When a nation's workers become obsolete, so will the nation itself become obsolete. For this reason, no super power rose up without protecting its manufacturers. Of course, economic reality is never allowed to get in the way of economic theory.
CNN: "[Democratic] Senator Tom Harkin and [Democratic] Representative George Miller have offered legislation to increase the national minimum wage to $10.10 [but] the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives won't even bring the minimum wage bill up for a vote. And this past spring, it was filibustered [by the GOP] in the Senate; a minority of [GOP] senators refused to even debate this proposal that a strong majority of the American people clearly support." (CNN left out a few party affiliations, so I filled them in for you.)
LA Times: The Democratic mayor of L.A. proposed a minimum wage of $13.25 an hour by 2017. But some City Council members are advocating a higher wage floor that would reach $15.25 by 2019.
New York Times: "26 states and the District of Columbia have, or soon will have, raised their minimum wage above the paltry federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Even so, these more robust state minimums tend to cluster around $8 to $10 an hour, which is better than $7.25, but still lower than the $11 to $18 an hour that is needed to bring minimum wages in line with relevant benchmarks, including the cost of living, average wages and labor productivity. That is where cities have come in...In San Francisco, the push is for $15 an hour by 2018. In Oakland the goal is $12.25 an hour by 2015. In Los Angeles the City Council has called for $13.25 an hour by 2017 and for a study to chart a path to $15.25 by 2019. In Chicago, city aldermen have proposed $15 by 2016 for large employers, significantly higher than the $13 by 2018 championed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently issued an executive order to require businesses that receive substantial city subsidies to pay a “living wage” of at least $13.13 an hour if they don’t offer benefits, or $11.50 if they do.
Courier-Journal: To date 14 U.S. cities and counties have raised their minimum wage above their state's minimum, joining 25 states plus the District of Columbia that now have a higher minimum than the federal floor of $7.25 ... Minimum-wage increases are often met with claims about big job loss. But a growing body of research shows that reasonable minimum-wage increases have little to no negative effect on employment, including at the local level.
PolitiFact: Minimum-wage hikes may or may not cause faster job growth, but it appears they do not to hamper job creation either.
Bloomberg News: "Incoming NRF chief wants retailers to curtail opposition to minimum wage increases ... Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has said it has a neutral stance on minimum-wage legislation ... Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment." (I'd say Brooke was conspicuously silent.) Why Does Minimum Wage Have a New Supporter? (A related article)
A CBO report issued earlier this year says gradually raising the minimum wage to $10.10-per-hour: "Real income would increase, on net, by $5 billion for families whose income will be below the poverty threshold under current law, boosting their average family income by about 3 percent and moving about 900,000 people, on net, above the poverty threshold." (Only 900,000? Then maybe $10.10 isn't enough. Let's raise it to $15 — and index it to inflation — and then let's see what happens.)
* John Barrow (Georgia- 12th District)
* Jim Matheson- (Utah- 4th District)
* Mike McIntyre (North Carolina- 7th District)
* Bill Owens- (New York- 21st District)
* Colin Peterson- (Minnesota- 7th District)
* Kurt Schrader- (Oregon- 5th District)
I think this is probably the best thing Congress could do for workers immediately. I do not know the breakdown of the vote though. You need to check to see if it is all Republicans, I sincerely doubt it, plus there are assuredly some Democrats who won't raise it as well.
I can appreciate your pessimism on this matter. But the good news is that that history of American tariffs shows we can come back. We went through repeated cycles of high and low tariffs in 200 years. We came back from the Civil War which some argue was a war over tariffs. Coming back from our present mess is a piece of cake; we can recover fully in 5 years, with a gradual increase in tariffs (want to avoid shock therapy). Don't give up! :) Your site can become the catalyst. All it will take is one national reporter to break a story and grab national attention.
Clearly there is a need of government intervention. For instance the government could decrease tax rate s for these company and should revise tax laws to make it more strict. This always shows that the labour market in the US is decreasing due to cost of labour and thus these big companies go for the cheaper foreign workers. However, this is the case in many countries in the world were foreign labour is more sought after than local labour due to cost.
was so front loaded with special interests, they used foreigners for projects, bought supplies from abroad. Our taxes pouring to other nations and their workers, not ours.
Reshoring, producing more of what we consume, is a key element in solving our nation’s economic problems.
Reshoring is based on the logic of local sourcing and applies equally to all countries. However, if all countries were to adopt localization practices, the U.S. would benefit the most because we have offshored the most.
Companies are reshoring because they are finding that selecting locations near customers gives them better flexibility to respond to customers’ changing needs, eliminates higher shipping expense, minimize supply chain disruptions and eliminates the larger production runs and inventories associated with long distance offshoring.
These companies are investing and reshoring because it makes good economic sense to do so.
As many as 60% of companies made the decision to offshore based on miscalculations, never taking into consideration the total cost of ownership (TCO) including all of the hidden costs and risks of offshoring.
Current research shows many companies can reshore about 25% of what they have offshored and improve their profitability simply by using TCO (total cost) instead of price to make their decision.
25% is equal to 1 million manufacturing jobs! And, that number increases due to the manufacturing multiplier effect.
Mannufacturing has a larger multiplier effect than any other major economic activity – $1 spent in manufacturing generates $1.35-$1.58 in additional economic activity in other sectors.
And, this number actually even under estimates the true multiplier effect of manufacturing jobs. As factories become more advanced, Nosbusch and Bernaden wrote, "the multiplier increases significantly. In some advanced manufacturing sectors, such as electronic computer manufacturing, the multiplier effect can be as high as 16 to one, or 16x, meaning that every manufacturing job supports 15 other jobs."
In order to help companies decide objectively to reshore back to the U.S. or offshore, the not-for-profit Reshoring Initiative’s free Total Cost of Ownership Estimator can help corporations calculate the real P&L impact of reshoring or offshoring. http://www.reshorenow.org/TCO_Estimator.cfm
Here is the latest data on reshoring U.S. manufacturing from the Reshoring Initiative. http://www.ReshoreNow.org
Since 2003, new offshoring is DOWN by 70% to 80% and new reshoring is UP by 1500%.
The most important accomplishment has been the net-loss of 100,000+ manufacturing jobs each year has ended.
New reshoring is now balancing new offshoring at about 40,000 manufacturing jobs/year, resulting in the first neutral year of job loss/gain in the last 20.
Reshoring yielded:
- About 120,000+ manufacturing jobs
- 20% of manufacturing job growth since the Jan. 2010 low
- 240,000 total jobs including the manufacturing multiplier effect
I also recommend reading “ReMaking America” the AAM’s new book on the wealth and growth opportunities of manufacturing in the U.S. Harry Moser, founder of The Reshoring Initiative wrote an excellent chapter on Reshoring. http://www.americanmanufacturing.org/remake-america/
How true, as a strong middle class fades into history, the ones who remember are dying off. The young have no experience with a secure middle class economy and good jobs.
ultimately a corporation that doesn't put profits first fails it's employees you can't pay wages very long if your running in the red. Of course no one in the government can relate to that.
It's the government that's driving these companies off-shore by keeping corporate taxes high. Of course if any politician brings this up he is castigated as being a shill for the rich, but they get away with calling ruinous deficit spending "investing in America".
Unemployment is a big problem in any economy and according to the graph "official unemployment per opening August 2014" there are 2 unemployed people per job opening .This indicates a lack of jobs ,but can this lack of Jobs not be combated by government investment that wil raise a country's GDP wich indicates a growth of production of ,wich is associated with higher a employment rate in order to achieve this boost in production caused by government investment and if so can such a boost by government investment be sustained over a long period
Human nature is to be greedy, and the current focus on results (those that increase shareholder value) is exactly the problem. The author is correct.
Since the concentration on shareholder value above all other concerns began, the wealthy have been effectively crowdsourcing their riches on the increasing pool of labor, but not increasing pool of wages, of the poor and middle class worldwide. Taxes on the wealthy and corporations are not excessive, regardless of our position versus other industrialized countries, when the wealthiest individuals have more money than their great-great-great-grandchildren could ever spend and corporations are sitting on so much overseas cash that they can't find enough other companies to buy.
The right often loves to accuse the left of pushing too much altruism, when it is usually the right (but admittedly not everyone on the right) who like to paint themselves as having religion and "God" on their side. God was all about altruism, but according to the right God would be a conservative, obviously. In practically the next sentence they condemn the "lazy" who "only want handouts." Sure, there are plenty of people who would like nothing better than to sit and collect free money. But whether someone is lying when they say they are needy is between that person and God. Whether a person with extra resources gives when called upon is between them and God. It is not the responsibility or the right of the wealthy to determine need.
The mindset of almost all the US wealthy, and by extension the corporations whose shares they hold, comes down to one simple thing, a paraphrase of the title of a Clint Eastwood movie. How much money is enough? A few dollars more.
I think the US government should step in and help stop the tax evasion issue. They could do this by decreasing the tax rates, and improve the seriousness of the ramification of tax evasion. Therefore the lowered tax rates would give them incentive not to evade tax and the consequences would make them think twice before avoiding tax. If the US government can get wall street to stop avoiding tax, they would have more revenue to use to help create more jobs.
The US government could implement a program to subsidize the salaries of companies who employ US citizens or provide tax reduction to companies who employ more US citizens. Therefore making it worth while for companies to employ locals instead of cheaper foreign labour.
just looked at this report, after reading the WSJ hype about a 13 year high in openings, and how that's going to pressure wages ...job openings in restaurants, bars and hotels rose by 73,000 to 632,000; there were also 63,000 more openings in health care and social assistance and 40,000 additional openings in retail...
guess there must be a lot of competition for those barmaid and bellhop jobs..
I'm using FRED because that is what the original template is for this article. I have "predefined" calls into the old FRED that they broke, then removed some of the breakage.
But, unfortunately, they went to graphing which is more like a toy, so the only way I know to get correct to scale graphs is to make them yourself in LibreCalc or Excel or Matlab, Octave, etc.
At least you are aware enough to comment! I know this is a huge problem and am looking for a solution. There is some new on the flash graphing code, HTML5 results open source and I was going to run a test case. So far,there just isnt a fast way to create correct, fast loading, readable graphs that I'm aware of.
Good eye you have!
I've just recently realized that dual-axis FRED charts can be highly distorted by different scales. One dataset is stretched up to meet the height of the other, creating a false correlation. Is there any way to remedy that in FRED or do I need to use a different program/site? I guess I could avoid dual-axis charts and use index charts, etc. I would also like the ability to zoom out to show zero but FRED doesn't seem to have that capability.
When a nation's workers become obsolete, so will the nation itself become obsolete. For this reason, no super power rose up without protecting its manufacturers. Of course, economic reality is never allowed to get in the way of economic theory.
American Exceptionalism: 2 charts in the 2 links below shows that America isn't even close to being #1
The Big Mac index
http://www.economist.com/content/big-mac-index
Minimum Wage Statistics
http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Minimum_...
From the Guardian:
http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/sep/25/comparing-the-minim...
CNN: "[Democratic] Senator Tom Harkin and [Democratic] Representative George Miller have offered legislation to increase the national minimum wage to $10.10 [but] the Republican leadership of the House of Representatives won't even bring the minimum wage bill up for a vote. And this past spring, it was filibustered [by the GOP] in the Senate; a minority of [GOP] senators refused to even debate this proposal that a strong majority of the American people clearly support." (CNN left out a few party affiliations, so I filled them in for you.)
LA Times: The Democratic mayor of L.A. proposed a minimum wage of $13.25 an hour by 2017. But some City Council members are advocating a higher wage floor that would reach $15.25 by 2019.
New York Times: "26 states and the District of Columbia have, or soon will have, raised their minimum wage above the paltry federal minimum of $7.25 an hour. Even so, these more robust state minimums tend to cluster around $8 to $10 an hour, which is better than $7.25, but still lower than the $11 to $18 an hour that is needed to bring minimum wages in line with relevant benchmarks, including the cost of living, average wages and labor productivity. That is where cities have come in...In San Francisco, the push is for $15 an hour by 2018. In Oakland the goal is $12.25 an hour by 2015. In Los Angeles the City Council has called for $13.25 an hour by 2017 and for a study to chart a path to $15.25 by 2019. In Chicago, city aldermen have proposed $15 by 2016 for large employers, significantly higher than the $13 by 2018 championed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio recently issued an executive order to require businesses that receive substantial city subsidies to pay a “living wage” of at least $13.13 an hour if they don’t offer benefits, or $11.50 if they do.
Courier-Journal: To date 14 U.S. cities and counties have raised their minimum wage above their state's minimum, joining 25 states plus the District of Columbia that now have a higher minimum than the federal floor of $7.25 ... Minimum-wage increases are often met with claims about big job loss. But a growing body of research shows that reasonable minimum-wage increases have little to no negative effect on employment, including at the local level.
PolitiFact: Minimum-wage hikes may or may not cause faster job growth, but it appears they do not to hamper job creation either.
Bloomberg News: "Incoming NRF chief wants retailers to curtail opposition to minimum wage increases ... Wal-Mart, the world's largest retailer, has said it has a neutral stance on minimum-wage legislation ... Brooke Buchanan, a spokeswoman for Bentonville, Arkansas-based Wal-Mart, didn't immediately respond to a request for comment." (I'd say Brooke was conspicuously silent.) Why Does Minimum Wage Have a New Supporter? (A related article)
A CBO report issued earlier this year says gradually raising the minimum wage to $10.10-per-hour: "Real income would increase, on net, by $5 billion for families whose income will be below the poverty threshold under current law, boosting their average family income by about 3 percent and moving about 900,000 people, on net, above the poverty threshold." (Only 900,000? Then maybe $10.10 isn't enough. Let's raise it to $15 — and index it to inflation — and then let's see what happens.)
I did a post earlier on this:
* John Barrow (Georgia- 12th District)
* Jim Matheson- (Utah- 4th District)
* Mike McIntyre (North Carolina- 7th District)
* Bill Owens- (New York- 21st District)
* Colin Peterson- (Minnesota- 7th District)
* Kurt Schrader- (Oregon- 5th District)
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/03/19/1195318/-6-Democrats-Betray-30-...
I think this is probably the best thing Congress could do for workers immediately. I do not know the breakdown of the vote though. You need to check to see if it is all Republicans, I sincerely doubt it, plus there are assuredly some Democrats who won't raise it as well.
Robert
Perhaps of interest: http://www.manufacturingnews.com/news/chinawages0617131.html
Robert
I can appreciate your pessimism on this matter. But the good news is that that history of American tariffs shows we can come back. We went through repeated cycles of high and low tariffs in 200 years. We came back from the Civil War which some argue was a war over tariffs. Coming back from our present mess is a piece of cake; we can recover fully in 5 years, with a gradual increase in tariffs (want to avoid shock therapy). Don't give up! :) Your site can become the catalyst. All it will take is one national reporter to break a story and grab national attention.
Clearly there is a need of government intervention. For instance the government could decrease tax rate s for these company and should revise tax laws to make it more strict. This always shows that the labour market in the US is decreasing due to cost of labour and thus these big companies go for the cheaper foreign workers. However, this is the case in many countries in the world were foreign labour is more sought after than local labour due to cost.
was so front loaded with special interests, they used foreigners for projects, bought supplies from abroad. Our taxes pouring to other nations and their workers, not ours.
Reshoring, producing more of what we consume, is a key element in solving our nation’s economic problems.
Reshoring is based on the logic of local sourcing and applies equally to all countries. However, if all countries were to adopt localization practices, the U.S. would benefit the most because we have offshored the most.
Companies are reshoring because they are finding that selecting locations near customers gives them better flexibility to respond to customers’ changing needs, eliminates higher shipping expense, minimize supply chain disruptions and eliminates the larger production runs and inventories associated with long distance offshoring.
These companies are investing and reshoring because it makes good economic sense to do so.
As many as 60% of companies made the decision to offshore based on miscalculations, never taking into consideration the total cost of ownership (TCO) including all of the hidden costs and risks of offshoring.
Current research shows many companies can reshore about 25% of what they have offshored and improve their profitability simply by using TCO (total cost) instead of price to make their decision.
25% is equal to 1 million manufacturing jobs! And, that number increases due to the manufacturing multiplier effect.
Mannufacturing has a larger multiplier effect than any other major economic activity – $1 spent in manufacturing generates $1.35-$1.58 in additional economic activity in other sectors.
And, this number actually even under estimates the true multiplier effect of manufacturing jobs. As factories become more advanced, Nosbusch and Bernaden wrote, "the multiplier increases significantly. In some advanced manufacturing sectors, such as electronic computer manufacturing, the multiplier effect can be as high as 16 to one, or 16x, meaning that every manufacturing job supports 15 other jobs."
In order to help companies decide objectively to reshore back to the U.S. or offshore, the not-for-profit Reshoring Initiative’s free Total Cost of Ownership Estimator can help corporations calculate the real P&L impact of reshoring or offshoring. http://www.reshorenow.org/TCO_Estimator.cfm
Here is the latest data on reshoring U.S. manufacturing from the Reshoring Initiative. http://www.ReshoreNow.org
Since 2003, new offshoring is DOWN by 70% to 80% and new reshoring is UP by 1500%.
The most important accomplishment has been the net-loss of 100,000+ manufacturing jobs each year has ended.
New reshoring is now balancing new offshoring at about 40,000 manufacturing jobs/year, resulting in the first neutral year of job loss/gain in the last 20.
Reshoring yielded:
- About 120,000+ manufacturing jobs
- 20% of manufacturing job growth since the Jan. 2010 low
- 240,000 total jobs including the manufacturing multiplier effect
Our economic development program and workforce development programs can be found here. http://reshorenow.blogspot.com/2014/08/the-reshoring-initiatives-economi...
I also recommend reading “ReMaking America” the AAM’s new book on the wealth and growth opportunities of manufacturing in the U.S. Harry Moser, founder of The Reshoring Initiative wrote an excellent chapter on Reshoring. http://www.americanmanufacturing.org/remake-america/
How true, as a strong middle class fades into history, the ones who remember are dying off. The young have no experience with a secure middle class economy and good jobs.
ultimately a corporation that doesn't put profits first fails it's employees you can't pay wages very long if your running in the red. Of course no one in the government can relate to that.
It's the government that's driving these companies off-shore by keeping corporate taxes high. Of course if any politician brings this up he is castigated as being a shill for the rich, but they get away with calling ruinous deficit spending "investing in America".
Unemployment is a big problem in any economy and according to the graph "official unemployment per opening August 2014" there are 2 unemployed people per job opening .This indicates a lack of jobs ,but can this lack of Jobs not be combated by government investment that wil raise a country's GDP wich indicates a growth of production of ,wich is associated with higher a employment rate in order to achieve this boost in production caused by government investment and if so can such a boost by government investment be sustained over a long period
types of jobs was something I wanted to get to, over the last year or so, or six months.
Human nature is to be greedy, and the current focus on results (those that increase shareholder value) is exactly the problem. The author is correct.
Since the concentration on shareholder value above all other concerns began, the wealthy have been effectively crowdsourcing their riches on the increasing pool of labor, but not increasing pool of wages, of the poor and middle class worldwide. Taxes on the wealthy and corporations are not excessive, regardless of our position versus other industrialized countries, when the wealthiest individuals have more money than their great-great-great-grandchildren could ever spend and corporations are sitting on so much overseas cash that they can't find enough other companies to buy.
The right often loves to accuse the left of pushing too much altruism, when it is usually the right (but admittedly not everyone on the right) who like to paint themselves as having religion and "God" on their side. God was all about altruism, but according to the right God would be a conservative, obviously. In practically the next sentence they condemn the "lazy" who "only want handouts." Sure, there are plenty of people who would like nothing better than to sit and collect free money. But whether someone is lying when they say they are needy is between that person and God. Whether a person with extra resources gives when called upon is between them and God. It is not the responsibility or the right of the wealthy to determine need.
The mindset of almost all the US wealthy, and by extension the corporations whose shares they hold, comes down to one simple thing, a paraphrase of the title of a Clint Eastwood movie. How much money is enough? A few dollars more.
I think the US government should step in and help stop the tax evasion issue. They could do this by decreasing the tax rates, and improve the seriousness of the ramification of tax evasion. Therefore the lowered tax rates would give them incentive not to evade tax and the consequences would make them think twice before avoiding tax. If the US government can get wall street to stop avoiding tax, they would have more revenue to use to help create more jobs.
The US government could implement a program to subsidize the salaries of companies who employ US citizens or provide tax reduction to companies who employ more US citizens. Therefore making it worth while for companies to employ locals instead of cheaper foreign labour.
just looked at this report, after reading the WSJ hype about a 13 year high in openings, and how that's going to pressure wages ...job openings in restaurants, bars and hotels rose by 73,000 to 632,000; there were also 63,000 more openings in health care and social assistance and 40,000 additional openings in retail...
guess there must be a lot of competition for those barmaid and bellhop jobs..
I'm using FRED because that is what the original template is for this article. I have "predefined" calls into the old FRED that they broke, then removed some of the breakage.
But, unfortunately, they went to graphing which is more like a toy, so the only way I know to get correct to scale graphs is to make them yourself in LibreCalc or Excel or Matlab, Octave, etc.
At least you are aware enough to comment! I know this is a huge problem and am looking for a solution. There is some new on the flash graphing code, HTML5 results open source and I was going to run a test case. So far,there just isnt a fast way to create correct, fast loading, readable graphs that I'm aware of.
Good eye you have!
Bud, how are you measuring retirees and HS graduates?
I've just recently realized that dual-axis FRED charts can be highly distorted by different scales. One dataset is stretched up to meet the height of the other, creating a false correlation. Is there any way to remedy that in FRED or do I need to use a different program/site? I guess I could avoid dual-axis charts and use index charts, etc. I would also like the ability to zoom out to show zero but FRED doesn't seem to have that capability.
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