Vance Slams Globalization For Hampering American Innovation (thehill.com) 164
U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance denounced decades of globalization for hampering American innovation in a speech to entrepreneurs and venture capitalists on Tuesday, arguing that offshoring has eroded U.S. technological leadership. "Our workers have been failed by the government of the last 40 years," Vance told the American Dynamism Summit, criticizing two "conceits" of globalization: that nations manufacturing products wouldn't eventually design them too, and that cheap foreign labor benefits innovation.
"As they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends," Vance said, adding that "cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch" that inhibits technological advancement. The Trump administration recently rolled back Biden-era AI regulations, with Vance emphasizing their goal to "incentivize investment in our own borders, in our own businesses, our own workers and our own innovation." Vance, a former venture capitalist, dismissed fears about AI eliminating jobs, comparing it to ATMs which ultimately created more financial sector roles.
"As they got better at the low end of the value chain, they also started catching up on the higher end. We were squeezed from both ends," Vance said, adding that "cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch" that inhibits technological advancement. The Trump administration recently rolled back Biden-era AI regulations, with Vance emphasizing their goal to "incentivize investment in our own borders, in our own businesses, our own workers and our own innovation." Vance, a former venture capitalist, dismissed fears about AI eliminating jobs, comparing it to ATMs which ultimately created more financial sector roles.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
I was never more innovative than when I could buy Arduino Nano clones from AliExpress for $2.35 with free shipping.
What Vance wants is not more innovation in general: what he wants is the US maintaining a significant lead over everyone else.
The former is to the benefit of most; the latter is to the benefit of the US. If the slogan is "America First", no wonder what the policy is going to be.
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Saying "cheap labor is a crutch" won't stop businesses from seeking cheap labor. There will need to be a lot of focus on incentives, because without something to make expensive labor worthwhile, every business has an obvious and strong incentive to continue seeking cheap labor: more profits!
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We don't have to make US labor cheap in order to bring industry back. There is something else to make cheap. Taxes. US industry is severely damaged by individual income taxes that make labor more expensive, payroll taxes that also make labor more expensive, capital gains taxes that make investments in US companies more expensive and therefore less available, and so forth.
We could eliminate all the income taxes, every one from those mentioned above plus estate taxes, gift taxes, self employment taxes, a
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So....retailers collect the tax as part of sales?
What if I order stuff from another country online? Or from a catalog by mail like in the old days? Who pays the tax in that case and how is that enforced?
If payment is not enforced this will give a significant competitive advantage to foreign businesses who can sell their goods and services tax free (any time the tax would be more than shipping fees, I guess). That could have unintended economic side effects.
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It would be covered in import duties.
I am skeptical that a 23% inclusive tax (so a $13 item would be $10 to the seller and $3 to the taxman) wouldn't create a black market and be hard to enforce.
I'm also skeptical that it'd be as extremely progressive as advertised by the poster pushing it, at a glance it seems flatter than our current taxes (we already have a standard deduction that approaches the amount excluded in the proposal). Additionally savings rates tend to increase with income.
I question the logic
Re: Really? (Score:2)
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And even if there are local goods produced again thanks to tariffs, the price will never be significantly lower than the foreign good plus the tariff. It's inflation no matter how you cut it. And it enriches the rich and hurts everyone else. And actually deflation is just as damaging.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
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You seem to have forgotten to say what your proposed tax rate is, though it sounds like it is close to 30%.
Though the threshold has been pushed up from the $0 I have seen before, this is still highly regressive. The basic problem is that poor people spend a lot higher percentage of their wealth on purchases that are subject to this tax.
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It's 23% internal (if we compare it to income tax).
But I agree it's super regressive.
I currently pay 0% on my first $12k, this only bumps that up by $3k, but then has flat tax for all of my spending past that.
My upper bound on savings is lower that someone making twice as much as me too.
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We could eliminate all the income taxes, every one from those mentioned above plus estate taxes, gift taxes, self employment taxes, alternative minimum taxes - all of them by passing the FairTax and abolishing the income taxes.
I would not be so sure. Most of the taxes that the "FairTax" would replace are very much progressive, so they affect less the "cheap labor" you are talking about.
Take income taxes: they are definitely progressive and actually at the lower end you pay nothing or even might receive a subsidy in forms of Earned Income Tax Credit. Counter-intuitively, by abolishing income taxes, people in those situation would end up with less money.
The point is, a different system only means people pay in a different way, but
Re: Really? (Score:2)
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Make the thing locally and avoid tariffs! Its like reverse colonialism.
Sure... but then the government would have to fund the spending in some other way.
Again, every penny the government spends belongs to its people: if the government cannot obtain enough from the people via tariffs they would have to obtain the money from other sources, regardless of whether those sources are traditional "taxes" or some other construct that ultimately siphons money from the people.
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This sounds like hell, quite honestly. A sales tax that somehow doesn't apply if you haven't spent enough yet? I assume it also applies to buying things from foreign companies? So you're going to add a whole level of out-of-US sales tax stuff onto
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The Fairtax is basically a luxury tax, where "luxury" is defined as spending above your personal poverty line on NEW items for sale AT RETAIL, and services. It is different for those in different living situations. The poverty line is a smaller dollar value for a single person than it is for a family of 4. But once the single person exceeds $15,060 or the family of 4 exceeds $31,200 in spending, then they begin paying the FairTax.
What is your plan for enforcement? How do we get people to actually pay? Do we just trust them to pay the tax on their purchases when they are supposed to? Does the government track every transaction made by every person in the country in real time? Do we ask the retailer to collect it at time of purchase? How would the retailer know if you should pay tax or not?
The details matter -a lot.
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Correction: Vance "says" he wants (Score:2)
What Vance wants is not more innovation in general: what he wants is the US maintaining a significant lead over everyone else.
Correction: Vance "says" he wants. His actions speak otherwise. The only thing Vance wants is tax cuts for the wealthy and to stay in office. Neither he nor the GOP have any further principles. The Democrats are no angels, but they at least make an effort to hide their corruption. If Vance actually had "America First" principles, the administration's proposals would look a lot different and your assertion would be true.
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You can only maintain a lead you have. Yes, I understand that a dumb fuck like Vance thinks the US is ahead or close to it for most things.
Re: Really? (Score:2)
It's actually long been held by economists that propping up failing industries merely puts money in the pockets of shareholders who don't want to invest. See how the YS car industry fared against Japan after using tariffs to keep them out for a while. Japan just kept innovating while the US kept paying dividends, eventually leading to the loss of a large part of the US carmakers.
Cheap labour is a crutch for non-performing capitalists. This argument has also been made many times by trade unions. If you reall
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Well, the title does say "American innovation".
And I'm with Vance on it. We don't need to fund innovation in China, there's too great a chance it will be used to kill Americans. We don't need to fund innovation in Vietnam, that's their lookout.
If your take is that China is an hostile country, sure it would make sense to stop trading with them, but both ways. This is not what this administration wants though: this administration most definitely wants more US products to be exported to China.
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The issue I have with them is the severe lack of coordination to bring manufacturing back.
1. Tariff the crap out of everyone
2. Prices go up on all imports
3.?
4.??
5. US Manufacturing replaces the foreign goods that we were tariffing
6. Profit!
We dont have any plan in the *years* in between where we get $Bs in capital to build and buy the equipment to manufacture, then train US workers, then find a way to underpay them in order to make products for only a lot more than they did overseas, instead of double.
That
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Can't you still? I just ordered ten 8x8 ARGB arrays for $1.22 each. Gonna build a ESP32-based signboard (I already have all the other parts, I think. Might still need the power supply. Still not sure if I'm going with one big supply or a bunch of little ones, the latter of which I definitely have.)
Relative (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with this argument is that first it assumes that Americans can't innovate as well as those of us elsewhere, which is something I see no evidence for so it seems strange that a political leader in the US would think it. Second it assumes that erecting trade barriers will somehow make it easier for people in the US to innovate while making it harder for the rest of us to which is also stupid. All trade barriers do is make it harder for us to access US technology while simultaneously making it harder for those in the US to access our technology.
The history of North America itself shows why isolating yourself from the rest of the planet is a bad idea for innovation. The reason the North American civilization was so technologically behind Euro-Asian civilization at the time of Columbus was because of the far smaller North American population that was cut-off from knowing all the innovations that were shared across Asia and Europe. Basically the rate of innovation is strongly correlated with the number of people: the more people you have thinking about problems the faster your science and technology develops. Cutting yourself off from the innovations that the 95% of humanity who live outside the US will develop and share amongst themselves is a really stupid idea but one that will hurt the US far more than the rest of the world.
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I think the problem that your VP sees is that we can all do that too, including those of us outside the US and that means we can all compete with your innovation by coming up with innovations of our own.
There is no issue with that. The concern is we have created conditions where it is cheaper to offshore entire industries that to maintain them here. For example, we may enact environmental and worker protection regulations that increase costs, and in response the industries offshore the manufacturing to countries that don't have similar regulations. The administration isn't advocating eliminating environmental and worker protection regulations, they are advocating for equalizing the costs through tariffs
Re:Relative (Score:5, Insightful)
The administration isn't advocating eliminating environmental and worker protection regulations, they are advocating for equalizing the costs through tariffs to incentivize manufacturers to move back onshore.
That might make sense for the tariffs issued against countries that do provide cheap labor through those lesser standards, but definitely not for the tariffs issued against Canada, the EU and arguably even Mexico. I would not be surprised if even Mexico has better environmental and worker protection regulations than the US.
Re:Relative (Score:5, Insightful)
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advocating for equalizing the costs through tariffs to incentivize manufacturers to move back onshore.
This is a good goal to have but tariffs are just an awful tool to accomplish this. They're being used way too broadly so the price pressure on American's is felt throughout, even on goods that American's have no desire to perform labor doing and we are pretty labor strapped as it is, there are far more productive jobs Americans can and should be doing. Nobody want's to work at a textile mill anymore in the US, comparative advantage is a real thing.
You now in the effort to protect and expand US businesses a
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The administration isn't advocating eliminating environmental and worker protection regulations
LOL
https://www.foxbusiness.com/vi... [foxbusiness.com]
https://time.com/7213433/what-... [time.com]
This administration is very much against anything that makes running a business more expensive, other than the tariffs on their imported goods or raw materials, because we all know someone else will pay for that. So.. you know.. when that doesn't work out, where the fuck do you think they're going to try making up the difference?
Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:4, Informative)
In-N-Out burger pays people $23 an hour and their prices are competitive. Same for McDonalds in Denmark. Workers start at $22 hourly and get paid vacations and sick time. Big Mac prices are on parity with the USA. https://www.yahoo.com/news/fac... [yahoo.com]
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The thing about "competitive", is anything is competitive, as long as everyone else raises their prices with you.
Re:Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:4, Informative)
There's a book about In-N-Out called, appropriately enough, "In and Out Burger", by Stacy Perman.
" In fast-food corporate America, In-N-Out Burger stands apart. Begun in a tiny shack in the shadow of World War II, this family-owned chain has steadfastly refused to franchise or be sold. It is a testament to old-fashioned values and reminiscent of a simpler time when people, loyalty, and a freshly made, juicy hamburger meant something..."
Re:Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:4, Interesting)
Our local In-N-Out pays $25/hour and they still have a line around the block, and that line moves quickly.
All fast food chains in California must pay at least $20/hour, and their prices are barely over those in other states.
Most people have not a single solitary clue about how fast food works, or how much more volume they have than a normal restaurant, despite it being obvious and the information being freely available. It's especially pathetic on a site like this...
Re:Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:5, Interesting)
What is the obsession people have with paying burger flippers more? They are already going past the affordability range of their target customer base.
That's not because of wages, it's because of profits. Due to volume and efficient design, labor is a very small portion of the cost of producing fast food. They literally design fast food "restaurants" around efficiency concepts like reducing the number of steps a worker has to take. I worked in one of the first new "central grill" Wendy's stores as a teenager. I was the fry guy and I did almost all of the walking, because that person did most of the fetching tasks so that nobody else had to, because they have time. They have the bare minimum staff in order to operate the facility. You queue up some fries on the rack under the warmer, then you go fetch the meat and load it into the cooler, or you go get some fries and put them on the slacking rack, or you go get a can of chili base and open it...
Most fast food restaurants raised their prices during the peak of the Covid-19 PHE by twice as much as their costs increased or more. Most of them tried to maintain them after that and found that customers were opting out of their artificially high prices, so they have since either reduced prices across the board or created limited lower-cost menus of things they know they can sling quickly and cheaply.
TL;DR: If you think increasing burger flippers' wages to a living wage (why are you obsessed with them getting paid less than they can live on?) will significantly increase fast food prices, you know nothing about fast food pricing.
Re:Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:4, Informative)
Due to volume and efficient design, labor is a very small portion of the cost of producing fast food.
This is not true. I worked fast food in college. Made it up to assistant manager before graduating.
Labor is 25-30% of the bottom line. I know, because I had to do the month-end paperwork where I submitted that information to corporate.
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I worked fast food in college. Made it up to assistant manager before graduating.
... and it's all been going downhill since then!
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I sure as fuck felt a lot healthier then.
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I sure as fuck felt a lot healthier then.
I'm right there with ya...
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Labor is 25-30% of the bottom line.
These days you're supposed to be shooting for more like 20%. 30% is a poor performer, a location which will be closed.
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The 3 largest factors for us were labor, food cost, and rent.
A month was made or broken based on food and labor waste.
Fast Food restaurants are not high margin businesses.
Re: Cheap Labour is Fundamentally a Crutch (Score:2)
Yeah, but look at the impact of doubling wages on the price of a burger and you will quickly see that they raised prices MUCH more than this already.
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But prices have about exactly doubled since I worked in the industry.
I know that if salaries have doubled, then people employed have halved.
And I'm not arguing that that is a bad thing. I support living wage legislation.
But it's silly to deny the math of it all.
If a Fast Food restaurant can't afford to pay its people enough to live, and stay in business, then it should go out of business.
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"If salaries have doubled, and prices were unaffected, then people employed have halved."
You must not have worked for a major franchise. (Score:3)
Due to volume and efficient design, labor is a very small portion of the cost of producing fast food.
This is not true. I worked fast food in college. Made it up to assistant manager before graduating. Labor is 25-30% of the bottom line. I know, because I had to do the month-end paperwork where I submitted that information to corporate.
For the major chains, they automate as much as possible. They were even doing that 30 years ago when I worked fast food. They understaff, do illegal things, like have managers clock you out at a set time, yet tell you to finish some task before you go...labor is a huge expense, but the biggest franchises have things quite automated, so instead of hiring 20 people to work a shift, it's typically 4-8 for a large location. They rely on apps, deliver services, and kiosks to eliminate people working the count
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For the major chains, they automate as much as possible. They were even doing that 30 years ago when I worked fast food. They understaff, do illegal things, like have managers clock you out at a set time, yet tell you to finish some task before you go...labor is a huge expense, but the biggest franchises have things quite automated, so instead of hiring 20 people to work a shift, it's typically 4-8 for a large location. They rely on apps, deliver services, and kiosks to eliminate people working the counter.
1 employee is now making 2-3x as much as they used to at these locations.
There were never 20 people in a shift in my lifetime.
And yes- automation has very much helped them survive the fact that their labor cost as doubled or tripled.
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20 years ago my local McDonalds had 20+ teenagers on staff at all times. Now they have 4 overworked adults and 8 kiosks. Working fast food wasn't supposed to be a career.
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How are teenagers supposed to handle the lunch time rush on a weekday?
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Which has little to do with the salaries of the employees. That is the company and its franchisees raising prices for higher profits.
These comments [reddit.com] from three years ago are a good example that higher wages do not have to necessitate higher prices.
Eh what? (Score:5, Interesting)
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And American customers voted for it by flocking to the cheapest products (i.e. Walmart). They drove air travel down by chasing the cheapest flights and ignoring things like baggage and human sized seats.
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Like customers even have a real choice? You either pay for cheap crap, or expensive crap. There is no easy way to tell if is good, I try buying quality products, but all I get is expensive repair bills when I try to fix them.
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In my experience it started the other way round. Well established brands suddenly moved their manufacturing offshore, and tried to maintain their established high prices despite the fact, that the transition period provided products with extreme quality deficits. BTDT, changed brands in frustration multiple times. Established brands destroyed their brand reputation by chasing the cheapest manufacturers and tried to keep profits to themselves, after all "they earn the reward for being so smart and offshore t
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40 years he claims? (Score:2)
Why would Ronald Reagan let such a thing happen?
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Why would Ronald Reagan let such a thing happen?
Are we not supposed to notice that almost all our worst issues today started with the Reagan administration? Or is it just Republican office holders who are supposed to ignore that?
Re:40 years he claims? (Score:4)
Why would Ronald Reagan let such a thing happen?
Are we not supposed to notice that almost all our worst issues today started with the Reagan administration? Or is it just Republican office holders who are supposed to ignore that?
And for decades thereafter Republican politicians pushed for cheap overseas labor to help their corporate donors increase profits, and whenever Democrats objected to try to keep American factory workers employed, they were called "protectionist" as if protecting American jobs was a bad thing. Now the Republicans want to take credit for the notion of bringing back the jobs that they eliminated.
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Now the Republicans want to take credit for the notion of bringing back the jobs that they eliminated.
^This!^
I feel like I'm living in bizzaro world with Trump running the Republican party. So much of what the Republican party used to stand for (some of which I even respected) has been thrown out the window. Complete abandonment of international commitments is another example of this!
So what's the solution? (Score:5, Interesting)
Great! A possible problem has been identified.
So how do you fix it? Arguably quality of life for most Americans is higher when we can have very, very advanced technology very, very cheaply. People want cell phones but they would not be able to afford them if they cost $5000 apiece.
If you want to hold something close to your chest, you hold R&D close, and you take care about what technologies/processes you offshore, knowing full well that where you go to for your cheap labor and environmental degradation from mining and manufacturing will steal your processes. You continue long-term development at home, and keep that work close to the chest.
But that flies in the face of the corporate quarterly earnings cycle. Running a Xerox PARC or a Bell Labs or a Watson Research Center is expensive and does not directly produce any profits. You have to convince your fickle shareholders that yes, this place costing hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars every year really is what makes the company profitable, even though it produces no widgets to sell.
Vance may as well be talking to a brick wall because his audience is the group that made this problem in the first place.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
What Vance and the admin won't say since they don't want anyone to know is that the real answer for this issues (which are real, as you said) is actually more globalization. The way you sort out these is with further trade negotiations, primary example is the Trump-killed Trans-Pacific-Partnership would have enforced certain conditions, labor practices, unions and many other measures to make American labor more competitive while. Was it perfect? No. Are international agreements difficult to enforce? Abso
Innovation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Innovation (Score:5, Insightful)
No kidding. And the open invitations coming from elsewhere to US scientists unemployed by DOGE will likely be answered in many cases, and all that basic research going on elsewhere as the US stagnates will just be part of the decline.
A country of the morons, for the morons and by the morons.
Re:[Fake] Innovation [in FinTech] (Score:2)
Even though I embellished the Subject, I think you deserve Funny moderation and FP status for that one.
Solution approaches? Sorry, but we're in "You can't get there from here" territory now.
On the positive side, that so-called VP is just a mindless puppet, so who cares what he's been told to spew? Funded by fake-value FinTech, to boot.
And the YOB is a lousy puppet. Too unreliable because the strings are so twisted up no puppeteer can be sure what the YOB will do next. Can't even make a GAIvatar for that one
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By not using PPPP's (Pooty's Pity Party Puppet) brand name, you're taking a page out of the KGB playbook for taking down a public figure. Think of all the names the Man with Cheeto Skin calls his enemies. The Kremlin does the same, and amplifies those silly names with bot farms all day until nobody can take "Sleepy Joe" seriously anymore.
I'm thinking it HAS to work both ways. But it may not because the bot farms and Trusk account on X and Faux Neus are not hammering in the silly names of Truskies 24/7.
Even
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You are aware those mice were "transgenic", not "transgender", right? And also aware that they were used for cancer research, right?
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This is in fact this the the US innovation that should be highlighted and promoted. Transgenic gene based DNA is something that changed everything about how research in plants and animals is done. And yes it was funded by NIH and the Government entities that they want to stop funding.
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Did you at least read the summary of this article? The mice were never considered transgender, in fact they were never even asked but given hormones to study their likely effect on humans. It's the humans, which are transgender here, and the term "transgender mice" to describe this research is highly misleading and most likely willfully chosen to be that.
You may be for or against animal experiments, you may or may not accept gender dysphoria in humans, but at least try to stick to the facts when reporting a
Lets take a page from China then... (Score:5, Insightful)
Want to know how to fix this? Have the government fund R&D projects, even if it is stuff of little or no value presently (like Gorilla Glass was, back when it was invented), and go from there. Maybe even see about government/company ventures structured similar to Chinese companies where they are not focused on Wall Street values, even if means the company implodes.
Look how China is doing with SMIC and CPU fabs. Imitate that. Get enough talent, and stuff can get done. Maybe even start considering something like the WPA or CCC, civilian corps that are intended to do almost any task, be it build a road, engineer a critical network, or stuff along those lines.
The talent is there. It takes decision making from the top other than "just let the invisible hand do everything."
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Maybe even see about government/company ventures structured similar to Chinese companies where they are not focused on Wall Street values, even if means the company implodes.
I wanna see the amount of smoke that would be blowing out of executive / board member ears if you dared to say anything about not focusing on Wall Street values around them. Seriously, how do you get decision makers to buy into this idea when we've essentially made Wall Street the new church? Whatever fantasy Wall Street buys into is what happens, whether it's ultimately good or not. They are steering the ship, and it doesn't matter if the iceberg is dead ahead, if they're convince de the iceberg itself may
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We are almost at the iceberg. Once the jobs fall long enough that people start defaulting on student loan debt, things will start getting really painful, beyond the real estate crash, because student loan debt is guaranteed by the government (well, most of it). So, banks will just charge it off.
Not sure how long the emperor can continue to have no clothes, but the gravy train by tech companies is over, so it will either be dealing with an economic implosion or setting policies that are not under the scrut
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I want to see these studies.
Did you just come up with gibberish that left-wingers supposedly say or have you seen real papers in real journals?
For every "bad" study you find I will find a study that right-siders do that is bad as well.
And in any case, what R&D would you want to invest in?
The most anti-science administration in history (Score:5, Insightful)
A few other causes (Score:5, Informative)
Robbing schools of funding, education curriculum that focus on religion over science, a practical shift to MBAs and Lawyers despite claiming to promote STEM would all be higher on my list.
And if I am being thorough, helicopter parenting, persistent failures for children in single parent households, child poverty, and homelessness also share some blame.
He's right (Score:3, Interesting)
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> these other countries don't accept 'highly skilled' immigrants like the US does
Japan is very strict about immigration and they are very protectionistic, you will find that it is very hard to even rent an apartment there if you are a foreigner. And they are not performing so well. It is said that in the 80's, Japan was living in the year 2000, and it is still in the year 2000. So why doesn't the strict immigration policy work in Japan? Because immigration is not causing the problem.
Re: He's right (Score:2)
I could agree with you, but then we would both be wrong.
The affirmation that other countries don't accept high skilled immigrants and keep tight control over it is patently false.
Tribalism (Score:3)
Tribalism is not good for humanity. At some point there is quest for resources, not to mention every culture needs an enemy or pariah group to blame all its problems on. Tribalism is sub-optimal even from an evolutionary standpoint because the "stronger" tribes inevitably fight and eliminate the "weaker" tribes. You might think that's "good" evolutionarily .. but it isn't. Because "stronger" is situationally dependent. As in, if the sub-species battle requires brute force, rather than nerd-intelligence .. brute force will win out. But then, what if later the species encounters a situation that requires a genetic stock of intelligence? We'd be fucked at that point.
We have to stop having hate for other human beings, we have to stop grouping all individuals in an entire race based on a the behavioral characteristics of a subset of them,. And we need to figure out how to live with each other. Given modern transportation it's inevitable that we will mix. It might be just a .1% annual mix rate (the actual interracial mix rate is a lot higher than that btw) but in 150 years that means most people will have at least a trace admixture. it's the same as how most of Europe is now mixed whereas not too long ago the tribes were clearly defined and didnt want to mix.
Nationalism killed 40 million Europeans in 5 years (1940 to 1945) .. (incidentally that's more than 200x the total amount of white Europeans killed by blacks in all of history .. calculate it yourself .. yet the European thinks their demise will be from Africans). That's where tribalism leads you. After WW2 we decided that white-on-white tribalism was bad. What war is needed before we decide that all forms of tribalism is bad?
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Tribalism is good for humanity and if it wasn't optimal for evolution then we would not have evolved with it.
But like most things too much of it can become bad. It is good to look after yourself and your family and your group first if you don't they will loose to a group that does. However taken to the extreme it causes conflict wars and inefficiencies, the trick is to find the right balance that works.
Offshoring (Score:3)
Hey, JD Vance, you know what the number one cause of offshoring is? Capitalism.
Darn those free markets! (Score:2)
Ok, so he'd rather you not hire Apu. That much of a free market is too far to the right for Vance. But what about super-cheap labor, like you get from hiring Bender instead? Is that also too far to the right, or is it more moderate? I honestly have no fucking idea where today's "modern" Republicans (which seem extremely different from the Republicans 20 or more years ago) stand on that. (One of you wanna tell me?)
From my point of view, the cheaper you can get labor (or
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Oh, he gets to it lower down in TFA. Apparently he doesn't hate Bender, i.e. automation. He only hates humans. Ok, well, that's something. His values are only half stupid, not totally stupid.
Stop crying and look in the mirror (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing more pathetic than losers crying about losing. People are not going to build shit in the USA just because you want them to. Protectionism (e.g. Tariffs) sure as heck are not going to make industry more competitive. If you want a local industrial base then you are going to have to provide a compelling incentive for people to care.
One of the few industries where quite a bit of manufacturing remains local Trump and Vance through petulance and narcissistic idiocy are in the process of actively sabotaging our DIB forcing the western world to seek alternatives to US based military platforms after the US cut off aid and actively sabotaged platforms in the field to an ally in need during an active conflict. Siding with the enemy and hurling insane threats against allies is not a winning strategy.
As Musk is in the process of finding out you can't shit all over your customer base and expect anyone to still buy your shit. If the US wants manufacturing then it is going to have to invest and we are going to have to reverse course on our path to being a bunch of hated clowns because otherwise nobody is going to buy what is manufactured.
We can't for example have the US being the only country in the world objecting to hope and peace.
https://digitallibrary.un.org/... [un.org]
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is, the Chinese government are subsidising the hell out of all the chinese companies that export to the US. This is an intentional long term strategy to deplete the US industrial base. Consequently, Chinese products have artificially low pricing in the US, often below what it costs to make and ship them. without their government's subsidy the Chinese manufacturers would be making a loss on every unit shipped, so it's absolutely not a level playing field.
Tariffs are about the only real way to try
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The problem is, the Chinese government are subsidising the hell out of all the chinese companies that export to the US. This is an intentional long term strategy to deplete the US industrial base. Consequently, Chinese products have artificially low pricing in the US, often below what it costs to make and ship them. without their government's subsidy the Chinese manufacturers would be making a loss on every unit shipped, so it's absolutely not a level playing field.
The US subsidizes the hell out of AG and energy industries. Is there something that prevents the US from doing the same in other industries?
Tariffs are about the only real way to try and level it out. I agree that tarriffs cause a short-medium term economic impact on consumers, but in the long run it will help the US regain local production.
Tariffs are a crutch that makes industry less competitive and limits the reach of your industry as it is unable to compete globally.
Keeping going down this same road of selling out all US production to China is not only a plain crazy short-term strategy but would be the end of the US ever being able to control its own destiny or ever recover and support itself.
Apparently the Chinese are the only ones who can subsidize industry and manipulate currency.
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Not only that. You can't pick and choose to look at what only benefits you. If you remove energy from the Canada - US trade numbers you hit almost balanced trade. Nothing is stopping the US from meeting it's own energy needs. So if they wanted to balance the trade between the 2 they would also increase tarrifs on energy. This is not about trade or globalization.
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Sad as it is, that nicely sums up a rather part of the problem.
As an European, I am in favour of getting rid of the dependency on US software and military hardware. I just did not expect the US to make itself so extremely unatractive as a supplier and this fast on top of that. Seems to me the "business savvy" president is the one so far that has the least actual understanding on how to do and expecially keep business.
Is this the same guy (Score:2)
This is what they wanted (Score:2)
Hey asshat, this is what your capitalist corporations wanted.
It's the red tape and self-inserted regulations. (Score:2)
Our country is collapsing under it's own over-administration, even schools now hire administrators to administrate the administrators.
Computers were sold as a way to administer everything with fewer people and less cost. Whe
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Then people wouldn't have a problem putting coal fired plants near golf courses or country clubs.
Our country has too many damn desk jobs and not enough laborers that actually contribute to getting shit done.
Without those desk jobs, laborers wouldn't get anything done. They wouldn't know which project they should work on, wouldn't get the equipment they need to do a job, wouldn't get paid, wouldn't have medica
American innovation comes from the Universities (Score:3)
What Vance is really doing here is trying to sell his national sales tax, AKA the tariffs, to the American people.
The Republican party's majority in the House of Representatives is too slim to get the tax cuts they want through. Approximately a trillion dollars a year between the corporate tax cuts and the ones for the 0.1%.
So they're trying to shift that tax burden onto you. The tariffs are how they're doing that because they can do that directly and immediately. They're also going around starting to talk about how great a locally applied national sales tax would be. IE one that's in addition to the tariffs.
What we're seeing here is smash and grab politics. Basically they're going to take everything they can get their hands on while they can get it. Just remember it's your glass and your home that's getting smashed and your stuff that's getting grabbed.
Corporations Offshoring is Their Decision, not Gvt (Score:2)
Corporations Offshoring is Their Decision, not the Government's decision. If you want to spur innovation at home, you need to fund education and research, and maybe hold off on bringing in so many H1B visas to apply downward pressure on wages. Vance has it all wrong, just like pretty much all of his other public opinions. What a greasy slimy dirtbag.
Great! (Score:2)
We can expect to see the abuse of H1B to stop in 3...2...1... Oh wait, he only means to stop the little guy. Big companies are perfectly okay to globalize when it helps them.
Shareholders did pretty well (Score:2)
Dumb fuck says dumb things... (Score:2)
Well, the US is done for anyways, economically. Might linger a few decades in the 2nd world, but a crash is inevitable after what is currently going on.
Incidentally, have a look where all those people that are innovative in the US come from. Here is a hint: Almost none of them is from the US. Hell, not even Elonia is from the US. Roll back globalization, and that goes away.
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In other words, the goal is make you pay more while not paying you more.
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What Vance is saying here is that we cannot compete on merit in the same free market that Republicans are always telling us will solve all of our problems.
The other thing he's telling us is that the minimum wage is too low. "cheap labor is fundamentally a crutch" in a country where the minimum wage is not a living wage is a scum-sucking thing to say.
Of course, he didn't mean to tell us either of those things, but he's a spectacular idiot so he couldn't help it. What will he tell us next that we already know, that Trump is named more than anyone else in the Epstein files? That Trump is America's Hitler? No wait, he already told us that, before he decided to become America's Goering.
"Cheap labor is essentially a crutch. Don't worry about AI taking jobs. We'll address that issue forty years after we create the problem, just like we're addressing the cheap labor thing forty years later by saying it's a crutch, but not actually doing anything to discourage industry from seeking cheap labor by offshoring. In forty years, AI will be a crutch, because it'll be cheaper than humans, but right now, it's an 'investment in the future.' Trust me, I'm from the government. When I'm not fucking couch
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What Vance is saying here is that we cannot compete on merit in the same free market that Republicans are always telling us will solve all of our problems.
Nobody wants a free, competitive market when they are on the top.
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What Vance is saying here is that we cannot compete on merit in the same free market that Republicans are always telling us will solve all of our problems.
Not that I'm a huge fan of Vance, but I think that's a very intentional mischaracterization of the argument.
There was, I think, a broad sense among economic minds when globalism was conceived that differences in standards of living would be a transient phenomena. The thought was that at some point relatively rapidly a poor population benefitting from trading with a more developed nation would begin advocating for the same thing their western counterparts had: less hours worked, more environmental protection