^The first thing Obama is doing?
Buying shit made where exactly? If the government opens factories and some of those 9k jobs are production jobs I’m all for it. We need to make shit to be sold here and abroad. We cannot have 9k high wage clerks added to the payroll.
From everything I’ve gathered, you want to basically bring this country to the days just after the industrial revolution. Manufacturing based economy, with shitty paying jobs where everyone works long hours, little to no workers’ rights, and let the corporations pretty much police themselves. This didn’t work. See: Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil, etc. Creating manufacturing jobs in this country is not sustainable in the private sector. Physical work is becoming less and less of a base of the American economy, because some grunt somewhere else will always do it for less. The goal is not to try to compete with them for how little we can pay people. The goal is to be better educated so we do stuff they can’t.
Oh cool. That tax money will surely go towards paying off the new and improved national debt then, right? :mamoru:
We do NEED to manufacture here. No one can deny that. All the people that claim they have an economics backround should agree with me on at least this.
Me and Newman are in the same-ish tax bracket and I think it worked out at 22%/32% salary going directly to the tax man NY/TX.
Not to mention NY sales tax and gas tax getting another 9% on what you buy, where done here it is about 7%.
So totals 29%/41% of salary going right to uncle sam.
I would personally get fed up paying anything more then 50% of my salary in taxes. If it ever got to that point I’d move to Europe. At least they know how to give vacation time. 
We need to manufacture here, but the only ways to do it are to either
1.) Tariff the shit out of imports. Then they tariff the shit out of our exports. Since we import more than we export, theoretically we win in this deal. The problem is that prices go way up, but we theoretically all make more money in that scenario buying only american stuff and a lot more of us are employed, so we have more money to spend. This is also vulnerable to black market imports of goods, particularly with the Internet.
2.) Manufacture only those specialty products that cannot be manufactured elsewhere with sufficient quality or that people are willing to pay a premium for increased quality. This is what we’re getting more and more toward right now, but it is not enough to sustain an economy.
With every job being created, in a global market, the question to ask is, “Can an American do this job better than 5 to 10 indians/chinese/3rd world citizens?” For many white collar jobs, the answer is clearly Yes, although management tends to think not and usually makes their quality suffer. For blue collar jobs, other than skilled trades, the answer is almost always, No.
Yup, and that’s where our jobs are going. I’m no economist but the fundamentals of the US economy are screaming at us IMO. For example the baby boomers are starting to trickle into the social security program. There are many more issues I don’t have the time or patience to get into here. It’s clear we have 2 camps here and I’ll just leave it at that. We are all entitled to our opinions of course.
GL
I agree with 1 but 2 is not realistic. Anything can be produced anywhere at this point because of cheaper and cheaper technology available to anywhere on the planet. White collar jobs typically don’t actually produce a product. Maybe farming is the answer everyone needs food and it is not rocket science either. Not sure about farming yet, just throwing ideas out there. Homesteading is growing in popularity (maybe out of necessity) but, that really won’t help people in downtown Detroit. lol
White collar jobs do produce a product. The mortgage on your house is a product. Your checking account and credit cards are products. Not to mention that every manufacturing company needs white-collar people to do the books and such, whereas services industries do not need anyone to manufacture.
Maybe a tie-in with the patent system could work. Any company applying for a US Patent for a new product must agree to manufacture any of that product sold in the US, in the US, for the duration of the patent.
Banks provide a service that is trading assets they do not add value or “create” anything.
They create the ability to do business in most circumstances. If the only way your company could be paid by any customer was cash in person, you had to pay for all PPM up front, etc. you’d long since be out of business. They absolutely do add value. Without them, the barriers to entry would be so great that no one would manufacture anything.
I am not saying we don’t need banks, I am saying they don’t produce a product they provide a service. I know bankers call them “products” but they are not in the traditional sense of the word. If they glued sequins to one dollar bills and charged 1.25 for the value added(assuming it increased the value), it would be a product. 
I can’t resell regular dollars I get from a bank for $1.25.
Ah, I see. I can agree with that. But in many cases, services are even more valuable than products, and the good jobs are in providing people or companies with a service. Inventing and engineering someone’s next product is a service. Teaching them how to make it is a service. Supporting the customer when it breaks is a service. Financing its production is a service. Americans can do all of these things much better than their foreign counterparts. When you talk about physically making it, the gap gets narrower.
^Services are valuable no doubt but, when I call the Geek Squad and they charge me $50 to explain to me that my computer has to be plugged in to work they really haven’t made the computer worth more. lol. So nothing was added to our economy, I just traded $50 for $50 worth of their time. But yeah, now that my computer is working again I can use it to assist in production again, which is valuable.
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Republican Sen. Judd Gregg of New Hampshire released a statement Thursday withdrawing from consideration to be President Obama’s Commerce Secretary.
Full statement follows:
“I want to thank the President for nominating me to serve in his Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. This was a great honor, and I had felt that I could bring some views and ideas that would assist him in governing during this difficult time. I especially admire his willingness to reach across the aisle.
“However, it has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me. Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.
“Obviously the President requires a team that is fully supportive of all his initiatives.
:tup: to sticking to your beliefs judd. Its Obamas way or no way but we don’t have to participate, we need more good guys like this in America
This is exactly why we are in the state we are in. People are too fucking lazy to do physical labor. Its not that someone will do it for less, its that everyone wants to get paid to do nothing, or work on computers, or in some office building. many jobs that require some “grunt labor” pay very well, have awesome bennies etc, but nobody wants to get dirty. We are turning into a country of pussies that wont do anything that may make us brake a nail. Aka, the trades. Used to be TONS of people trying to get into the trades. Now there is virtualy nobody.
And if you don’t spend the $50 and the members of the Geek Squad get laid off how does that help the economy?
There is a reason why unemployment rates are the first thing people look at when they want to see if the economy is doing well.
NO, it’s not.
Thank society for that, for decades people only measured success on things like college education.
I’ll be the first to admit that not every student should go to college but society has bred to believe that. Look at BOCES, it was supposed to be for those who wanted to learn a trade and it has been turned into a center for rejects that can’t hack it in high school.
The other side of that however is that during the 70’s and 80’s manufacturing ground to a halt because of cheap labor oversees. Once people realized that they can’t earn a living in a steel plant anymore they were forced to turn to other fields.
Thats why we need decent wages for those in manufacturing or construction, otherwise no one is going to want to do it and it will flood the market with college graduates with very few jobs available to them.
Our economic problems really stem from the fact that a Progressive Movement never really happened in places like China, India and S. America. The people their live horrible lives compared to the US but I’m sorry I don’t want our country to be reduced to their level just to compete.