And yet another litany of assertions backed up with zero evidence.

Really not getting it are you?    By moving shoe production to China Nike creates more higher-paying jobs for Americans than they could if they made them here.    These are jobs that are less physically damaging and mentally deadening than shoe assembly.   They also raise the std of living by providing goods which cost less.    $50 which is not spent on shoes is avail. to use for some other purpose.

The way to reduce the use of illegal aliens in agriculture or the service industry is to raise minimum wages and increase enforcement of tax laws (withholding for SS &c) and labor laws until the incentive to hire them goes away.

yrs,
rubato

Scooter says don't worry; don't try to do anything; everything is just fine:

Social Security to start cashing Uncle Sam's IOUs

If that were true, unemployment would not be rising.  And of course there are jobs that are mindlessly boring.  There will be for the foreseeable future, because for the foreseeable future, fruit will need picking, and dishes will need washing, and ditches will need digging, and lumber will need hauling ....

But even low-end, tedious jobs are still jobs.  And they beat all hell out of having no money.  (I know; I've had such jobs.)

By moving shoe production to China, Nike is not, on the net, creating more jobs for Americans.  By moving shoe production to China, Nike creates jobs for people in China and wealth for people who own Nike.

Do you really think that transferring vast numbers of jobs to Mexico has created more jobs for Americans in America?  That's utter hogwash.  Transferring vast numbers of jobs to Mexico and India and China and all over the fucking place has been an important factor in creating more bread lines in America -- food-supplying charities are often running out of food before they run out of people who need it -- not more jobs.


Well, raising the minimum wage is not going to do much good if employers are already not paying the minimum wage we already have.  Nor do illegal aliens have any particularly strong incentive to see that minimum-wage laws are enforced.  Sure, their wages would go up.  Oh, wait; they wouldn't have the jobs at all, because if the jobs paid decent wages, Americans would take them.


And I'm not buying it (ha ha).  Why did Henry Ford pay his workers more than he had to -- that is, higher wages than the labor market required?  Because he quite sensibly realized that his company would be better off if his workers could actually afford to buy his products.  Now we import zillions of tons of Chinese-made crap which (besides killing our children) gets sold at WalMart super-cheap.  The result?  Even many of WalMart's own employees can't afford to buy the stuff.

What matter are not nominal price increases.  What matters is the ratio of prices to wages.  If my grocery, etc., bills go up by fifty percent while my wages double, I'm better off than I was before.  And I can afford to buy more things.  And that's what pays the wages of those who make those things.


True.  Things that do not exist are unlikely to disappear.  The economic "laws" that govern US trade policy are those set up by the rich so that they gan get even richer at the expense of ordinary people.

And still more than you are capable of learning.  Go figure.

Let's be real though, oldr, jobs stitching shoes and sewing garments are not and never have been "middle class" jobs, they are and always have been subsistence jobs, which is why, when such jobs did exist in large numbers on shore, they were filled primarily by women and children working to supplement their families' meagre incomes, and not by able bodied men who had four or five mouths to feed.

There is a reason why China is using tax policy to discourage growth in those sorts of jobs, it might behoove us to think about why.

And which is why, now that the regular labor market will not tolerate such wages, companies avoid paying decent wages by hiring illegal aliens and/or shipping jobs overseas.  Which is exactly what we should stop.


And they're obviously doing a bang-up job of it ....