Big problems for US industry:

Healtcare costs
Legal/ liability costs
Unions to a lesser degree
Lack of capital investment
Overzelous EPA/OSHA regulations

I've managed several manufacuring facilities. The ability to find people willing to work on a daily basis is discouraging. Most of the unskilled labor has big time substance problems, lack of work ethic, or think someone "owes" them a paycheck. We have a whole class of people who are looking for a work related accident so they can get off on disability and watch Jerry Springer all day.

Tort reform needs to happen. Frivolous lawsuits are killing the US.

The social safety net is too broad. We need to take care of those who are unable to care for themselves. THe others need a swift kick in the a$$.

Lawyers are major campaign donators to the ___ party specifically.

What cracks me up is being able to be disabled under work contracts but not disabled enough to receive SSI.

They also wrote the best poetry:

Oh freddled gruntbuggly,
Thy micturations are to me
As plurdled gabbleblotchits
On a lurgid bee.
Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes
And hooptiously drangle me
with crinkly bindlewurdles,
Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts with myblurglecruncheon
See if I don't.

Re: Help Me Understand The Ecomonics - So How Is The China Mfg Going To Hurt Us?
 

Read Powershift by Alvin Toffler. Among other things, it deals with moving from an industrial age to an information age. Money can be made without reliance on manufacturing.

Of course none of it will matter once we reach the technological singularity and world operations are taken over by post-humans.


You mean the Vogons?

" Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

If you ask me shipping jobs to other countries has a limited life. The reason is that as countries expand their economies their standard of living goes up, and their wages get higher, and it becomes less attractive to send jobs offshore. Look at Mexico. They have lost more jobs to China in the last 5 years then they have gained from the U.S. The reason is Mexican wages have risen, Chinese quality has risen, and so Mexico can't compete on price/quality any more. It takes a long time, probably a couple generations or more, but wages in India and China are rising, and will eventually rise to the point where it is not attractive to send jobs there.

By then robots will build everything. Who do you think is going to be building those robot factories?

I, for one, welcome our new robot overlords!

You think we are dependant on oil now, just wait until the robots are in charge. A bunch of tin men looking for an oil can fix.

good.

Just point them south with programed oil field locations. I'm sure Thom can design a black market program that has them returning with delicious women.
Kinda like payback.

We may have moved from an industrial to information based economy, but we still need things. Cars, clothing, electronics etc. My concern is that our economy is not sustainable as we rachet further and further from producing the things we consume. We are a nation that spends all or more than we make relying on others to do the work. What is the logical conclusion to that? What are our kids going to inherit?

You didn't look at the WSJ editorial. We are a creditor nation, meaning they owe us more than we owe them or in other words we make more than we spend as a nation if you count properly. The point is that the so called trade defecit dosen't count all of our countries products that we sell. In other words its a bogus number.

Sounds like the old "GAAP" vs "Pro-Forma" dance. If we move the billions spent on Iraqnam to "good will" column...

Pardon me, but Iraq is no nam. It is the direct result of major screw ups by a series of Democrats. Starting with the biggest screw up Jimmy Carter and ending with the do nothing coke head Willie boy Clinton.

Several close friends died in nam, and the major reason for getting the heck out was we were not being allowed to win, again politics tops reality and american lives.

Iraq is truly supported by the people who are fighting for us there. This is the total opposite of nam, where everyone that came back from a tour was down and out against our being there, not because they didn't like war, but because we were being slaughered for political reasons. The lefties and the Democrats who have a BLIND hatred for Bush are willing to try and sacrifice our troups for political gain, nothing new, but they don't realize that there is a fundamental difference this time. This time the old nam vets are leading the way and letting us win, and win big. We would be out of there at this point but for the lefties and Democarats undermining our troups and president.

As to the defecit, don't bother to let the facts get in the way of your worthless opinion, its probably as solid as your iraqnam one is.

I guess if it is about products, I have to consider some companies like Merrill Lynch - Blackrock or Aetna - virtual products but profitable non the less.

I have introduced a product that has a huge gross margin and provides customers exceptional performance. It is virtual. It does not come in tubes, cans, pails, drums, totes or tankers but customers will spend spend spend for it and they get value and savings while helping improve their bottom line and keep there costs in line.

Products do not have to come in the form of metal or liquid or anything material per se.

Damn that kool-aide must be strong today!

• Clinton was a coke head?
• Iraq is somehow Carter's fault?
• the Iraq insurgency is the fault of the Democrats? (I'll bet the VC were an invention of the tie-dye'd bus-driving hippies, too)
• apart from expending billions in ordnance (defense contractors need that kind of churn) how were/are we 'winning big'? This whole escapade has pretty much gone downhill ever since "mission accomplished" photo op.
• despite my 'worthless opinion' you haven't provided any facts to back up your claim the US is a 'creditor' nation. Or are we adding "debt is credit" to Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth's list of slogans, Winston?

I did reference the WSJ which included a lot of references, But then you have to read real newspapers to know any real facts.The editorial page, the WS Journal, the 03-16-06 issue

Carter lost the middle east to terrorists when he lost Iran. There was no excuse for it. The precedent set there gave hope to all those terrorist that followed that they could do the same thing. So yes Carter is responsible for Iraq.

Insurance companies generally pay for negligence. So torts are not a significant source of company expenses. When comparedto taxes, and employee costs the cots of lawsuits rthat make people cry "tort reform" is minimal. Lawyers are easy scape goats to shift the blame.

I serously doubt the majority of people can define what is meant by "frivolous lawsuit." If a lawsuit is truely frivolous the penalties against those who initially brought the suit more than compensate the falsly accused party. You should be so lucky to be on the receiving end of a frivulous lawsuit.

Lawyers also comprise members of government and the heads of, or consultants to, big business. Very few make a move without a lawyer. Actually one of the only states that is not run by lawyers is LA and California. Those public servants either never went to law school or couldn't pass the Bar Exam. I guess that shows how non-lawyers do such a wonderful job. :D

Man..the number of conjectures stated as fact on this BB are astounding.

All WSJ articles

Motley Legal Crew
February 27, 2006; Page A14
Even as its asbestos and silicosis scams are unraveling, the trial bar is looking for its next industry to loot. It may have found it last week in a state court in Providence, Rhode Island, where a jury found three paint companies liable for creating a "public nuisance" by selling lead paint many decades ago. The mere presence of lead paint -- whether or not it was safely contained -- was deemed a danger to public health.
There are so many screwy aspects to this case that it's hard to know where to begin. The jurors heard no evidence about an injured party, nor were they informed of any specific house or building that constituted the "nuisance." As for the defendants, Judge Michael Silverstein instructed the jury that it wasn't necessary to find that Sherwin-Williams, NL Industries and Millennium Holdings had actually manufactured the paint present in Rhode Island or that they had even sold it there.
The bizarre tort theory in Rhode Island is terrible news for the paint business and the thousands of people it employs, and it has potential ramifications for other industries that make lawful products that years later turn out to have health or safety problems. It also demonstrates once again that "liability" in America has become completely untethered to either legal precedent or basic fairness.



Math Divides Critics As Startling Toll of Torts Is Added Up
By LIAM PLEVEN
March 13, 2006; Page A2
NEW YORK
-- It's easy to raise the blood pressure of an American chief executive. Just talk about rising tort costs and the burdens of asbestos exposure, medical malpractice, product defects and other lawsuits. The tort system is designed to compensate people who feel they've been wronged -- and rightfully so. But the extremes of litigation and the volume of lawsuits considered frivolous drive CEOs nuts.
The latest study puts the cost in 2004 at $260 billion, almost equal to the annual sales of Wal-Mart -- nearly $900 for every man, woman and small child in the nation. It projects that cost will rise to nearly $315 billion by 2007, outpacing the expansion of the overall economy.
Tillinghast's calculations get lots of attention in Washington, where the Bush administration has used the figures as a rallying cry to reform the nation's tort system, lamenting the "deadweight losses" to the economy. "The U.S. tort liability system is the most expensive in the world, more than double the average cost of other industrialized nations that have been studied," the Council of Economic Advisers said in a 2002 study of the subject that cited the Tillinghast research extensively.
The $260 billion for 2004 is almost twice the amount spent in 1990, according to the Tillinghast study. As a percentage of total economic output, tort costs, as defined by Tillinghast, actually fell during the economic boom of the 1990s, but have begun rising again, and could hit 2.27% of gross domestic product by 2007, the highest level since 1989, the study says.

Many economists who have looked at this subject find the numbers game somewhat frustrating, because it misses some bigger questions about how the tort system influences human behavior.
Ultimately, economics is the study of how people respond to incentives. So how should an economist calculate the cost to society of a medical student who chooses not to become an obstetrician because malpractice insurance in that field is getting more expensive? Or the loss to society when a company decides not to roll out a new product because its executives are afraid of potential liability claims if something goes wrong? Neither scenario figures in the Tillinghast calculations.
"A big part of the cost is a black hole," says Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who was director of the Congressional Budget Office in 2003 when it published its own look at the economics of tort liability.

More important, he says, are costs that may be "altering behavior in undesirable ways."

Nonetheless, Mr. Holtz-Eakin says: "It's an imperfect indication of something that's a big deal."