“We just want the wealthy to pay their fair share.”
And how much is that, exactly? The honest answer: “As much as we, the taxers, can get away with.” Even the Beatles grasped that at a fairly early stage of their success. Actually, I guess it was hard to miss this point because:
Written by the group’s lead guitarist, George Harrison, with some lyrical assistance from John Lennon, it [Taxman] protests against the higher level of progressive tax imposed in the United Kingdom by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, which saw the Beatles paying a 95% supertax. — Wiki
The top rate on investment income in Britain in 1976 was 98%.
==
We had a dear co-worker / friend who had a fine autosignature: “Good judgment is caused by experience, which is caused by bad judgment”. The British experience in political economy (1945-79) was a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. Britain since 1997 has been providing that world another cautionary tale.
Tax rates in the 80% and 90% range played a part in the Nero Wolfe series, often affecting Wolfe’s motivation to take a case or the motivation of his clients. It feels like a foreign country to me, who grew up when top rates were 35% to 40%.
so did anyone in England, pay that effective rate, or did they find dodges around them, note almost all of that generation, except possibly Daltrey and Johny Lydon, who lives in America, are labor,
Very sad to converse with young Brits who have been indoctrinated to think that Thatcher was an evil witch. Totally clueless about the source of the wealth and mobility they now enjoy.
It really is important who controls the cultural narrative. Conservatives of the Reagan Thatcher era thought sense had prevailed and they could return to private life – but Lefties are relentless, inherently political critters who will (re)infest the system.
This is difficult for some small government Dont Tread On Me conservatives to understand… it is foreign to their own lives and ambitions. They cannot imagine clever intelligent people who actually embrace machine politics and get off on controlling others.
But political power draws just these creatures.
So constant vigilance and involvement by conservatives in politics is necessary. It is not optional. The system will not leave you alone.
Ben David:
You are so right–they can’t stop themselves! And, now, they have a winning strategy for every state, every condition, every possible issue — they have been practicing for a long time. If you look carefully, you can see a “local” event in some far-off state become something similar 2,000 miles away and 10 years later! They can’t stop. That is why “we the people” have to be organized at every school and every university to begin to turn that ship around. We already have three generations of people who have been indoctrinated! A good place to start is with some friends, maybe 10 or so. Go sit in the audience of your local courthouse during a trial that will affect your community. When they know they own the judges in your town–they are free to do whatever comes next in the communist playbook. We are fools if we wait for an organized local Republican party to get anything done!
Bought something off eBay from a seller who is literally 12 miles away by kayak or 42 miles by road. My package is well traveled. Pity it doesn’t get mileage.
Port Angeles WA on the 10th
Troutdale OR on the 11th
Portland OR on the 13th
Tacoma WA on the 14th
Troutdale OR on the 15th
Trump, Musk, Gabbard and all the other enemies of the left will be persecuted if the donkeys ever get control of fed government again. They must not only be prevented, the fed courts have got to be pried out of their grubby paws.
Fine post Ben David. Bravo.
You see the Reform Party, is more like Old fashioned Tory, then the current crop, Badenoch is a rare exception, across the bay you have the Sinn Fein,
Palmerston, would be screaming in the Ether, which is ironic because he was responsible for at least one of the Opium wars,
one recent techno thriller of less elite roots, had a page long screed by some security official about anti vaxxers and misinformation, as if they knew what that was about, of course China almost never is the villain in these things,
the BBC through netflix is insinuating the real threat is an army of tow headed tykes not the lads from certain countries that will not be named,
Re: Taxman trivia
That blaring TAXMAN! refrain was a callout to the Batman TV show on at the time.
_____________________________
so did anyone in England, pay that effective rate, or did they find dodges around them…
miguel cervantes:
Well, the Rolling Stones created their “Exile on Main Street” masterpiece, while roughing it in France.
A more accurate title would have been “Tax Exile in the South of France,” but that somehow lacks the gritty urban underdog je ne sais quoi.
doesn’t really have the same bite, I know in the 40s and 50s, the effective rate was nearly as high, (and then people wonder why the stock markets were somnolent till the 60s,) but there was an industry of tax shelters, with the flagship being Tommy Corcorans shop, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NREekmnl9wU
what I was referring to, one might consider this a fairy tale, but with real world consequences, instead of the spies of 1984, you have parents turning their own kids in for radicalization, while the likes of the stockport slasher, well they get three bites at the apple,
Orwell might not have imagined this, but perhaps Anthony Burgess would have i his sovietized Britain, (that film is very hard to watch, the censorship board should have been stronger)
of course by the 80s, the likes of Python, had sneered away at every British institution of note, the Church the Army, much of the professions that were not barristers
the Middle England voter, the City had become more powerful and consequently more contemptuous, this coincided with the influx of new immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, which one is not allowed to question, because colonialism or racism or what not,
some of thatchers policies like the ones targeted at the Coal Miners probably were not helpful but Blair somehow made it worse,
some of thatchers policies like the ones targeted at the Coal Miners probably were not helpful but Blair somehow made it worse,
==
She refused to cave in to a union whose internal governance mode made it the personal property of one Arthur Scargill. IIRC, Shirley Williams remark at the time was you really could not allow an industrial action to destroy an elected government. The eventual response was implemented during the Blair ministries: Britain’s state collieries were sold off to private investors. Coal production is not a natural monopoly and it does not have a philanthropic component, so this was proper.
==
Britain was importing too many people in 1997. The response of the Blair-Brown ministries was to expand immigration to build an electoral base. The Conservative ministries did flat nothing to reverse this policy, because Conservative pols in Britain do not give a rip about ordinary Brits any more than Labour pols do.
Ah, Bob Dole’s favorite Beatles’ song. And he didn’t even like the Beatles. Very appropriate, Neo.
Y’all might want to check out the “Laverne And Shirley” episode where Eric Idle and Peter Noon (of Herman’s Hermits) play two British Invasion mod rockers who decide to marry American girls so the two moptops can “save a bundle on taxes”. The only 2 American girls who are readily available are Laverne and Shirley (who happen to be high on marijuana brownies). Hilarity ensues.
Also, the place where you can watch Peter Noon explain British tax structure to Eric Idle by taking apart an American hamburger. I don’t know if George Harrison ever watched this episode, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
My apologies if this post might be offensive to some readers:
Recently, the TV show- Saturday Night Live, decided to make a comedy skit about- Trump comparing [his tariffs battles with other nations], with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Whether you think it is appropriate to: make fun of Religions, + those religions’- Gods, Goddesses, + those religions’ other religious figures, regardless- this joke isn’t even funny.
Comedy needs to be funny. That’s its purpose.
I mean- if you want to do jokes, or “edgy jokes”, [they need to at least be funny].
Being edgy isn’t enough.
Doing edgy jokes isn’t enough.
Really, it looks like- the SNL show was [something people enjoyed for its first twenty years], like [a tired comedian in a Las Vegas show], but the only people who watch- the Las Vegas comedian anymore or SNL anymore, are the people who watch them now, are watching them for the nostalgia factor, + not for the humor factor.
Your first, twenty years were good, but they are over, Saturday Night Live.
It’s not 1995 anymore, Saturday Night Live, and you’re just not funny anymore.
I keep hearing people talking about the wonderfulness of **service industry** jobs…most recently, Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux in the WSJ. I wonder exactly what they visualize when they use the term “service industries.”
Discussion a few days ago about ‘cobblers’, and what some people believe is the ridiculousness of the idea of making shoes in the US. Take a look at this video from the Swiss company On and their new production process, Lightspray:
Accommodation and Food Services
Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
Health Care and Social Assistance
Educational Services
Administrative and Waste Services
Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
Real Estate and Rental and Leasing
Finance and Insurance
Information
Transportation and Warehousing
Utilities
I clicked through to your blog: everything you say about the service sector applies just as well to manufacturing. A lot of people in the service sector are janitors, and so would be a lot of people in manufacturing. As you say there, many of the actual roles are almost identical. An accountant or a CFO of a manufacturing firm is not going to have a very different job from one in an insurance company despite the classification of the sector.
Here’s the thing that you and I, I suspect, agree on, though maybe you won’t say it the way I do. The point of the manufacturing industry, or the service industry, is not to multiply “jobs”. It is to produce abundance. Abundance of stuff, and abundance of services. Because abundance makes us richer. “Jobs” do not make us richer.
I do not understand why so many people are fetishizing the manufacturing sector and its “lost jobs”, and not (for example) agriculture and its “lost jobs”. Or the “lost jobs” of the cobblers, for that matter. I think people have a lot of mistaken impressions about what the past was really like. Before WWII the peak share of manufacturing jobs was about 31%. Very shortly after WWII the peak share of manufacturing employment was only about 33% and it has declined ever since. This is not a new phenomenon.
No one born after WWII has experienced a sustained period of expanding share of manufacturing jobs, as a glance at the data makes perfectly obvious. There is no obvious change in the slope of that curve until 2010: and then it gets BETTER, because the decline is SLOWER. Nobody making a case for protective tariffs has, to my knowledge, admitted these two long and sustained trends of decline for just about 80 years now. Children born at the peak share of manufacturing employment have grown old and died while this decline was going on.
As to your point about poor education putting people in dead-end service jobs, I fail to see why poor education wouldn’t also put people in dead-end manufacturing jobs. I’m sure you would not try to claim there are fewer dead-end jobs in manufacturing then in services…
NC…my point is that there are plenty of low-paid jobs in the service sector, as there are in manufacturing, that’s why it’s silly for Gramm and Boudreaux to make a blanket assertion implying that service jobs are better.
@David Foster:that’s why it’s silly for Gramm and Boudreaux to make a blanket assertion implying that service jobs are better.
And equally silly to make a blanket assertion that manufacturing jobs are better, or would be better if it weren’t for foreigners underselling us. I’m not saying you have, but certainly there are people commenting here who seem to believe such an assertion.
TR– SNL stopped being funny long before 1995, but I may have more to draw on as I move into the adventure of my 9th decade. Regardless, your analogy of the “tired comedian” in Las Vegas is close, but I would say SNL is well past LV and into the Indian Casino circuit. Even the “old” episodes that NBC airs as lead-ins to the actual show on Saturday evenings fail the “funny” test. Its time for that dinosaur to just cash in and lay down to become oil for future generations.
Niketas and David, great discussion about mfg and service jobs and wealth creation.
We are dealing with a very complex, interconnected system of economic transactions; limited, or not quite that limited, availability of initial or starting materials; along with declines in selected education and skills, if not actually a reduction in raw talent when properly incentivized.
A system works well because it interconnects many participants, or subsystems, but it is fragile because that interconnectedness may have many points of disruption and potential for failure. Ideally the system design includes the ability to cut out a given subsystem and continue with the rest of the systemic operations at 80+ % capability. Of course the internet was intended to be robust against selected line to node failures by rerouting connections around failed areas. But it is dealing with a single or simple transport/transfer content of information packets, fitting within a limited and structured hierarchy of communication functions [and many here know more about the details of that than I do].
But our transactional networks deal with a wide variety of objects and services with substantial interdependency between/ among them, aka Smith’s “hidden hand”. Add in the necessity and wisdom of protecting against supply chain failures impacting national security, including medical and pandemic responses, etc., and the global trade among unequal and mercantilist nations becomes less attractive. In particular if the working population did not, or felt they could not, move to getter job locations, gain new education or skills, etc., to match the presumed new opportunities such foreign trade made possible and perhaps even required, and we end up with our current populist discontent. A lot of that discontent originates because the national and business “leadership” did not in fact provide leadership, or even mere guidance and encouragement. [And leftist political power plays just added to that leadership gap and arrogance, etc.]
But what I do not seem to be seeing or hearing from anyone is just how we are going to make our current interconnectedness and interdependency less so, up to a point of valid protection*, but retain as much of the benefits of both global and national specialization and trade otherwise. I am encouraged by comments from Vance, Thiel, and others about innovation and productivity, etc., but then the MSM ignores what that really means in terms of what people have to learn to give up and to work to obtain in new skills, outlooks, etc. As our hostess has emphasized, change is hard. Too few are saying such change has always been necessary and has always been hard, but often easier in hindsight than foresight.
Any thoughts in that direction are welcome.
*Another scary topic I listened to last night was the mention of both solar and enemy nuclear weapon created EMP attacks that would decimate our electronically controlled world and all of the dependencies for food, medicine, transport, etc. that involves. I don’t know exactly how we protect against that situation, but it seems buying and storing a few thousand transformers in suitably protected locations, and other lesser level protections for controlling and providing grid power, plus vehicular and other electronics would be a good cost/trade off, even just for a naturally occurring EMP potential, let alone a warfare situation.
I do not understand why so many people are fetishizing the manufacturing sector and its “lost jobs”, and not (for example) agriculture and its “lost jobs”.” – Niketas C.
Pretty simple. Agricultural jobs were lost as farms became bigger and more mechanized. But that’s not what happened after China gained permanent MFN status and a place in the WTO.
Companies moved their manufacturing to China for cheap labor and lower regulatory costs. From 2000 to 2010, manufacturing employment dropped significantly from 17.3 million to about 11.5 million—a loss of 5.8 million jobs. This is a much steeper decline than the prior decade, averaging roughly 580,000 jobs lost per year, compared to roughly 40,000 jobs lost per year the previous decade.
“The point of the manufacturing industry, or the service industry, is not to multiply “jobs”. It is to produce abundance. Abundance of stuff, and abundance of services. Because abundance makes us richer. “Jobs” do not make us richer.”– Niketas C.
No, the point of reshoring industries is to create a bigger tax base. We need to do that quickly as the trend of increasing government debt doesn’t work in our favor. That’s one of many goals,
I don’t think philosophical considerations like abundance or wealth pay the bills– you need a paycheck for that (which requires a job). Abundance in a downturn is a millstone around a manufacturer’s neck. I worked in a manufacturing environment which used lean techniques. The average delivery of a machine from an order was about a year.
A newly hired executive from the sales side decided we could take more market share if we upped production on one line. Lots of overtime and we soon had a plant full of these machines– just before the Great Recession hit. It took several years to sell down the excess inventory at tremendous expense.
I know that’s not what you meant by abundance, but we are in an age of efficiency and excess anything is a drain on the balance sheet.
We need all kinds of jobs– service oriented for the thinkers and hands-on oriented for the doers. It seems from the conversations that some don’t think increasing manufacturing jobs would have a benefit to the economy or worth the effort.
” In particular if the working population did not, or felt they could not, move to getter job locations, gain new education or skills, etc., to match the presumed new opportunities such foreign trade made possible and perhaps even required, and we end up with our current populist discontent.” – R2L
You’re plant has just closed and you’ve lost you’re job.
For some time you receive unemployment benefits and possibly special re-training benefits. But that occurs right where you live. Where you’ve possibly lived for generations. It takes a lot of determination/courage to pack up and move.
In the meantime your plant has closed and slowly support businesses close. Retail businesses close and the downtown starts to look like the abandoned streets of a dystopian movie.
But the big drag is your home. It’s your largest asset and possibly you’re only one. With all the lost jobs, home values decline. You’re asset become a liability.
Your house is repossessed. You can’t afford to move. You’re on welfare, and chained to a life that offers no hope of a better future.
I think that had something to do with the malaise in the midwestern rust belt.
Leave a Reply
HTML tags allowed in your
comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Timeless…
“We just want the wealthy to pay their fair share.”
And how much is that, exactly? The honest answer: “As much as we, the taxers, can get away with.” Even the Beatles grasped that at a fairly early stage of their success. Actually, I guess it was hard to miss this point because:
Written by the group’s lead guitarist, George Harrison, with some lyrical assistance from John Lennon, it [Taxman] protests against the higher level of progressive tax imposed in the United Kingdom by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, which saw the Beatles paying a 95% supertax. — Wiki
The top rate on investment income in Britain in 1976 was 98%.
==
We had a dear co-worker / friend who had a fine autosignature: “Good judgment is caused by experience, which is caused by bad judgment”. The British experience in political economy (1945-79) was a cautionary tale for the rest of the world. Britain since 1997 has been providing that world another cautionary tale.
Tax rates in the 80% and 90% range played a part in the Nero Wolfe series, often affecting Wolfe’s motivation to take a case or the motivation of his clients. It feels like a foreign country to me, who grew up when top rates were 35% to 40%.
so did anyone in England, pay that effective rate, or did they find dodges around them, note almost all of that generation, except possibly Daltrey and Johny Lydon, who lives in America, are labor,
Very sad to converse with young Brits who have been indoctrinated to think that Thatcher was an evil witch. Totally clueless about the source of the wealth and mobility they now enjoy.
It really is important who controls the cultural narrative. Conservatives of the Reagan Thatcher era thought sense had prevailed and they could return to private life – but Lefties are relentless, inherently political critters who will (re)infest the system.
This is difficult for some small government Dont Tread On Me conservatives to understand… it is foreign to their own lives and ambitions. They cannot imagine clever intelligent people who actually embrace machine politics and get off on controlling others.
But political power draws just these creatures.
So constant vigilance and involvement by conservatives in politics is necessary. It is not optional. The system will not leave you alone.
Ben David:
You are so right–they can’t stop themselves! And, now, they have a winning strategy for every state, every condition, every possible issue — they have been practicing for a long time. If you look carefully, you can see a “local” event in some far-off state become something similar 2,000 miles away and 10 years later! They can’t stop. That is why “we the people” have to be organized at every school and every university to begin to turn that ship around. We already have three generations of people who have been indoctrinated! A good place to start is with some friends, maybe 10 or so. Go sit in the audience of your local courthouse during a trial that will affect your community. When they know they own the judges in your town–they are free to do whatever comes next in the communist playbook. We are fools if we wait for an organized local Republican party to get anything done!
Bought something off eBay from a seller who is literally 12 miles away by kayak or 42 miles by road. My package is well traveled. Pity it doesn’t get mileage.
Port Angeles WA on the 10th
Troutdale OR on the 11th
Portland OR on the 13th
Tacoma WA on the 14th
Troutdale OR on the 15th
Trump, Musk, Gabbard and all the other enemies of the left will be persecuted if the donkeys ever get control of fed government again. They must not only be prevented, the fed courts have got to be pried out of their grubby paws.
Fine post Ben David. Bravo.
You see the Reform Party, is more like Old fashioned Tory, then the current crop, Badenoch is a rare exception, across the bay you have the Sinn Fein,
https://www.steynonline.com/15216/when-haters-cant-hear
having groveled to the Dragon
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/economy/race-to-keep-british-steel-furnaces-running-with-last-minute-efforts-to-secure-raw-materials-under-way/ar-AA1CQRfQ?ocid=BingNewsVerp
Palmerston, would be screaming in the Ether, which is ironic because he was responsible for at least one of the Opium wars,
one recent techno thriller of less elite roots, had a page long screed by some security official about anti vaxxers and misinformation, as if they knew what that was about, of course China almost never is the villain in these things,
the BBC through netflix is insinuating the real threat is an army of tow headed tykes not the lads from certain countries that will not be named,
Re: Taxman trivia
That blaring TAXMAN! refrain was a callout to the Batman TV show on at the time.
_____________________________
BATMAN!
–“Old Batman TV Show Theme Song”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qP-NglUeZU
so did anyone in England, pay that effective rate, or did they find dodges around them…
miguel cervantes:
Well, the Rolling Stones created their “Exile on Main Street” masterpiece, while roughing it in France.
A more accurate title would have been “Tax Exile in the South of France,” but that somehow lacks the gritty urban underdog je ne sais quoi.
doesn’t really have the same bite, I know in the 40s and 50s, the effective rate was nearly as high, (and then people wonder why the stock markets were somnolent till the 60s,) but there was an industry of tax shelters, with the flagship being Tommy Corcorans shop,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NREekmnl9wU
what I was referring to, one might consider this a fairy tale, but with real world consequences, instead of the spies of 1984, you have parents turning their own kids in for radicalization, while the likes of the stockport slasher, well they get three bites at the apple,
Orwell might not have imagined this, but perhaps Anthony Burgess would have i his sovietized Britain, (that film is very hard to watch, the censorship board should have been stronger)
of course by the 80s, the likes of Python, had sneered away at every British institution of note, the Church the Army, much of the professions that were not barristers
the Middle England voter, the City had become more powerful and consequently more contemptuous, this coincided with the influx of new immigration from the Middle East and North Africa, which one is not allowed to question, because colonialism or racism or what not,
some of thatchers policies like the ones targeted at the Coal Miners probably were not helpful but Blair somehow made it worse,
some of thatchers policies like the ones targeted at the Coal Miners probably were not helpful but Blair somehow made it worse,
==
She refused to cave in to a union whose internal governance mode made it the personal property of one Arthur Scargill. IIRC, Shirley Williams remark at the time was you really could not allow an industrial action to destroy an elected government. The eventual response was implemented during the Blair ministries: Britain’s state collieries were sold off to private investors. Coal production is not a natural monopoly and it does not have a philanthropic component, so this was proper.
==
Britain was importing too many people in 1997. The response of the Blair-Brown ministries was to expand immigration to build an electoral base. The Conservative ministries did flat nothing to reverse this policy, because Conservative pols in Britain do not give a rip about ordinary Brits any more than Labour pols do.
Ah, Bob Dole’s favorite Beatles’ song. And he didn’t even like the Beatles. Very appropriate, Neo.
Y’all might want to check out the “Laverne And Shirley” episode where Eric Idle and Peter Noon (of Herman’s Hermits) play two British Invasion mod rockers who decide to marry American girls so the two moptops can “save a bundle on taxes”. The only 2 American girls who are readily available are Laverne and Shirley (who happen to be high on marijuana brownies). Hilarity ensues.
Also, the place where you can watch Peter Noon explain British tax structure to Eric Idle by taking apart an American hamburger. I don’t know if George Harrison ever watched this episode, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he did.
My apologies if this post might be offensive to some readers:
Recently, the TV show- Saturday Night Live, decided to make a comedy skit about- Trump comparing [his tariffs battles with other nations], with the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
Here’s a link to that news story:
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/articles/snl-trump-gives-easter-message-040405431.html
Whether you think it is appropriate to: make fun of Religions, + those religions’- Gods, Goddesses, + those religions’ other religious figures, regardless- this joke isn’t even funny.
Comedy needs to be funny. That’s its purpose.
I mean- if you want to do jokes, or “edgy jokes”, [they need to at least be funny].
Being edgy isn’t enough.
Doing edgy jokes isn’t enough.
Really, it looks like- the SNL show was [something people enjoyed for its first twenty years], like [a tired comedian in a Las Vegas show], but the only people who watch- the Las Vegas comedian anymore or SNL anymore, are the people who watch them now, are watching them for the nostalgia factor, + not for the humor factor.
Your first, twenty years were good, but they are over, Saturday Night Live.
It’s not 1995 anymore, Saturday Night Live, and you’re just not funny anymore.
I keep hearing people talking about the wonderfulness of **service industry** jobs…most recently, Phil Gramm and Don Boudreaux in the WSJ. I wonder exactly what they visualize when they use the term “service industries.”
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73750.html
“Fair and Balanced” wins AGAIN! Top 12 Cable TV shows are on Fox News (Rachel Maddow is 13th) – RePost
https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/04/fair-and-balanced-wins-again-top-12.html
Discussion a few days ago about ‘cobblers’, and what some people believe is the ridiculousness of the idea of making shoes in the US. Take a look at this video from the Swiss company On and their new production process, Lightspray:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkOFlJhZUmc
(I have a small investment position in this company)
@David Foster: I wonder exactly what they visualize when they use the term “service industries.”
Probably this. For people who don’t click links:
I clicked through to your blog: everything you say about the service sector applies just as well to manufacturing. A lot of people in the service sector are janitors, and so would be a lot of people in manufacturing. As you say there, many of the actual roles are almost identical. An accountant or a CFO of a manufacturing firm is not going to have a very different job from one in an insurance company despite the classification of the sector.
Here’s the thing that you and I, I suspect, agree on, though maybe you won’t say it the way I do. The point of the manufacturing industry, or the service industry, is not to multiply “jobs”. It is to produce abundance. Abundance of stuff, and abundance of services. Because abundance makes us richer. “Jobs” do not make us richer.
I do not understand why so many people are fetishizing the manufacturing sector and its “lost jobs”, and not (for example) agriculture and its “lost jobs”. Or the “lost jobs” of the cobblers, for that matter. I think people have a lot of mistaken impressions about what the past was really like. Before WWII the peak share of manufacturing jobs was about 31%. Very shortly after WWII the peak share of manufacturing employment was only about 33% and it has declined ever since. This is not a new phenomenon.
No one born after WWII has experienced a sustained period of expanding share of manufacturing jobs, as a glance at the data makes perfectly obvious. There is no obvious change in the slope of that curve until 2010: and then it gets BETTER, because the decline is SLOWER. Nobody making a case for protective tariffs has, to my knowledge, admitted these two long and sustained trends of decline for just about 80 years now. Children born at the peak share of manufacturing employment have grown old and died while this decline was going on.
As to your point about poor education putting people in dead-end service jobs, I fail to see why poor education wouldn’t also put people in dead-end manufacturing jobs. I’m sure you would not try to claim there are fewer dead-end jobs in manufacturing then in services…
NC…my point is that there are plenty of low-paid jobs in the service sector, as there are in manufacturing, that’s why it’s silly for Gramm and Boudreaux to make a blanket assertion implying that service jobs are better.
@David Foster:that’s why it’s silly for Gramm and Boudreaux to make a blanket assertion implying that service jobs are better.
And equally silly to make a blanket assertion that manufacturing jobs are better, or would be better if it weren’t for foreigners underselling us. I’m not saying you have, but certainly there are people commenting here who seem to believe such an assertion.
TR– SNL stopped being funny long before 1995, but I may have more to draw on as I move into the adventure of my 9th decade. Regardless, your analogy of the “tired comedian” in Las Vegas is close, but I would say SNL is well past LV and into the Indian Casino circuit. Even the “old” episodes that NBC airs as lead-ins to the actual show on Saturday evenings fail the “funny” test. Its time for that dinosaur to just cash in and lay down to become oil for future generations.
Niketas and David, great discussion about mfg and service jobs and wealth creation.
We are dealing with a very complex, interconnected system of economic transactions; limited, or not quite that limited, availability of initial or starting materials; along with declines in selected education and skills, if not actually a reduction in raw talent when properly incentivized.
A system works well because it interconnects many participants, or subsystems, but it is fragile because that interconnectedness may have many points of disruption and potential for failure. Ideally the system design includes the ability to cut out a given subsystem and continue with the rest of the systemic operations at 80+ % capability. Of course the internet was intended to be robust against selected line to node failures by rerouting connections around failed areas. But it is dealing with a single or simple transport/transfer content of information packets, fitting within a limited and structured hierarchy of communication functions [and many here know more about the details of that than I do].
But our transactional networks deal with a wide variety of objects and services with substantial interdependency between/ among them, aka Smith’s “hidden hand”. Add in the necessity and wisdom of protecting against supply chain failures impacting national security, including medical and pandemic responses, etc., and the global trade among unequal and mercantilist nations becomes less attractive. In particular if the working population did not, or felt they could not, move to getter job locations, gain new education or skills, etc., to match the presumed new opportunities such foreign trade made possible and perhaps even required, and we end up with our current populist discontent. A lot of that discontent originates because the national and business “leadership” did not in fact provide leadership, or even mere guidance and encouragement. [And leftist political power plays just added to that leadership gap and arrogance, etc.]
But what I do not seem to be seeing or hearing from anyone is just how we are going to make our current interconnectedness and interdependency less so, up to a point of valid protection*, but retain as much of the benefits of both global and national specialization and trade otherwise. I am encouraged by comments from Vance, Thiel, and others about innovation and productivity, etc., but then the MSM ignores what that really means in terms of what people have to learn to give up and to work to obtain in new skills, outlooks, etc. As our hostess has emphasized, change is hard. Too few are saying such change has always been necessary and has always been hard, but often easier in hindsight than foresight.
Any thoughts in that direction are welcome.
*Another scary topic I listened to last night was the mention of both solar and enemy nuclear weapon created EMP attacks that would decimate our electronically controlled world and all of the dependencies for food, medicine, transport, etc. that involves. I don’t know exactly how we protect against that situation, but it seems buying and storing a few thousand transformers in suitably protected locations, and other lesser level protections for controlling and providing grid power, plus vehicular and other electronics would be a good cost/trade off, even just for a naturally occurring EMP potential, let alone a warfare situation.
I do not understand why so many people are fetishizing the manufacturing sector and its “lost jobs”, and not (for example) agriculture and its “lost jobs”.” – Niketas C.
Pretty simple. Agricultural jobs were lost as farms became bigger and more mechanized. But that’s not what happened after China gained permanent MFN status and a place in the WTO.
Companies moved their manufacturing to China for cheap labor and lower regulatory costs. From 2000 to 2010, manufacturing employment dropped significantly from 17.3 million to about 11.5 million—a loss of 5.8 million jobs. This is a much steeper decline than the prior decade, averaging roughly 580,000 jobs lost per year, compared to roughly 40,000 jobs lost per year the previous decade.
“The point of the manufacturing industry, or the service industry, is not to multiply “jobs”. It is to produce abundance. Abundance of stuff, and abundance of services. Because abundance makes us richer. “Jobs” do not make us richer.”– Niketas C.
No, the point of reshoring industries is to create a bigger tax base. We need to do that quickly as the trend of increasing government debt doesn’t work in our favor. That’s one of many goals,
I don’t think philosophical considerations like abundance or wealth pay the bills– you need a paycheck for that (which requires a job). Abundance in a downturn is a millstone around a manufacturer’s neck. I worked in a manufacturing environment which used lean techniques. The average delivery of a machine from an order was about a year.
A newly hired executive from the sales side decided we could take more market share if we upped production on one line. Lots of overtime and we soon had a plant full of these machines– just before the Great Recession hit. It took several years to sell down the excess inventory at tremendous expense.
I know that’s not what you meant by abundance, but we are in an age of efficiency and excess anything is a drain on the balance sheet.
We need all kinds of jobs– service oriented for the thinkers and hands-on oriented for the doers. It seems from the conversations that some don’t think increasing manufacturing jobs would have a benefit to the economy or worth the effort.
” In particular if the working population did not, or felt they could not, move to getter job locations, gain new education or skills, etc., to match the presumed new opportunities such foreign trade made possible and perhaps even required, and we end up with our current populist discontent.” – R2L
You’re plant has just closed and you’ve lost you’re job.
For some time you receive unemployment benefits and possibly special re-training benefits. But that occurs right where you live. Where you’ve possibly lived for generations. It takes a lot of determination/courage to pack up and move.
In the meantime your plant has closed and slowly support businesses close. Retail businesses close and the downtown starts to look like the abandoned streets of a dystopian movie.
But the big drag is your home. It’s your largest asset and possibly you’re only one. With all the lost jobs, home values decline. You’re asset become a liability.
Your house is repossessed. You can’t afford to move. You’re on welfare, and chained to a life that offers no hope of a better future.
I think that had something to do with the malaise in the midwestern rust belt.