Valles Wrote:Quote:robkelk wrote:BA, the labor market is oversaturated because we've chosen to outsource most of our manufacturing to other countries, leaving substantially fewer jobs here for people to do. If you want to fix that, you'll have to bring the jobs back - which will raise the prices of the goods that are manufactured, because the minimum wages here are higher than they are in most of Asia (where the goods are currently manufactured).My understanding is that the US and other 1st World economies do very close to the same amount of manufacturing they always have, even in things like heavy industry or cheap plastic toys, and that the job share in those sectors has been decreasing because the automation of those jobs has improved - hyperbolically, rather than a thousand people on the assembly line, it's a thousand robots and fifty robot-repair technicians and five or ten robot programmers.
Which, yeah, has the same upside as the outsourcing - those thousand assembly-line jobs will never exist again.
The US does manufacture the most stuff by value, but most of it is specialized high value stuff, or just durable goods such as air-planes, artificial hearts and so on.
As for automation in the US.... I know of one specific factory that was build in the 80's to manufacture ceramic goods such as tiles and toilet-bowls and so forth, it employs roughly thirty thousand people.
In the 00's a similar factory was built in the US, it employs 5 people and a few dozen robots, it doesn't make anything but tiles, and in roughly equal mass as the chinese factory total output. Roll that in your head for a moment, a roughly three orders of magnitude change in the amount of workers needed... And personel cost for the two factories are not that different as having expensive engineers work the night shift.... (you can;t just start and stop a kiln, it takes tremendous power and time to get back to operating temperature.) vs the thousands of workers working in conditions that would give OHSA fits....
Well one is the kind of manufactering job we want to have the other... we can;t compete on labour prices with china.
Quote:In that case, the prices of everyday items would go up significantly. So much so that you're left with a zero-sum change: In other words, the employees at the bottom end get paid more. But their cost of living goes up to match it and they gain nothing in the long run. This has happened EVERY SINGLE TIME that the minimum wage has been hiked upwards!
Nope, there is a short inflationary spike but it is mild and short, and low end workers still come out way ahead. That has happened every single time in the past the US has raised the minimum wage, so if you are going to tell me this time will be different you better have some good arguments as to why we should not rely on historical data.
Also the cost of payroll is 10-15% of retail (source) so tripling minimum wages should add 20-30% to the price of most goods, compared to having triple the income that is just a very small rise. For most consumer goods labour is a trivial part of the cost.
E: "Did they... did they just endorse the combination of the JSDF and US Army by showing them as two lesbian lolicons moving in together and holding hands and talking about how 'intimate' they were?"
B: "Have you forgotten so soon? They're phasing out Don't Ask, Don't Tell."