Article

2011-04-02 Economy

We've Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers

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Posted by JohnQC 2011-04-02 00:00|| || Front Page|| [3 views ] Top

#1 The leaders in government hiring are Wyoming and New Mexico, which have hired more than six government workers for every manufacturing worker.

What are you going to manufacture in New Mexico? You don't have an adequate water source to support most industrial manufacturing. The one major manufacturer in the state is the Intel Processor Planet in Rio Rancho which operates on tight water management as it is. Shipping gets a bit expensive trying to get to and get from there. It's not like the Rio Grande is navigable to Las Cruces let alone Albuquerque. And yes, New Mexico has a lot of government jobs largely because its the state a lot of NIMBY projects end up in. Remember they nuked New Mexico first! Want to store low level nuclear waste, want to shoot missiles and practice intercepts, want to conduct supersonic and low level aircraft training, etc. What's not done in other's backyard seems to end up there along with the government jobs that go with them. The devil is in the details.

Posted by Procopius2k 2011-04-02 00:35|| 2011-04-02 00:35|| Front Page Top

#2 Don't know about Wyoming, but New Mexico has many federal facilities, e.g, Los Alamos National Lab, Sandia Lab, Kirtland AFB, Cannon AFB, Holloman AFB, White Sands Missile Range, National Park Service facilities, Indian reservations with their necessary staffers & federal law enforcers, and the Bureau of Land Management, which cares for 13.4 million acres of public lands plus 26 million acres of federal oil, natural gas, and minerals, just in New Mexico. The BLM is responsible for a total of 38,417,600 acres, which by my calculations is 49% of all the land in the state. That's federal land, not counting city or state stuff. New Mexico only has 2 million people. It seems more than reasonable that NM has a high percentage of government employees to match its level of government ownership & responsibility.

Posted by Anguper Hupomosing9418 2011-04-02 02:30|| 2011-04-02 02:30|| Front Page Top

#3 How much of this is due to more government workers generally speaking, and how much is due to the fact that as private sector wages and benefits for unskilled/semiskilled labor stayed high well past the point that other countries had the trained workers and infrastructure to manufacture things and a hugely lower labor cost, the manufacturing jobs here simply moved overseas?

If the populace had kept its demand for compensation more in line with the market cost for its labor, many of those jobs would have stayed here and by that alone much of the imbalance between public sector and manufacturing jobs would not have occurred.

Agriculture? Not gonna happen. Outside of a few boutique items that comprise a statistically insignificant portion of our output, agriculture is entirely capital intensive. It is unlikely that agriculture will ever employ more than 5% of the population going forward. in 1900, that number was over 40%. For three generations those people who lost agricultural jobs went into manufacturing. Then they priced themselves out of those jobs over the next generation.

The housing boom picked up the slack and made for a set of conditions where a lot of guys could become small contractors. But with 13% of the houses in the country and anywhere from 10% to 30% of most urban commercial real estate now empty, we don't need people building things. That's a non-starter.

Those that have the skills could go into professions like law and medicine and dentistry and accounting and engineering or successful small business in certain cottage industries. Those that can't end up unemployed or working for the government doing useless things, on average. If citizens were willing to do what illegal aliens now do for minimum wage and the government shut down employers who employed illegal aliens, that would help, but I'm mot sure how much. Too many Americans think that that sort of manual labor is "beneath" them, anyways. I would say no job is beneath anybody, but I suspect those words would fall on deaf ears. A bloated welfare/unemployment benefits apparatus allows them the luxury of taking that attitude. And I'm not sure how many politicians of either party have the will to pursue this as a policy.

The desire by the elites and some workers to create a world where there is perfect income and pension security combined with outcome egalitarianism has brought us to this pass. I'm not smart enough to figure a way out of this situation, other than to suggest that our economic woes may last long enough that the public sector workers, too, will lose their precious, precious perfect job security, which will bring us all back down to the ground, and engender more realistic material expectations of life. At that point perhaps things can be fixed.

Posted by no mo uro 2011-04-02 06:46|| 2011-04-02 06:46|| Front Page Top

#4 Nope. The nation and it's currency WILL collapse. Sorry folks. Thats what democrats wrought on you.

Posted by newc 2011-04-02 10:23|| 2011-04-02 10:23|| Front Page Top

#5 This is not well argued. That there are too many government workers stands alone as a statistic.

But the argument is muddied by comparing them to manufacturing jobs, which is apples and oranges apart.

If America is so fond of manufacturing jobs, then why is there such emphasis on higher education? Precisely so that people won't have to work in manufacturing jobs, but in other forms of employment.

Who is doing the manufacturing in the world right now? People in low wage jobs in the third world. The US can't sustain UAW wages and benefits in competition with that, unless there are sky high tariffs, and all manufactured products are extra expensive.

It's just easier and cheaper to migrate our workforce into other forms of work and import foreign made goods.

Certainly, if there is a huge international depression, we will have to go back to making stuff for ourselves; but we can do that if we have to.

We have massive energy reserves, and there are very few vital metals that we don't have, which we have carefully put into strategic reserves. So the bottom line is that we really don't need the rest of the world.

None of which has anything to do with how we manage ourselves by hiring too many government workers, and paying too much largess.

Posted by Anonymoose 2011-04-02 19:21|| 2011-04-02 19:21|| Front Page Top

#6 personal experience: my Local Agency staff typically supervise bridge construction with 4 people - myself half-time and a full-time Resident Engineer, as well as my two Surveyors as needed. Our state agency uses up to 20 to do the same job.

No fat there.

Nosirreeee

Posted by Frank G 2011-04-02 19:38|| 2011-04-02 19:38|| Front Page Top

#7 Yep, and the real reason real wages for the middle class has been stagnant or going down for the last 40 years. The fall in real income has become alarming since 1/2 the "making" jobs (the stuff people buy) have been shipped overseas in the last 20 years.

Posted by Zebulon Thranter9685 2011-04-02 20:19|| 2011-04-02 20:19|| Front Page Top

#8 Well then what kind of a savior is he if he can't reverse that trend Zebulon?

Posted by CrazyFool 2011-04-02 22:24|| 2011-04-02 22:24|| Front Page Top

#9 Crazyfool: It took over 30 years (til 1982-83) to lose 1/3 of manufacturing jobs. During that 30 years productivity increased by more than the loss of those jobs, so the net amount of goods manufactured per person increased. (I.e. the standard of living increased. Actually the production increased til about 1970. After that the loss of manufacturing jobs was greater than the productivity increase)

While the graph looks like a linear decline, the loss of jobs has been accelerating as a percentage of the remaining manufacturing base. Since 1982, half of all remaining manufacturing jobs have been lost. Has productivity doubled just to provide the same amount of goods? No even close.

So how has America avoided a situation where more and more people chase after fewer and fewer goods? Imports.

How are excess imports paid for? With savings and transfers of technology. Well, the savings of Americans are exhausted and the credit card companies are breathing down debtors necks. We're broke. No more cash for stuff unless we count the endless lines of US treasury printing presses. How long before the goods providers wise up to that?

Transfers of technology? Even visit a foreign factory? They are often more modern, automated and efficient than ours since they have invested their export earnings into upgrades. Heck we've even transferred out latest nuclear weapons designs to the Chinese. So no more joy there.

What's left #1? The US is still #1 in weaponry. Too bad it gives away several times more in feel good foreign adventures and aid than it brings in in weapons sales.

What's left #2? Financial swindles. See Financial crisis of 2008. Too bad the American taxpayer was the pigeon of that scam and two trillion dollars was given away to domestic and foreign banks, so the net foreign debt increased by a frightening amount. The US taxpayer is still on the hook for trillions more. Financial swindles #2B: Inflate your way out of debt - See Quantitative easing.

What's left #3? Foreign invasion and looting. The problem - see #1: Feel good foreign adventures.

What's left #4? Cut consumption, bring "making stuff" back in country and try to work off the debt. Good luck w/ exporting our way to financial health. No other nation is stupid enough to open wide their markets to foreign products, less rig it so that foreign products have a built in advantage.

The least painful solution? #4 in combination w/ #2B. Make stuff again and make our debts worthless. Either way, that means less stuff to buy until our production rises to what we have been accustomed to.

Posted by Zebulon Thranter9685 2011-04-02 23:11|| 2011-04-02 23:11|| Front Page Top

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