I didn't mean Cuba specifically. I just meant that Detroit sells it's outdated stuff to foreign markets. And in all fairness it won't be "Detroit" doing it. They sell their old crap to machinery liquidators, and THEN that stuff ends up in Mexico, India, China, etc. It's one of the reasons that up until recently at least, foreign made widgets were of lesser quality. They were made with worn out yesterdays technology.
Right now China and India are HUGE importers of used manufacturing equipment. I'm sure there are a slew of others as well.
Actually, Japan is a pretty great place. Modern, friendly, and the girls are especially cute. Just so long as you don't mind being groped on a train now and again (by women curious about westerners and their, uhm, "attributes"), it's a nice place.
And you view this as a good thing? It started with union jobs in the 70's and early 80's. Those union guys just made too much money. Then, the non-union jobs started going overseas in the 1980's. In the 1990's the floodgates were opened up to moving the manufacturing jobs into Mexico (remember that big sucking sound Ross Pero referred to?). Then, in the
2000's, the white collar computer jobs moved to India, and the flood of Mexicans came in to replace construction workers in this country. I got news for you: Your job is next. Be afraid...be very afraid... What's scary is that the Republicans and talk radio are trying to convince us this is a good thing. Even scarier is that some people believe it! Don't get me wrong, I'm very much conservative. However, this is something that I cannot agree with.
This is very true today. You almost have to take it on a model by model basis.
Yeah, American cars weren't as good in the 70's as they were in the 60's or today. However, Toyotas and Hondas weren't especially good either. I still see 1970s era American cars running around. I don't mean collector cars, either. I mean daily drivers. I couldn't tell you the last time I saw a
1978 Honda or Toyota of any model. Don't you think that if they were built so well that there would still be some running around on the roads somewhere? I think a lot of it was hype. Some of it was true, but a lot of it was hype...
True.
This is why it's less important to worry about whether the vehicle is GM, Ford, or Chrysler(ahem...DaimlerChrysler) and consider whether it was US built at all. I'm more of a Big 3 fan than anything, but if they want to build everything in Mexico, then give me a Toyota made in nearby Georgetown, KY...
No, but it is happening, and eventually there will be a paradigm shift in education in the US to adjust to it. In the late 19th century, while the US was shifting from a agricultural society to an industrial society, farming become more automated and many farmhands with a sixth-grade education found themselves out of work. The early 20th centrury saw a national priority to increase education for the labor force to make them more employable, hence high school attendance was made universal. Now we are on the cusp of another educational prioriy...a high school education won't be enough to compete globally, and two years minimum of post high school study will be necessarily universal in the next twenty years or so.
Then, in the
I'm self-employed, but that makes little difference to a lot of self-employed people, depending on what they do...
Be afraid...be very afraid... What's scary
Big business loves this trend. Like all socioecononomic shifts, there will be some that will be left behind. You want to stay employed...the emphasis will be to stay employable.
I see your point...I think a lot of it was in the gas crunch of the 70's people wanted smaller, fuel efficient cars, and the domestics really didn't have much to offer, while almost every Japanese car was small and fuel efficient, quality notwithstanding. That really opened the floodgates and the quality improvement perception came later as they built up market share and the domestics' quality stagnated through the early 80's.
Education has nothing to do with it. Here's the problem: For the US to compete globally, we need tangible goods to sell. Education does nothing to give us those tangible goods to sell to the world. Someone has to actually produce them. In the late 1980's, Pres. Bush declared that he wanted to push the transition of the US to a service oriented society, which is the last stage defined by Karl Marx in the evolution of a society's economy. This has been the fundemental shift that has been happening since the early
1980's, where we've gradually gone to making more and more goods outside the US. There has been a push to become more of a global marketplace and a global economy. The problem with this is that you have to have something to sell to the world. At first, you'd think that we'd sell our services of our expertise. Well, the shift of computer related jobs to India has shown that that type of work can be exported a lot easier than moving an entire production plant. Now, once that knowledge has been gained by foreign countries, what else do we have to sell to the world? If we've become a society that is too expensive to employ, we then don't have any hard goods to sell. We then face economic collapse. When it becomes too easy to replace you with someone on another continent for a lot less, then we're doomed.
The US is something like 1/3 the entire world consumer market, and roughly the size of the entire european continent combined. However, if we keep trying to cut costs by eliminating jobs by sending them outside our borders, or replacing them with foreign immigrants who pay no taxes, and the government subsidizing such action, we'll find ourselves in desperate times. For too long, white collar and self-employed people have looked the other way because it didn't affect them. Well, it's beginning to. Again, they can ship white collar jobs outside the US far cheaper than they can move a plant. If the current trend continues, you'll find company accounting records kept in India, etc..
Self-employed people need to be worried too. As more and more production of goods is outside the US, larger, more global companies are arising, stamping out the mom-and-pops and small businesses out of the market altogether. Witness Walmart. 80% of their goods are produced in foreign countries, typically in sweat shops. That enables them to sell cheaper, and runs smaller chains out. This is a disease that we all are catching because we like to pay less. Again, this country is becoming more out for themselves to a degree unprecedented. Everyone feels like they deserve $100,000+ a year, but the next guy gets paid too much for what he does. We're driving down our collective standard of living, as a result. This way of thinking is a sinking ship...
Yeah, and like lemmings, we're following this trend...
And when all the tangible goods are made outside the US, accounting, computer related positions, and just about all white collar work is exported to India and management only needs a computer readout of the reports? What then? Is it even possible to stay employable? Doing what? When enough people can't find work, or cannot earn a decent enough living, then the market for goods collapses, sending the economy down the toilet with it to doomsday.
For this country to survive, we need people earning good livings. I don't just mean a few with college educations, I mean the vast majority of everyday people. Then, they pay lots of taxes, the government has money to do its job, and the consumer market flourishes and fuels a booming economy. Instead, we're trying to rid this country of good paying jobs by exporting them somewhere else. I heard a local talk radio host claim that we export low paying jobs and gain high paying jobs in the process. However, I don't see those jobs lost by GM, Ford, and DC worker to Mexico as being low pay.
I'm telling you...this trend is dangerous for the economy in the long run. It's good for corporate America, but bad for you and I.
Yes, it's like Ferrari, BMW, Porsche, Mercedes, etc... Look back into 1970's at their products. They're far inferior in most ways to American counterparts of the period. Ferrari's were beautiful cars with kit car build quality. Mechanically they were unreliable. They weren't all that impressive performance-wise either. Sure, the snobby will call their performance "balanced", but a common Chevelle SS would outgun most Ferraris in an acceleration contest. The one on Magnum PI had a 0-60 time of something like 9 seconds! The original VW GTi was capable of that. Even the Corvette during those poor performance years could go faster. Porsche never even made a fast car until the 1978 911 Turbo was released, and its performance would have been laughed at between 1967 to 1971. Have you even seen a 70's era Bimmer or Benz? Most were nothing to look at... There was nothing special about Mercedes vehicles back then, but somehow in the
1980's we began a love affair with them and that funded them to improve their product to be where they are now. Same goes for Honda, Toyota, and Datsun (Nissan). Our need for fuel efficiency provided them with the much needed funds, combined with their ambitition, led to the admittedly good products they have now. But back then, there was nothing special about them. I remember reading an article about a Toyota 2000GT, where they were so unreliable that the engine needed rebuilt every 60K or something like that. They got the reliability later, after we funded it.
Interesting to note that our domestic auto mfrs, particularly GM & Ford, continue to lose market share (and, hence, jobs) to the Asians. GM, Ford & DC have shed over 130,000 jobs since 2000. Over the same period, however, the Asians & Europeans have continued to invest in the "high-cost" USA, opening new plants and employing thousands of workers. Unfortunately, due to the built-in inefficiencies of the UAW-bound domestics, they've only replaced about 30,000 jobs over the same period of time. It should be no mystery why the UAW has been unsuccessful in organizing the Asian plants, they simply have nothing to offer the workers but lost income and eventual unemployment.
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