4 Year Recovery Watch Remains On High Alert

WSJ: The manufacturing sector is digging its way out of its hole. Some optimists even see the nation on the cusp of a manufacturing renaissance, though that seems widely optimistic. Since December of 2009, factories have added 504,000 jobs–a tidy gain, to be sure, but one that represents less than a quarter of the jobs lost during the meltdown.

10 Replies to “4 Year Recovery Watch Remains On High Alert”

Utter BS! The WSJ is engaging in feel-good cheer-leading. Wishful thinking, but a cruel lie is more accurate.
The only thing that can bring US Manufacturing back from near extinction is a 70% reduction in operating costs through tax relief on materials, output, profits or in wages by removing union pay scales or going to robotic fabrication – seeing how none of this is likely, China will continue to monopolize manufacturing as we destroy our competitive advantage with absolutely insane kleptocratic rape of our industries.

There will never be a recovery as long as every conceivable roadblock is thrown in front of capitalism. Forward has a different meaning for socialists.
http://www.ijreview.com/2012/11/22029-average-68-new-regulations-per-day-from-obama-administration/

A guy at work has a brother who is an engineer for a big Japanese company. The company wanted to build a refinery down in Texas. They spent several years trying to get approval to no avail. They moved the project over to Japan a broke ground within 6 months.
My former boss left the company to help run a big operation down in Arizona. The mine planned to hire at least a thousand people as soon as they were up and running. That was years ago. They are still fighting to get their permits and have a skeleton workforce. From an article about the endless battle:
‘Globally, the United States is tied with Papua New Guinea as the country that takes the longest time of 25 countries studied to permit a new mine — seven to 10 years, said a study prepared by Behre Dolbear Group, an international mining advisory group. The group said permitting delays are “the most significant risks to mining projects in the United States.””
Here is the article:
http://rosemontcopper.com/rosemont-copper-eyes-final-permits.html
Imagine how many job-intensive projects in mining, manufacturing, and the oil business are not even tried in this country due to the horrible regulatory environment we now have. You would have to be nuts to risk capital here. We have gone from a country that could do seemingly anything to one that is just living on past glory. It is no wonder there are so many low-paying jobs now and so few that pay well.

68 new regs/day?!?!. No wonder the USSA is fubared. And does the Chimp-in-Chief even have to vote present on any of them? So. There are 564 days until the election. 564 x 68 = 38,352 new regs?
What are they going to regulate?

Occam, there’s no need to reduce wages 70 percent. Look at these charts:
http://fx.sauder.ubc.ca/PPP.html
If exchange rates bore any relationship whatsoever to what things actually cost in each country, goods manufactured in China would easily cost double what they do now, and we would have a lot more manufacturing jobs than we actually do.
Heavens, the Canadian dollar is 95 cents US. It should be somewhere between 80 and 85 cents. Were money issued and its value regulated in the interest of the Canadian people, and not those of banksters wanting a break on their greenback denominated debt, the Bank of Canada would issue enough loonies to satisfy demand at a rate reflecting the cost of living in each country.
Rich idiots would whinge about how the cost of bananas and their March Break trip to Florida had gotten so expensive suddenly. The rest of us would find it much easier to find stable employment making things people can use and that we can sell at a price people will pay. Hard as it may be to believe, there simply aren’t enough good jobs in the oil-patch for every loyal and able-bodied Canadian.

I have a big problem with all government statistics, particularly those of the current US government.

Dick…if you believe guberment studies and statistics…welllll… take your head out of the sand.

Yeah, because Canadians don’t import food from overseas priced in U.S. dollars all winter.

Dick I speak from experience in manufacturing management – I put in bids for international electronic mfg. contracts – NATO, US Military, Aviation, IBM, and Palm Pilot. Cisco etc. I was consistently killed by Japanese contractors undercutting my bids by 50% or better (they manufacture in Malaysia and other low cost labor venues) even though I cut profit margins on the these contracts to 2-3 points just to get the business so we could keep full staff. The bids were open so I got to see itemised break downs of the bids after contracts were won by others and material costs were surprisingly close but my Japanese competitors always were 50-70% lower on labor and overhead costs (Overhead is where you bury the cost of doing biz like tax, regulatory permitting/compliance, export duty etc.) – Within 5 years of this global trade war on electronic manufacturing the industry dried up here. Now these same Japanese companies which were killing our bids are having their bids killed by more aggressive Chinese companies.
High taxes, regulation costs, scaled labor and a totally disinterested government and finance community all cut our competitive advantage, and although I tend to agree with you that non-management labor deserves a decent wage commensurate with local economic demands, this is no longer possible – leaving robotics to take over repetitive tasks and expand our manufacturing base – but that won’t happen as capitalization is stalled here due to timid markets ravaged by scammers and our investment banks liking sleazy debt instrument trading rather than risk in the manufacturing industries. Not only is freedom and democracy on the wane in western nations but free market capitalism is as well – killed by the Klepto-economics of statist socialism and their crony capitalist enablers.