■ 03 February 2012 | 5:00 AM
Outsourcing makes sense
Re 'Apple rolls away,' Donald Luzzatto op-ed, Jan. 29: You appear to blame Steve Jobs, or business in general, for the increase in outsourcing to China of Apple's manufacturing.
No blame whatsoever is placed on our bloated regulatory environment. Regulations are choking off business in America. That President Barack Obama would even ask Jobs why such manufacturing is outsourced is laughable. Look at the Boeing plant in South Carolina. Or at Gibson guitars. The government is openly opposing these highly successful, iconic American brands on behalf of labor unions. But organized labor is only part of the problem.
Don't you think businesses would locate their manufacturing here if it made economic sense? Apple used to do all its manufacturing in California. Jobs wouldn't have it any other way. Why would businesses do such a thing?
The answer is obvious. Because they can produce more product at higher quality and lower cost. Thanks to a culture of entitlement, American workers are not as motivated as some foreign workers. Many prefer unemployment checks to working 40 hours a week. Now with Obamacare on the horizon, job growth in America is in full, unabashed retreat.
Phil Eagan
Virginia Beach
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Someone keeps sighting
Someone keeps sighting Europe as having a handle on this through job sharing etc. Last time I checked Europe was going down the tubes. Some handle. When are people going to understand that we are not all equal? We all were created equal in God's sight but we are not equal. That is just the facts. But in this country at least those who are less equal than others had the chance to change that through hard work and innovation. But Government will see to it (through regulations) that we no longer have that opportunity. We MUST all be equal. We must all have the same amount of what ever it is you wish to talk about. Except of course the 1% of the 1% who make the rules and regulations that make all of us equal.
Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated.
"Going down the tubes"
are they? Are they in worse shape than we are after having "gone down the tubes"? It is not at all obvious. By many different measures of wealth, health, education, economic justice and happiness many European countries still leave us in the dust even after suffering the same global downturn triggered by Wall Street shenanigans. Do they have fiscal problems and need to make some adjustments? You betcha! Will they make those adjustments on the backs of the poor or push tens of millions into poverty to protect the wealthy (of whom they have plenty). I doubt it very much.
A culture of "entitlement"
Imagine greedy Americans who expect to earn a living wage. Who do they think they are?
No such problem in China. In the case of Apple's suppliers the workers live in dormitories and when the bosses say get out of bed and work a 14 hour shift to expedite iPad production they just do what they are told because - oddly - they don't want to starve. And those suppliers have helped turn China into an environmental cesspool where breathing itself is hazardous to your health.
The real problem is that we allow products produced by slave labor without enviromental safeguards into our country. Not to mention dealing with a country with a make-believe currency. But lets blame American workers for their love of "entitlements!" Ha!
In addition to virtual slave labor China also offers a massive cadre of highly trained engineers and technicians. We can't compete with that because we have been starving public education for decades while they have been investing in it. Penny-wise and pound-foolish.
We are discussing Apple because Governor Mitch Daniel's badly chosen example of them being job creators. They have created jobs alright - in China. In the USA - not so much.
Finally, the LTE writer seems to be one of those whose grasp on reality is tenuous when it comes to "freeloaders" enjoying a life of leisure on unemployment insurance. The current high unemployment rate is caused by lack of jobs - not by people choosing not to work.
But wait, there's more...
What's causing the lack of jobs?
If you want a real answer - it is this.
In the long term technological advancements are making human beings far less important in production and service than they used to be. ATMs replace bank tellers. Web sites replace store clerks. Robots replace workers in factories. Now iPads are repalcing order takers in restaurants. And so forth. As usual many European nations are ahead of us on this problem which is why they have actively promoted job sharing and shorter work weeks.
In the short term these long term problems were exacerbated by the finacial and economic collapse of 2008 which scared the bejeezus out of businesses and consumers alike leading to a negative spiral that might have ended in collapse without government action.
Maybe It Isn't
Not many economists would agree with your analysis. Indeed, the standard theory is that new technologies create jobs, on balance, rather than destroy them.
Take ATMs, for example. It is true that ATMs replace bank tellers, but it is also true:
* The loss of teller jobs is partially offset by the creation of ATM manufacturing and maintenance jobs. Considering that ATMs are available in far more places than just banks, it is likely that there are far more ATM maintainers in the world today than there ever would have been tellers.
* ATM technology spawned new industries that created jobs which didn't exist before, such as point-of-purchase card readers in grocery stores and the ability to process debit/credit card numbers over the Internet.
* ATMs and related technology freed up human and material resources on a large scale to pursue other economic objectives.
Here's another way to picture the same thing: If it were true that technology, on balance, destroys jobs, then we could achieve full employment by restricting the use of technology. We could outlaw digging tools, for example, forcing all excavation work to be done by bare hands.
But that, of course, would be silly. It would mean giving up skyscrapers and bridges and railroads and hydro-electric dams because the time it takes to produce them at "full employment" would be vastly greater than the time it takes to produce them at "full employment" using advanced tools.
Not many economists would agree with your analysis?
You have that backwards. Not many economists would DISAGREE with my analysis?
I am not against Technology advancements. Not in the least. But they really are causing serious structural problems for the labor force for the reasons I cited. We have approached that structural problem by marginalizing a lot of people to keep other people more than whole. Other countries have recognized the problem and begun to address it with steps like job sharing, shorter work weeks, earlier retirement and serious investments in education and re-education.
jobs which did not exist
How many people were employed writing and selling cell phone apps a decade ago? Or optimizing web site search engine results? There are whole new industries which did not exist before.
Further, there are billions of new customers for the things we make well.
Those low wage workers in foreign countries who are taking away our sneaker factory jobs now have money. Not a lot by our standards, but before they had none. They want things like electricity, trains, and roads, and we make generators, locomotives and heavy equipment.
We will never get the sneaker factory jobs back, and we really don't want them, but we excel in heavy manufacture. Many of the oversized trucks used around he world in mining are made in Hampton.
We have a world waking up due to those 'lost jobs' going overseas, and they are our future customers if we don't drive those industries where we dominate overseas as well with our high corporate tax rates and double taxation of investment income.
So, we can have good manufacturing jobs supplying the world with the tools to lift themselves to prosperity, but only if we are willing to give up the politics of envy and let our businesses compete unimpeded in the world marketplace.
You are assuming - as you always do - a fact not in evidence.
And that is that our tax rates have ANYTHING to do with the movement of jobs overseas. This is a common fallacy on the right - that minor changes in marginal tax rates on the wealthy and on corporations have big impacts on what their money is used for. They don't.
Your evidence for that is?
Because your ideology says so?
When investors buy stock in companies here or abroad, they look at the return on their investment. Corporate taxes reduce that return.
Corporate taxes which reduce by 1/3 that return are no different and are, in fact, indistinguishable from other costs which reduce that return.