Manufacturing Jobs Are Never Coming Back

Common sense says you ship off your consumer goods and stop making them you have to import to sell them.

So no, ain't buying it. We for years exported mostly scrap while they shipped us consumer goods.

The numbers don't match reality . We runs deficets with China . And our MNCs in China.

 

Can't help you then.

 

The devastation of the rust belt are not reflected in your graph. Huge damage to those workers. Low wage servant work replaced living wage jobs. They should all learn to code. But HB1 visas would take that job.

 

NEVER, is a long long time!!!

 

Ronnie, you need it to think about the technology that was lost along with those jobs. The US stopped mining all rare earth metals making us totally dependent of China for even the basic electronic components. It was a foolish move to offshore for whatever reason the products that could have kept us independent.

 

Right to work laws.

 

If that was the case, the US would not be maintaining a big trade deficit.

The fact is, low cost of labor still trumps better technology when it comes to most sectors of manufacturing in today's market.
(That is, China's technology only has to be "good enough"; the fact that wages are 10 times lower easily compensates for the lower efficiency and lower quality. Not to mention Chinese companies don't have to waste lots of money complying with so many regulations or ridiculous legal lawsuits which countries like the US have)

Manufacturing is "special" in that it formerly created a large number of high paying jobs (especially in certain areas) but at the same time it could also be easily outsourced. Entire local economies in many parts of the country revolved around big manufacturing companies, that is how important of a role they played.

 

This is somehow China's fault?

 

Yeah, all that cheap labor in Europe too.

 

What are you talking about ronv ?
Your point, if you even have one, is not well made.

Germany, considered the most economically prosperous major country in the EU also has the lowest trade deficit ratio. In fact they maintain an overall trade surplus.

 

Hell no it's not China's fault. It is the fault of sloppy, stupid decisions like stopping the processing of rare earth minerals and outsourcing them to China. That's the problem.

 

You need to find a good economics textbook, and it just has to be one written in last decade. You might also go to a good reference, like Brittanica, (not Wiki, this is too controversial for Wiki) and look up the term Post-Industrial

And then you need to resolve to look up real statistics in actual sources and not rely upon people you talk to.

You'll find that very interesting

 

The trade deficit is not solely based on manufacturing. Nor is it an actual, monetary deficit. A trade deficit does not mean we are actually losing wealth. We've known this since 1776, when capitalism killed mercantilism.

 

That is the problem. The economic textbooks written over the last two decades have perpetuated a flawed economic ideology.

So students have been being "mis-taught", I suppose you could say. On a wholesale level.

 

Does the USA have any significant amount of rare earths? We can't just forbid American manufacturers from using Chinese rare earths when they're the only ones that have any

 

Economic textbooks have known for centuries that your zero sum theories are nonsense. I'm sorry your factless propaganda is no longer taught, but that's because it isn't based in evidence.

 

That's a red herring, what you just stated. No one is claiming all of economics is zero sum.

You would be hard-pressed to find any Asian country that believes exports and maintaining a positive trade surplus is not immensely important.

The entire economy British Empire, the greatest economy of its time, was based on the economic perspective of mercantilism, today viewed by many economists as "obsolete".

 

Oh, ok, right . You and Rush know better than every known economist since 1950. Carry on.

 

Then you know your complaints about trade deficits are nonsense. Good to know.

 

Is it that cheap German labor that make their products so popular in the US?

 

No, the issue is that Germany is able to sell their manufactured products to other EU countries, because the EU zone maintains an open market, and most other EU countries in Southern and Western Europe maintain trade deficits and are poorer than Germany.
Eastern Europe (which everyone knows is poorer and has a lower standard of living) is able to export some things to the rest of the EU, but has trouble competing with China and cheaper countries elsewhere.

 

If you think trade deficits make countries poorer, then I'm sorry, but you are preaching zero sum economics.

 

Nope. That is an equivocation fallacy.

You can't keep buying stuff and not selling stuff without getting poorer. This has little to nothing to do with zero sum economics.
I have no idea why you think those are even related.

 

Not manufacturing jobs - and right now - jobs in general are not plentiful.

 

Exactly right. Outsourcing might make sense if there were plentiful other better higher paying jobs for everyone else.

And even if that were the case, you also need to think about the bottom 10% of the population in your own country. I mean a $19 per hour manufacturing job with some health benefits is still going to be a lot better than welfare.

I think if those old jobs were brought back, you would see a lot more intact families among the poorer segments of society.