Why it that US can't do anything about unemployment rate? Japan is 5.2 germany is 8.3 taiwan is 5.2 I remember bush saying something about having a service economy, but I don't see how this is possible. As we export the manufacturing base we are going to lose jobs. The fact is you don't need that many people to design things. I don't see how education is going to help things either. You will just have more educated unemployed people.
What Bush meant by service economy is everyone serving each other junk. People serving each other hamburgers, pizza, cleaning cars, carpets, salesmen, changing tires, mowing lawns, all minimum wages jobs. Our economy will never be healthy again until we bring back manufacturing jobs and push for new technologies, have more innovation and less of the big corps. trying to corner the markets and squeeze out the middle class. It's all about profits, without the middle class this country becomes a 3rd world country.
The biggest issue in my opinion is that economist consider all this a "good" thing because of the golden rule of Comparative Advantage and Globalism. It irks me when they say things like "although it hurts a particular group, it's better for the whole". They point to the GDP and how it has been climbing. The issue is that while overall it may be better for the United States, the system breaks down when you have 5% of the people making 95% of the income. Just because the rich are getting richer at a faster rate than the poor are getting poorer, doesn't mean that our country is on the right track. Perfect example is Walmart. Mom and Pop shops are screwed but the money lost is made up by more efficient profits of Walmart (which go to shareholders). Unfortunately, the "mom-n-pops" don't own much Walmart stock in the first place.
At the same time, thanks to Walmart, tens of millions of poor people in the US save money by being able to buy staple goods at much lower prices. So there are pluses and minuses here - Walmart benefits, but so do consumers.
There is a shift in power, unemployment will remain high in the US, the unemployed should look into moving beyond their own borders for work.
Lower prices brought on by forcing manufactuers to reduce prices by strong arming them, causing manufactuers to shut down American plants for cheaper labor. (I don't actually know the timeline/facts, but this is what I'd say in debate club. - If i were to ever join a debate club. - which I won't.)
There was a great article I read about walmart and pickle maker a while ago. THe point was walmart was a blessing and curse for them. It increased sales, but when walmart demanded they lower their prices, they couldn't do it and if the lost walmart as a customer they were screwed.
Absolutely - anytime consumers save money, that has to come from somewhere. In Walmart's case, it's a combination of more efficient delivery systems and squeezing suppliers (or forcing them abroad, as BigBenito suggested). I'm not making a judgment as to whether they are a net plus or minus - just wanted to point out that they do bring benefits to someone besides their shareholders.
A good article I just saw http://finance.yahoo.com/banking-bu...ZXMEc2xrA3RoZTNiaWdnZXN0bA--?mod=bb-budgeting
Huge problem not many are talking about is that the US has all the technology to but has yet to change their format of training. We are stuck in a society that raises each generation to learn in a work style environment which caters towards industrialism instead we need top place our focus toward teaching towards technology age.
Do What? Our first and foremost problem is that we are primarily a consumerist economy, which leads to our equally as big problem, in that we live on debt. What we NEED is more industrialism. We NEED more exports. We don't have an unemployment problem, we have people who will not work many of the manual labor jobs that the illegal immigrants will gladly have.
Concur ... completely. As an added thought, we need to stop a generational stigmatization of skilled, but physical labor. We can't all design can openers and mouse traps. Someone has to build them at fair wages.
The problem is that we all would have to take a HUGE hit on wages in order to keep these manufacturing/labor type jobs here in the states. There is no way in hell anyone here would be ok with being paid lower than min wage. The remedy is (as countries like Japan are doing) to increase our education and training to specialize in sectors. But our Govt has gotten rid of a lot investment in education, especially in the last 8 years. Until we don't realize that to keep up our lifestyles, we need to create more high-tech related jobs. We all can't design LCD TVs, cars, missles but we can increase the number items that can be designed primarily in United States. We're the leaders of the technology and medical sectors but we're not innovating at the rate we used to. Nanotech, renewable energy, biotech....all these sectors that we're not the leader of but could be. Investing in education is the best thing to do long term but instead we keep creating problems that lead to wasteful spending and bailouts. Could you imagine 800 billion going straight into education and R&D for these new budding industries? Too bad our leaders can't look past 4 years .
OMG, I just noticed I was replying back to Thumbs. I hope it doesn't lead to nowhere fast. Please don't go trollish on me Thumbs!
Ya forgot to mention the amount of money we blow on defense. Defense spending should be healthy but not what we have going.
