Isn't What We're Going Through The Inevitable Result of Off Shoring Our Jobs Base?

[Yavin4]

Over the past 30 years, we've offshored our manufacturing and IT jobs over seas to cheap labor markets, and we were told that it would be great for consumers. Sure, for a while, it was good for consumers, but without income from jobs, how would the consumers consume?

For a brief period of time, consumers could borrow the money and over-extend themselves like they did in the last decade, but that causes even more problems as consumers start to default on their borrowed money and throw the entire financial system into crisis.

Am I wrong?

[Warpy]

1. New niche manufacturing might have replaced the old

had the demand side not been choked completely off. Demand is what creates jobs, not the largesse of multinational corporations or the overstuffed rich.

[Pab Sungenis]

2. You're not wrong at all.

We destroyed our industry by letting companies move jobs to Mexico and China, and said that we'd make up for them with high tech and info jobs.

Now those same companies are offshoring the high tech and info jobs.

Why should we be surprised?

[Little Star]

7. Yep,yep,yep!!!! And no matter how many new jobs that..

happen to get created here will get moved off shore once they are big enough. We are screwed the way this shell game is set up!

[marmar]

3. Yep. It's a shell game with no pea.

And now everyone's looking for the pea.

[madrchsod]

4. yes it is....this started in the mid 70`s and it has`t stopped.

[defendandprotect]

5. Of course, still sucking 100,000's of jobs out every month -- beyond what we are producing!!

Thom Hartmann said last week that he expected we'd lose 1 million more jobs

by end of 2012!!

[RegieRocker]

6. One of the many reasons but no doubt very valid.

[LooseWilly]

8. Obviously, globalizing the economy requires a "levelling"...

Jobs go where pay is lowest, until pay starts to increase, then goes somewhere else that is cheaper still.

Manufacturers moved to Mexico, then when pay in Mexico started to rise, they moved on to Guatemala, China, India, etc.

If the system is "globalized", then it inevitably has to reach a new "equilibrium"... as wages in the "developing world" rise, and wages in the "developed world" fall. Over time the wage rates will continue to converge, if the system continues as it is currently structured.

If the workers abroad are the only ones with jobs, then the stores and so on designed to profit off the consumption that comes with prosperity will move there... and that will be where the corporate profits will come from. The interest in creating new jobs in the developed world will wane (is waning).

You are right, it is inevitable.

There are no politicians or political parties fighting this trend. All pressure is to "restructure" the domestic system in order to accommodate these changes. Busting public employee labor unions, privatizing schools (and hiring in the private schools at lower wages), talk of the pay scale that pilots face, elimination of health care benefits (or merely shifting all of the costs to the employees) coupled with mandates, increasing use of (independent) contractors, speed-ups of current workers (demanding they "do more with less").

When minimum wage laws start to be repealed (in order to bring jobs back), that's when the levelling of Developed World standards of living, in comparison with Developing World standards of living, will really begin.

The irony is that, as the economic crumbs allowed to reach labor become smaller and smaller, the reductions of demand are causing the "value" of all the stuff owned by the rich to decline. This is the real point that has politicians, both Republicans and Democrats, scrambling... the struggle to keep the value of the stuff owned by the rich from declining while the workers are dispossessed of the trappings of a middle class existence.

[NNN0LHI]

9. I tried warning people here a decade ago that the workers who build our imported stuff ...

... don't contribute to any of our social programs like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and food stamps. They don't contribute anything to pay our public employees salaries and benefits either.

But no one wanted to hear that.

Now some of those very same people who refused to support our private union workers in manufacturing as those jobs were being off shored are yelling Solidarity.

And many are also blaming President Obama for their own bad decisions they made 10 or 20 years ago that got us into the mess we are in today.

Amazing thing is many of these people claim to be college educated. They can't comprehend simple economic principles and yet they claim to be educated. They apparently skipped the course on common sense.

Don

[Vinca]

10. You're exactly right and it's not just manufacturing and IT.

Your taxes might be done in India and your x-ray might be read there, too.