, but I find this country perilously close to a tipping point, with enough people being unemployed and the rest terrified of losing their jobs and the consumer economy being choked off completely.

The author is absolutely correct about one thing: any country that is looted of its manufacturing base becomes a defacto colony of the country that looted it, supplying raw materials but too poor to buy the finished goods and services. That part is coming, and I fear it will be sooner rather than later.

The loss of excellence in education is another thing entirely, and has more to do with the loss of hope of any ability to use that education in the country that provides it.

as you have stated. What raw materials? Dale Earnhardt #3 decals with a halo around them?

including wool. China has barely enough arable land to feed its population; grazing land is hard to come by, as is cotton growing land.

Ores and refined metals.

Wood and wood pulp. Furniture is already being built in China of US wood and shipped back to the US. Paper production is soon to follow.

Steel and recycled, crushed cars as scrap metal.

Tobacco. They're addicted to US ciggies. Production will be moved to China at some point. They'll make the butts out of US tobacco and ship them here.

Don't kid yourself about this stuff. More and more we're supplying raw materials to the new manufacturing superpower, China. We have started to become their colony. Until and unless Congress acts in the form of punitive tariffs on corporations that throw Americans out of work and still expect this country to supply their market, the trend will continue.

"Any country that is looted of its manufacturing base becomes a de facto colony of the country that looted it."

Thank you! That is the point I've wanted to make for a while now, but wasn't able to work it out just right. I'll call it 'Modern-day mercantilism.' Again, thanks.

It's a fantasy.

No Child Left Behind is gutting the education system.

Reeptiles want test scores to improve, but they definitely don't want kids to be able to think critically or have access to knowledge that isn't literally in the Bible.

Sue

:grr:

And McDonald's is testing outsourcing the drive-thru ordering process!

:wtf:

Will be very hard, if not impossible, to reverse this dangerous trend. No scientist or engineer learns how to innovate overnight, most of them are not born geniuses. If we continue to outsource all entry-level science and engineering jobs to Asia, there will absolutely be no way to nurture scientific and engineering talents. Most of the available talent pool will be discouraged to pursue such a career. Also, a strong domestic manufacturing sector which consumes scientific and tech innovation helps a lot in nurturing such a culture - they work together closely. It will take just a generation or two before the Indians and Chinese take a big lead over USA in all high-tech sectors.

... but I don't give him much credit for being so. His party has consistently pushed this fantasy since 1973, when the Nixon administration consciously began the push to support an economy based on financialization and speculation rather than manufacturing.

That trend accelerated in Roberts' own Reagan administration, and in the first Bush administration (maybe some have forgotten that the unemployment statistics and white collar permanent job losses in that time were eerily similar to what's happening now), and he spent plenty of time pooh-poohing whatever Democrats knew to be necessary while on the WSJ's editorial pages.

I'd say he's coming to his senses about thirty years too late.