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Politics : Piffer Thread on Political Rantings and Ravings -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (12086)	1/13/2004 4:04:47 PM
From: Original Mad Dog	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14610

I hesitate to buy into any arguments about "costing" jobs. I think it's more important to look at the production side of things. An economy is measured by the value of what it produces. Put another way, if an economy produces lots of stuff (goods and services) people want at a price they're willing to pay, everything else tends to take care of itself. If you import cheap labor (or alternatively, outsource more routine tasks to cheap offshore labor), you produce more stuff at lower cost. If you replace labor with machinery or use labor more efficiently (fewer people producing more and better stuff), you produce more stuff at lower cost. If the stuff you are producing is something people want, you gain a competitive advantage (essential in a global context) for selling it and making money. Which you can then invest in business activities which employ more people to make more stuff at lower cost. Used wisely, cheap labor (and automation) helps you gain economic traction. That is particularly so if your chief competitors, in our case Europeans and developed Asian countries, have less cheap labor available. As for the jobs "lost", America more than any other country has shown itself capable of creating opportunities for new business activity. A key part of our policy, imo, should be the creation of a pro-business economic climate that makes new business activity more attractive. Clinging to the jobs we have at any given time, whether by keeping out sources of cheaper labor or preventing technological advancement that might replace human employment activity, is a recipe for decline. 55 years ago, when she was a relatively new entrant into the work force, my Mom was a telephone operator supervisor in Chicago. It was a pretty good job, back then, for someone with a high school education. It paid more than most of her high school classmates were making; it made essential services, such as connecting calls (the way she tells it, they actually had to manually insert a plug into a switchboard for each call to connect) and providing information, available to the public. Over the years, though, her job was not preserved. You could, I suppose, count it among about a half a billion "lost" jobs of the past six decades. Her job, and the job of nearly everyone else who once performed that function, was eliminated... the connecting of calls became automated, and the providing of information has largely been taken over by a combination of the Internet, offshore operators, and auto-response call handling equipment. There isn't a room full of employees at the phone company in Chicago, or anywhere else in the U.S., manually putting calls through on a switchboard at the central phone company anymore. There are still a handful of people who work as phone operators to provide information, but there are tens of thousands more calls being connected for a tiny fraction of the previous cost involving far fewer operators per call. Where are those operators now? They are not sitting on a street corner wondering who moved their cheese. Most of them went on to learn how to do something else, and got jobs or created businesses to fill their new roles. Some transformed their skills and roles numerous times over a lifetime. Some moved into and out of the workforce to raise families. Freed from the necessity of manually connecting telephone calls, they went into other activities that created valuable things for society in numerous ways. Was the economy better off even though their jobs were "lost"? Absolutely.

To: MulhollandDrive who wrote (12086)	1/13/2004 6:00:13 PM
From: X Y Zebra	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14610

the mexican creating a net drain of approximately $55K per individual Is that as an illegal worker or as a legal one... big difference since the illegal, indeed does not pay taxes, FICA or most of the fees a legal worker will pay. I believe that I have covered this in one of the posts already... as long as we provide the social service incentive (especially in the area of healh care) i personally don't see how we gain economic traction by importing cheap labor Agreed... so now, how do we stop this from continuously repeating over and over... illegals crossing the border, having babies in the US (not paying for it) and then ... this new "gringo" i.e. a citizen, can live in the US no worries” AND in addition, import the rest of the family... The only possible way will be by putting some degree of control into this... having "the finger on the pulse of the patient". Taxing the (otherwise -untaxed-) income. Asking for his/hers share of the cost of the health care. I am no comrade of any sort, neither am I a defender of the down and trodden upon... I am thinking this because it is in MY best interest, since I see the alternative as a WORSE scenario... Not only that, I further see that taking these type of actions will set the course for more "common sense" approaches, given that after all, the entire American Continent faces a common threat. As for a legal Mexican worker... well... in which way this legal worker s costing any more than any other worker... I can see that in specific situations a "preferred" policy of quotas (one that I do NOT agree with) a Mexican (or any other so called "minority”) is treated with preference... on that basis alone, it is WRONG and I do not agree with. The only qualifier ought to be his or her ability to perform the job. No other. i have an example i'll relate to you via pm (personal situation) in how the employment of legal* mexicans are costing jobs.* I look forward to reading about it. I do not pretend to ignore that if additional labor is brought to the table, obviously the share of the pie will get smaller... That is why I am saying that these programs CANNOT really work UNLESS the South side of the equation improves the opportunities... This is where we all need to focus, how to make the entire continent a better place to live, everyone will benefit from it... btw.... I have learned recently that Canada is actively opening its border to workers from other nations... I have recently learned of several individual cases where they have successfully applied for Canadian residency... and obtained it with relative ease... That was somehow a surprise to me.