A NATION OF TRUCK DRIVERS

BTW – fuck balance. Balance is for pussies. TBP needs fights!

Llpoh says – 80% lost (jobs) to efficiency and 20% lost ( jobs) to export.

Double, triple bullshit. Where did you get these figures ??

Bea – I am one of those folks qualified to render expert opinion in this area. Senior manager multinational corps, advanced degree in mfg, forty years experience, owner of successful business, turnaround expert in mfg.

Admin knows he is outgunned here. Same way I am in banking. He is trying to irritate me. He us a gnat on the asd of greatness.

Lipoh logic and business thinking win over your words and admins graphics.

Stucky

Somebody has had a few too many drinky poos tonight.

Here is a graph that explains it, if it shows up. Basically, there has been a steady drop in mfg employees as a share of the workforce, but wonder of wonders – a lower per cent in manufacturing manage to – gasp – produce the same overall GDP percentage year after year! How is that possible! We are sending jobs overseas, right? So the drop in mfg as a percentage should be matched by a corresponding drop in GDP – right?

But it did not happen. Manufacturing employment as a percentage of employees dropped – but manufacturing as a percentage of GDP did not. Because more was made by fewer.

I win.

[img]http://econbrowser.com/archives/2014/03/graphs-of-key-economic-trends[/img]

Manufacturing has contributed about 12% to GDP each year since around 1970. That remains the same for the entire 45 years, with little variation.

We are importing goods with borrowed money. If we had borrowed money and bought local made goods, things would be better. It did not happen.

Now it will get worse.

bb just might be the Sarah Palin of TBP, a dubious personality who is nevertheless able to play kingmaker. Just remember, bb, with great power comes great responsibility.

yep, I remember truck drivers, teachers, government workers and people on social programs who did not care one bit about the slave trade agreements….They figured that it was someone else’s problem……….all the people who lost their jobs went on social programs, and it was Bill clinton who had the fed push the housing boom to hide the damage being done as people bought homes at prices they really could not afford.

Remember that all those jobs came with health insurance and they all helped finance our government.
When the jobs went our government had to borrow money to help support the people who lost their jobs and health insurance.

it was Bill Clinton and many within our political ranks who were determined to force us into s socialistic and eventually communistic form of government.

So many idiots here keep praising the social democrats but eventually we just will collapse under the debt and then things will change greately………social democrats are Americans enemy

Thanks Siete. Starfuckwit gives the game away immediately. He cannot grasp that if manufacture as a percent of gdp has not dropped, how exactly have jobs been exported?

What has happened is that consumers are buying shitloads more manufactured goods. They used to buy mfg goods = to 12 percent of gdp, more or less. They currently buy 12% of gdp in mfg goods, PLUS the difference between imports and exports, which is more or less $1 trillion. One trillion is about 7% of GDP.

Thus I deduce that consumers are now buying 19% of gdp in manufactured goods – the 12 per cent plus the $1 trillion in excess imports. We have become a country of excess consumers – we consume more than we make, and we buy the difference with borrowed money from overseas.

Uh-oh.

We are screwed.

But not because we are shipping jobs overseas (yet). But simply because we consume more than we make – 50% more consumption than in 1970, without a corresponding increase in production.

And we have created a monster. By buying overseas goods we have funded the development and automation of our competitors. That will in the end be a fatal mistake. They no longer just manufacture cheap shit, but they now manufacture high quality product as well.

And NOW they will strip the jobs that are left. And now they will compete against our high dollar and high quality exports. And given they have better regulatory and cost advantages and lower taxes on corps, they are now going to kick the ever-loving shit out of US manufacturing.

Starfucker – you have added zero to this debate, because you have zero to add. The sum total of your contribution is to try to ridicule me. You are a total idiot – no background, no experience, no education in the field to call upon. As I said, no one knows more than me about this stuff around here, and very fucking few anywhere else do either, for that matter. I was running plants with thousands of employees before I was thirty. What about you, dickwad?

I no longer work for big corps. For the last two plus decades I have run my own business, selling to big, and small corps. And I have done very well, thank you.

But big corps are about to make some serious shifts in outsourcing to, especially, China. The US is simply far too restrictive and costly a place to run a business. So folks that can leave, will. And because China can now produce quality goods, there is less and less reason to put up with the world’s highest tax rate, with the unbelievable number of regs, with EPA rampant interference, etc. big, and small, corps are going to abandon ship.

I added nothing because jim was doing a fine job of slicing and dicing. What do you think foxconns 1.2 million employees are doing, running CNC machines? Out of the fog you are totally right about the regulatory straightjacket, but understand why that exists. To encourage offshoring. It’s called economic treason. Easy to stop. It’s called tarriffs. Taxes on foreigners designed to protect AMERICAN businesses and workers.

Tariffs are bullshit. The reason the Japs were able to get a foothold in the seventies was because the US manufacturers had let quality slide because they were a protected species.

Yes, we need a level playing field. But putting ridiculous regs in place, then saying we need tariffs is the height of stupidity.

Plus, you have no idea about how much the US exports. Make no mistake, the US is a manufacturing powerhouse. People forget that. The US is an absolute 500 pound gorilla in manufacturing. No country on earth, no matter what you hear, is as good at it, in volume, as the US.

Tariffs would have an enormous negative impact on the by memory, trillion dollars plus a year the US exports. Tariffs would take us back to bad quality and protected classes.

What we need is for corp tax rates to drop, and for regulatory parity to be made to happen.

The US is more than capable of playing on a level field. That is why on a GDP basis the US has not dropped manufacturing. But it is about too.

People place too much emphasis on conspiracies. Let me tell you, the vast majority of businesses, even giants, simply adapt to regs and laws in place as an effort to make a dollar. Some spend a lot of money lobbying for breaks. But do you really think business, by and large, want to be handcuffed by the EPA and NLRA? Really? Bullshit. They are in business to make a profit – although the way senior execs are compensated has very much subverted that.

I have never sat in a meeting and heard the CEO say “gee, what say we fuck the Average Joe”. ” Let’s take our company offshore so we can really fuck them over!”. Bullshit. They are trying to maximize shareholder return despite the fact the politicians are fucking things up at every turn.

Want to see the economy BOOM? Eliminate corporate tax, and allow immediate deduction of capital expense. It will cost by memory $300 billion in list corp taxes a year.

You would immediately see US business reawaken without any need for “tariffs”. Killing the EPA would not hurt, either. And when I say boom, I mean short term GDP growth of like double digits. The Chinese could suck the sweat off our balls. Not to mention the several trillions in capital that the multis would IMMEDIATELY bring home.

If I were in charge, business would boom. And no country on earth can compete with the US if handcuffs are off. Really.

llpoh, when i was 22, I had an executive delivery business in miami. One of my accounts was eastern airlines. I spent many evenings sitting in the corner of the boardroom while frank boreman and the board tried to save eastern. I would take their proposals over to the machinists union. The union guys were blind to whst deregulation had changed. They thought eastern was made of money.

The moment clinton signed NAFTA, the most valuable asset most american’s possess, the fruits of their labor, got significantly devalued. No majority ever voted for that. The moment ben bernanke enacted QE and ZIRP, most americans savings became a lot less valuable. I don’t recall that vote either. You and tom donilan and larry kudlow might think that is swell, but I didn’t sign up to be lorded over by schmucks, and I think this experiment in oligarchy is going to end badly

If one ( ) has economic arrogance, and the right laws, one ( ) might end up with general
prosperity and a middle class.

If one ( ) has demonic arrogance, such as Russia, China, others, 1900 onwards, one
might end up with territory, and the ability to win wars.

If one ( ) has religious arrogance, such as Islam, one might end up with a
subservient population, (and pissed off women).

If one ( ) has civilizational arrogance (my coined phrase) and enough of
something else, one might stave off the ascendency and ultimate
victory of the above other types of arrogance.

It is the good threads, that can welcome a higher level of discussion.

Llpoh should have picked a better example of the success of industrialization than agriculture. If eating was simply a matter of producing the highest number of calories from a specific plot of land with the lowest investment of labor regardless of the amount of energy expended to do so, he’d be right. The problem with our current system of agriculture should be obvious to anyone with two eyeballs and heartbeat, but for some reason only the smallest minority of people are able to see the holistic panorama of industrialized agriculture and it’s downstream effects on the population.

Let’s examine some of the issues in greater detail before we decide what makes something successful as opposed to efficient.

Food is more than calories. I’m not a nutritionist or an MD, but I do know that calories are simply a mechanism for delivering energy to an organism, not a measure of nutritive value. If a toddler needed 500 calories a day and was offered a choice between a 500 calorie soft drink or an equal amount of vegetables, meat and fruit, only a sadist would feed the child the soft drink as a steady diet based on cost alone. `A single handful of fresh greens picked right out of the garden brings greater value to the life of a human being than a 2 litre Mountain Dew with ten times the calories.
Humans need better nutrition to live healthier and longer lives. Today we have calories produced by industrialized agriculture with little nutritive value that leave people to live miserable lives filled with preventable illnesses and multiple disabilties directly related to poor diet. The associated costs to remediate these problems using pharmaceuticles and overtaxing the healthcare system are never factored in, nor is the cost of lost labor directly related to these failings.

Loss of knowledge. When we began as homesteaders we possessed very limited knowledge regarding the production of food. Most of the lessons learned took years because food production is cyclical in nature and requires years of experience to build any type of knowledge base. These factors include seasonality, hybridization, mortality, fertility, water cycles, morbidity, invasive pests, etc. What America once possessed in the untold millions was generational knowledge of individuals concerning what to plant and when, what breeds proved best for which environments, maximizing the benefits of waste cycles, minimizing erosion and soil loss, water quality and drought prevention- the list is longer than my own life would ever be able to uncover in the time I have left to learn and I am dedicated to the task in a way the vast majority living would ever do. The problem isn’t that there are too few people left with this knowledge, but that EVERY ONE requires it. I haven’t met anyone yet who doesn’t eat- excluding a couple of breathatarians who strike me as frauds. The whole of the population is entirely dependent on a very, very small minority to satisfy ALL of their nutritive requirements. That is no less of a threat to the future of our civilization than an equally small minority controlling the vast majority of financial resources needed by the rest of the population. For some reason we all seem to count on the benevolence of the food producers to continue turning it out for a fraction of its true value so everyone can benefit. What happens if, say form example, the elite banker class winds up in control of the last means of agricultural production and no one is left with any land/knowledge or resources to counter that kind of monopolism? Will they continue to sell healthy high end heirloom produce and heritage meats to the hoi polloi or hoard it to themselves and allow us high fructose corn syrup and a low end form of soylent green to keep the masses from starvation at extortionist prices? The near elimination of the knowledge required to maintain sustinable farming practices isn’t something that can be reversed in time to prevent a holomodor on a scale unimaginable to even the most doomy doomers out there.

Soil. I wish I could begin to explain the importance of soil to life. Soil is not an inert anchor for roots, it is one of the most complex ecosystems on Earth. It is the final transition between decay and growth and the damage that industrial agriculture has done to the soils- and by extension the watersheds- is nothing less than catastrophic. That we still produce crops is a testament to the historic health and fertility of North America rather than the efficacy of the industril model. The volume of soils lost due to erosion, the poisons relesaed into the waters and atmosphere and remaining in the soils as result of persticides and herbicides, the diseases and disorders, the cancers and obesity, the spent fossil fuels that will never be replaced in order to produce “cheap” food is incalculable. Soils are created at a rate of inches per millenium and we have exhausted these in time spans of fifty years or less. Once gone they are not replaced for any amount of money or any human effort. The use of NPK since the end of WWII as a means of goosing production worked fine as long as there was soil to use up and unlimited amounts of cheap oil to create these additives. Once the soil is done, once the cost of fossil fuels exceeds the limits of profitably of pulling it out of the ground the era of cheap food is over, forever. The cost of high priced food will only be available for those who can afford it. Our advanced systems of industrialization applied to a natural system was not only short sighted, it was nothing short of an inevitable ELE.

The industrialized agricultural system of the 20th century was one of the greatest mistakes of mankind. Only the most misguided of us would point to it as a triumph of anything other than hubris. The collapse of the debt based economies of the world will be like a summer cold compared to the collapse of the oil based industrial agriculture system, the pancreatic cancer of our species.

And all of those retards, save me and SSS and Admin and bb (in this case) are posting on this thread.

🙂

Llpoh

Admin’s 08:28pm post above (chart) scorched your whole argument.

At 04:26 today you state – “I clearly said there will now be a huge outflow of mfg. jobs overseas. Now? Now?

The plane hit the fucking mountain long before now. Loss of manufacturing jobs since 2001 has been due to offshoring not efficiency. And to be sure, I understand that we have been a nation of consumers. Posturing Llpoh?
What did I contribute? Did you read the link I provided in my 10:31am post? Where is your proof ?

The church lady asked me if it true that Macy’s will be closing soon. I say, let’s go look at their new line featuring Thalia Sodi. If Sears is any guide with their failed Kardashians line, Macy’s is indeed on the ropes. Her shoes and clothes are cheap Chinese products, better workmanship than the Kardashians but still low quality nylon, darcon or polyester. The design quality is terrible, we saw a leopard print dress highlighted with hibiscus. While some clothes feature Miami pastels, others feature 1970’s brown hues.