You keep hearing the Democrats complain that all the jobs in the US are moving overseas and that they should be elected to punish companies that send jobs offshore. But there is one thing that the Democrats are not telling you. The US is the world's number one manufacturer. (By dollar value)
BEIJING (XFN-ASIA) - China is set to overtake the US next year as the world's largest producer of manufactured goods, four years earlier than expected, as a result of the rapidly weakening US economy, the Financial Times reported, citing forecasts provided to it by consultancy Global Insight.In 2009, China will account for 17 pct of manufacturing value-added output of 11,783 bln usd and the US will account for 16 pct, according to the estimates.Just last year, the US was the clear leader with about 20 pct of the total, compared with China 's 13.2 pct, the newspaper said. - Forbes
Just think about that. Twenty percent of everything manufactured in the world, by value, was made in the US. Do you think that that might be part of the reason why the US consumes about 25 percent of the world's oil production!
With the US being number one in manufacturing, it is going to be pretty much impossible to prevent some jobs from moving overseas, seeing that the US has more than its fair share (using a Democrat term) of the world's manufacturing jobs. It might be that the US became a manufacturing powerhouse partly due to the third world being so underdeveloped, failing to undergo an industrial revolution of their own. But now, it is much easier to set up a factory pretty much anywhere and have it automated enough to limit the need to employees. And these factories in the US can also modernize and automate resulting in less manufacturing jobs anyway. The end result is that moving offshore or not, jobs go away. The trick is to provide people with valuable skills so that they are qualified for a much larger pool of jobs.
There is one other thing not mentioned about many of those manufacturing jobs that are disappearing. Many of them sucked and many of those jobs required very little of the employees other than repetitive motion. (NOTE: There are many, many very rewarding manufacturing jobs. Thankfully, many of those jobs are still here and are probably not going anywhere, anytime soon. Provided that Obama doesn't become President and raise Corporate taxes.)
The long-term goal was to retrain workers in order to restore manufacturing jobs in the area; Kellman took Obama by the rusted-out, closed-down Wisconsin Steel plant for a firsthand look. But the whole thing was a bit of a pipe dream, as the leaders soon discovered. “The idea was to interview these people and look at education, transferable skills, so that we could refer them to other industries,” Loretta Augustine-Herron told me as we drove by the site of the old factory, now completely torn down. “Well, they had no transferable skills. I remember interviewing one man who ran a steel-straightening machine. It straightened steel bars or something. I said, well, what did you do? And he told me he pushed a button, and the rods came in, and he pushed a button and it straightened them, and he pushed a button and it sent them somewhere else. That’s all he did. And he made big bucks doing it.”That, of course, was one of the reasons the steel mill closed. And it became clear that neither Obama nor Kellman nor anyone else was going to change the direction of the steel industry and its unions in the United States. Somewhere along the line, everyone realized that those jobs wouldn’t be coming back. - National Review
Should we really spend lots of tax money to keep jobs like that? It is much better to try and retrain people to do something that is in demand. Provided that they are open-minded enough to be retrained. Unfortunately, most of them are not likely to earn the type of money that they were earning before. But then again, maybe it was a gift that they were earning big buck for as long as they did. They still can earn big bucks in the future, but they are going to have to work hard to learn the skills that the rest of have learned to get the jobs we have now.
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