Quote from agpilot:
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Hello eusdaiki:
I think you might be hiding behind books rather then having to experiance first hand sending our jobs out of this country so fast. Tarrifs can be used in various ways... You assume a fixed tarrifi for a long time? A tarrifi could be for a variable amount on money for a set number of years with a set reduction each year.
Look at it this way. You go to a cafe to eat your main meal. You prefer to use maybe 15 minutes. How about having your time reduced by 14 minutes and all food forced down your throat in just one minute... because someone else wants your "job" of eating... You don't like being rushed out of your chosen "job" of using 15 minutes to eat... Tough luck, go back to school to learn how to retrain your self to eat your main meal in just one minute flat... Fast eaters would help profits at McDonalds? Yes yes, we can't even consider "slowing down this very fast rate of change in our work force" because it might hurt possible profits??
Yep.. everything must be done RIGHT NOW including helping the whole world.. even if we have to stomp hard on our own people.. Glad I am fairly well off and retired rather then depending on you for anything. I'd only need a half second to tell you how fast I could help you learn how to eat faster in a public cafe so others could have your table... I wouldn't want you holding down profits at any public cafe... Profits ya know are first... not people.
agpilot.
Ps. You do make valid points but I think you forgot the human side of doing is so fast...
I haven't forgotten the human side. Im just looking at things from the other side of the fence. Each US citizen that gets fired feeds several Chinnesse citizens.
With the model of tariffs you propose you obtain the same result, delaying the problem. You're not dealing with the problem itself.
Tarifs might aliviate things in the short term, like taking an aspiring to control an internal infection... it might make you feel better inmediatly, but the solution to the problem becomes more painfull with everyday that goes by.
Lets say you're running your own bussiness. A coffee shop. Your income regardless of how many people you employ is $60 an hour. You have to pay $10 an hour to all your workers, so you do your microeconomic analisis and determine that the optimun number of people you can hire is 5 employees. You are giving wages of $50 total per hour with a profit of $10 an hour. One day the unions tell you that your salaries must go up to $12 an hour. Now your costs jumped from $50 to $60 an hour eliminating your profit and you have to fire 1 employees to keep only 4. reducing the wages you pay to $48 in wages and being short handed one employee, but your profit went up to $12 an hour.
On the other side of the fence, Jhon got fired from his job at the cofee shop. Since this change came from the unions then all the coffee shops suffered a similar effect, and you have hundreths of unemployed coffee shop operators looking to work. Jhon is willing to work for $10 an hour or even less [anything beats $0] but no one can hire him, since they can't pay him what he's willing to earn. So as Friedman stated many years ago, unions benefit a few people while creating unemployment for most people.
According to Friedman's theories. One solution to the outsourcing problem might be getting rid of all unions and letting the labor market float freely. You wont get as good a wage as if you where with the union, but you'll have a job. Plus... if everyone's wages go down, you'll have deflation instead of inflation making everything cheaper, and making the US a less attractive customer to the outside world and solving the trade deficit. So when you lose your job, dont blame the Chinnesse or the Southamericans, blame the unions.
