It's a Great Plan
I like it. It'll be great! Go the Donald!
Trumping free trade: Say 'King of Bankruptcy' Ross does end up in charge of US commerce
Say hello to Wilbur Ross, "King of Bankruptcy" and the likely next US Secretary of State for Commerce – the man charged with implementing President Trump's promise to bring home the jobs stolen by cheap labour countries using free trade policies. Suppose he has his minions look over the storage industry, what will they see? …
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Monday 23rd January 2017 17:41 GMT Oh Homer
It's easy. Honest.
Increase wages, decrease prices, and pay for it all out of the billionaires' vast profits.
Now all The Donald has to do is to convince his fellow billionaires to actually work for a living, for a more reasonable income, like the rest of us.
That ends foreign exploitation and brings home American jobs, in a single stroke.
Ream the profiteers. That's how you fund American growth. It's a yuuuge source of funding. The best sort of funding.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 19:24 GMT Mark 85
Re: It's a Great Plan
The fatal flaw is that any manufacturer worth their salt will point to fearless leader and say, "when he moves his clothing company's production to the US, we will too.".
Point of reference is his clothing line is made Vietnam currently. IF he won't, why should anyone else be forced to do it.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 12:44 GMT Voland's right hand
Same idiocy regardless of location
There is no plan.
In order to have a plan you need to EDUCATE the workforce. It does not matter if it is the factory floor or the coders in the open plan office. You need to produce educated labor in bulk quantities.
Now, how the f*** can this work out with USA or UK educational systems requiring tens of thousands of thousands to traverse? Here is some news for you - it f***ing does not.
The secret to German industrial dominance in Europe is the German technical education. It produces qualified labor with the efficiency of a VW or BMW plant. Or vice versa. It is massively subsidized too. Similarly, we may not like South Korean (or other countries with "cheap" labor) educational systems, but they do produce the people to fill the positions.
USA and UK cannot and will not compete. Not any time soon. Especially with the current USA education secretary and her desire to disassemble the few remaining working bits in the USA educational system to please the religious nutters.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 12:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Shhh, don't worry your head about it right hand, you'll wake Comrade Big John and he'll come in and tell us all that Trump has the plan, he has drained the swamp and the best people are now in charge who can and will fix everything to Make America Great Again (Do we know when that was yet?)
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Monday 23rd January 2017 17:32 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Shhh, don't worry your head about it right hand, you'll wake Comrade Big John and he'll come in and tell us all that Trump has the plan, he has drained the swamp and the best people are now in charge who can and will fix everything to Make America Great Again (Do we know when that was yet?)
When? I'm thinking late 1940s (when only white males had rights, Japan had two nuclear craters, German manufacturing had been destroyed, and China was still in the 19th century), or perhaps the 1910s (before inconvenient things like child labor laws, women voting, the EPA, etc)
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Monday 23rd January 2017 13:43 GMT Tatsky
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
RE: "There is nothing to say that the drive manufacturers continue to maintain those factories and plants for worldwide production. Just means that anything they want to sell in the USA would have to be made locally, so let them build plants Stateside."
Do you have any idea how much it costs so set up the infrastructure to support one of these factories, let alone create the factory itself? And even if you could invest that sort of cash in getting a factory, you still have the huge issue of a complete lack of qualified workforce.
It would take around 10 years for the USA to build up the level of expertise and numbers of personnel to make this happen.
China et al have invested bigly in their factories and workforce. They have created who cities to support this manufacturing.
To make this a reality would take an overarching 15-20 year plan to gradually pull back production from international factories.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 14:07 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
And the biggest issue is no one in the US will make long-term investments - all US "shareholders" want - including many of the Trump's friends now at the helm - is easy money every three months. And executives will bend just to get their bonuses.
In the US finance killed the industry. It's far easier to move money around, than look for ideas (and bright people who have them) and run a manufacturing company (and share earnings with employees).
Who's in the government now? Entrepreneurs who created large, healthy industrial companies with thousand and thousand of well paid workers? No. Mostly, financiers who took advantage of the market to make money - often borrowing from banks, and never using their own money (quietly stored in tax havens...). Or an oil executive who was paid 180M for leaving, poor lad. Or someone who sells wresting matches... oh well, a country were wrestling sells, what could go wrong?
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Monday 23rd January 2017 15:11 GMT H in The Hague
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
" In the US finance killed the industry. It's far easier to move money around, than look for ideas (and bright people who have them) and run a manufacturing company (and share earnings with employees)."
Interesting idea. Here in NL where I work (and also in Germany I think) many businesses, even some v large ones are privately held. One of the things they always emphasise is that they're in it for the long term and that they can make investments which only pay off many years ahead. Their employees also seem to be loyal to them and stay with their employer for decades.
One of my customers not only has the third generation of the family running the business but also second-generation employees. Not having to present three-monthly reports to shareholders must help. (Of course, there are also poorly run companies in NL, it ain't perfect here.)
And there's still a vocational technical education system here though probably not as extensive as it used to be.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 14:31 GMT Shaha Alam
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
"To make this a reality would take an overarching 15-20 year plan to gradually pull back production from international factories."
that's fine because trump was expecting to stay in power for a lot more than 4 or 8 years.
now, what circumstances are needed to galvanise the republic into granting him emergency powers to exceed his mandate as president, well, i think we all know what form of public persuasion that takes...
next step, the reordering of the republic into the First Amerikan Empire.
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Tuesday 24th January 2017 10:40 GMT CrazyOldCatMan
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Do you have any idea how much it costs so set up the infrastructure to support one of these factories, let alone create the factory itself?
So, China/S. Korea/Vietnam state gives lots of free money (sorry - startup grants) to a brand new set of companies that just happen to have all the plans and designs of the current generation of palnts and products, as well as a big pool of trained and educated people to run them.
Problem solved. It'll take a couple of years, but that doesn't matter in planned economies. And gives the funding Governments another big stick to beat the West with (after all, the Governments will retain a large, if not controlling stake in the companies) and will be able to outcompete the incumbents on price. At which point, the re-US-ified companies go into liquidation/get taken over/get asset-stripped by the VC vultures and the US ends off worse than before.
Yup. Make America Great again. For a very short time and in a self-destructive and shortsighted fashion. But the Great Wind won't care because he'll have had his moment in the limelight and his ego will have been fed for a while.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 13:57 GMT thegroucho
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
This implies any significant quantity of HDDs and SSDs (etc, et al) is actually manufactured in USA.
Which I doubt and think most are imported (if not all).
Slap the tax on the imports, the corresponding end product becomes more expensive.
Sell it in USA for a lot more than it cost prior to the insane taxation and then the end buyers will suffer, not the manufacturers.
Unless you intend to import the drives, manufacture something in USA and then export the end product.
Unlikely but possible.
I can see this working with the foreign car manufacturers, at least there is some car production still left in USA and most of the workers of the bankrupt companies are still alive and well within the working age.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 14:55 GMT Tom 38
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Slap the tax on the imports, the corresponding end product becomes more expensive.
Sell it in USA for a lot more than it cost prior to the insane taxation and then the end buyers will suffer, not the manufacturers.
Unless you intend to import the drives, manufacture something in USA and then export the end product. [..]
I can see this working with the foreign car manufacturers, at least there is some car production still left in USA and most of the workers of the bankrupt companies are still alive and well within the working age.
Hard drives are not cars though. Car manufacturers have to sell their cars where their consumers will use them, so if they want to sell cars to americans, the cars have to be in america.
Hard drives don't necessarily have to be located where their users are using them. Obviously, hard drives in PCs/laptops etc do, but think of all the hard drives google, amazon, et al have in their datacentres; those hard drives represent a huge chunk of the market, and there is no need for the hard drives servicing americans to be located in america. You could put huge datacentres in Mexico and Canada, and put the hard drives there. There are no plans to tax bytes on the wire yet, right?*
If he does put a tariff on hard drives, then yay! This will make businesses around the world more competitive compared to american companies. If that forces hard drive manufacturers to move operations back to the US and increase costs for all of us, then there will be a bunch of empty HDD manufacturing capacity in Thailand for someone else to step in and undercut them.
* I do hope I'm not giving him ideas...
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Saturday 28th January 2017 15:33 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
"Just means that anything they want to sell in the USA would have to be made locally, so let them build plants Stateside."
And thanks to protectionism, they'll be able to sell Stateside for whatever price they want.
This is Trump's idea of Free Trade - the polar opposite of what most people define it as.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 15:52 GMT Otto is a bear.
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
It's true, unemployed people do not contribute very much to the market, and the more money that goes to the very rich actually contracts the market. So what you need is more people in the middle ground with good jobs that want to buy stuff, which means you have to have people making and designing stuff in your economy. Low paid workers don't buy much stuff either so having lots of low paid factory workers doesn't do much for your end market.
The other bit that's missing here is VW, BMW and alike work closely with the education system, and actually train people themselves. In the UK and US, it seems to me that companies want schools and colleges to produce graduates who can walk into their plants and coding shops to start work without any training. I have heard senior managers say to many times, that there's no point in training people because they just leave, and training is always chopped as soon as targets are in jeopardy.
When I started, I was given all the training I needed by the companies I worked for when I joined, they were after capability not qualifications. So thank you GEC (The UK one) and Xerox.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 17:47 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
It's true, unemployed people do not contribute very much to the market, and the more money that goes to the very rich actually contracts the market. So what you need is more people in the middle ground with good jobs that want to buy stuff, which means you have to have people making and designing stuff in your economy. Low paid workers don't buy much stuff either so having lots of low paid factory workers doesn't do much for your end market.
But Trump is going to bring back good-paying, non-automatable factory jobs.
When I started, I was given all the training I needed by the companies I worked for when I joined, they were after capability not qualifications. So thank you GEC (The UK one) and Xerox.
Ah, but that deprives the private education companies.
I saw an ad today - I can take a 12-week class, become a "web developer", and earn "an average of $105,000" per year!
[see "How to teach yourself programming in 10 years" https://norvig.com/21-days.html]
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Monday 23rd January 2017 18:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
>USA and UK cannot and will not compete. Not any time soon.
Yes the USA education system is a bit crap in most places but the way the US has traditionally made up for it is by stealing all the best and brightest in the rest of the world that come to our Universities for what they think are a few years but we end up capturing many of them for far longer. Of course the Donald is probably going to ruin that (might as well roll out the white Euros only place mat, not to mention the Republicans looking at our University funding as only feeding a dirty liberal factory) so yeah we're fscked.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 20:33 GMT Voland's right hand
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Yes the USA education system is a bit crap in most places but the way the US has traditionally made up for it is by stealing all the best and brightest
The best and the brightest do not do grunt work on the shop floor. Modern manufacturing requires at the very least secondary technical or technical baccalaureate. In Germany you will find it difficult NOT to graduate with a secondary technical. In USA and UK you get a liberal arts butt-wiper and you are useless for any _MODERN_ manufacturing until you have spent 40K+ for a BS degree on top of that. 40K is not an investment which fits the economic realitites for a factory floor grunt.
So sorry, no bonus - with the current educational systems UK and USA are not competitive and will never be until they start subsidizing technical education at all levels to at least a fraction of what Germany, South Korea, China, etc do. No tariffs, walls, revocation of treaties, quoting at Tory conferences from the Mein Kampf will help here.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 22:06 GMT Gray
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Empirical examples: When I worked in a leading print shop in Boise, ID, the practice was for each shop to hustle trained talent from other shops. There was no entry-level training, and very little on-the-job training. Industry-proficient vocational training was not offered in area schools.
Currently, living on a large Pacific NW island, we've been stymied trying to convert a home heating system from electric to propane (95% efficiency upgrade). No electrical concern we've called even bothers to return phone calls. One local heating contractor retorted that "we cannot find qualified workers to hire." I dared not ask why they didn't offer an apprentice or on-the-job training for local kids needing their first job. Fact: small US business cannot afford the expense of training; they get no tax breaks in most areas; and few vocational schools offer such training, and those that do are quite expensive. So we see small business stealing each others employees, or limiting their services to existing accounts. That's the situation in our small chunk of the world.
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Tuesday 24th January 2017 17:53 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
>The best and the brightest do not do grunt work on the shop floor.
No but they do develop the technologies and companies that change the world which is still what the US is fairly decent at (Silicon Valley, etc). Actually the US is already a manufacturing power house its just we have done it with automation which requires somewhat STEM educated people as you imply (what I do for a living). I just dispute the German model is what the US necessarily needs. For one thing Germany's model is a bit of a house of cards that requires other countries borrowing money to buy their stuff. Greece and the other southern Euros kind of exposed the weakness to a German led trading block. I am not sure what the answer is and I agree we do need to revamp our education system but currently it looks like the answer will be to use what money we have to send well off kids to religious based schools which is probably not the medicine we need. Good STEM education requires having a population that actually believes in science or even facts.
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Thursday 26th January 2017 13:45 GMT quxinot
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
>The best and the brightest do not do grunt work on the shop floor. Modern manufacturing requires at the very least secondary technical or technical baccalaureate.<
The best and brightest have been working out how to line their own pockets whilst screwing the poor bastards on the shop floor for many, many years.
There's very few companies willing to play the long game, because they want their bonus today. Management isn't hard, you hire good people, keep them as happy as is reasonable, give them what they need to do the work, and get out of the way!
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Tuesday 24th January 2017 17:12 GMT zvonr
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
Timeless as well... and using Tariffs to "encourage" companies to create local jobs will most likely not work... The thing about Tariffs is that once somebody starts with them it will create a chain reaction that will be difficult to stop...
For fun here is an economics lesson about the Smoot–Hawley Tariff Act from the "Ferris Bueller's day off" movie:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhiCFdWeQfA
That does not mean that trade agreements could not be improved so that companies don't do environmental, labor... law arbitrage which results in pollution export, child labor....
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Wednesday 25th January 2017 20:32 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
using Tariffs to "encourage" companies to create local jobs will most likely not work.
so go the OTHER way... CUT taxes! You know, like LOWERING the corporate tax, for starters... [yes it's on Trump's agenda]. and cut regulations. and so on.
Supply Side Economics - aka 'Reaganomics' - works every time it's tried! Even JFK would agree, as he outlined basic supply side economics in his 1962 speech at a New York economists get-together. I heard a replay of it. It was interesting to hear supply-side out of a Democrat. It made me like JFK even more. No _wonder_ they assassinated him! He must've had LBJ and the other liberals ripping out their own insides over it.
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Wednesday 25th January 2017 20:27 GMT bombastic bob
Re: Same idiocy regardless of location
"In order to have a plan you need to EDUCATE the workforce"
no argument there, however, when education focuses on "feelings" instead of FACTS, social engineering instead of the "3 R's", and so forth, those poor widdle snowflakes won't be able to hold a job, let alone perform well. Might as well start fixing the problem at its source.
yeah no more telling those young 'skulls full of mush' (as Limbaugh would say) that it's all "whitey's fault", that American history is filled with social injustice, the Pilgrims were saved by the local "native Americans" and repaid with injustice, that slavery existed until Malcom X and the Black Panthers started THEIR movements, yotta yotta yotta. And the _RACIST_ poetry of Maya Angeloo...
If we taught the kids how to read, write, do math, and STANDARD history [not 'revisionist' social engineering] there'd be plenty of well-educated potential employees ready to go to work.
Same for colleges, but SQUARED.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 12:51 GMT Dr. Mouse
These populist movements seem to wish to end (or at least limit) globalisation. Fair enough, but I wish they'd stop pretending it was about ending inequality.
IIRC everyone in the Western/First world is in the top 10%. This means that, by "bringing jobs home", the top 10% get richer, and everyone else gets poorer. It increases inequality.
That's not to say that something doesn't need doing "at home", too. But at the very least, admit that the attitude is "Screw that guy in China/Korea/India. I don't care if he starves, I want more moneys!!"
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Monday 23rd January 2017 13:02 GMT Roger B
Thats what gets me about the policy in the US now of taking all the factories from Mexico, each factory built in Mexico gives jobs to Mexicans who suddenly have an income, support a family, support their local businesses and so less Mexicans perhaps feel the need to travel north and cross the Rio Grande.
Every factory Trump takes from Mexico means the wall needs to be higher.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 13:54 GMT Steve Davies 3
That's far too complicated
for a genius like DT to even begin to understand let alone anyone in his cabinet.
Yet everything will be 'Tremendous' in the end.
I forsee lots of plants planned and even construction started but never finished. After all a workforce consisting of one man and a dog can't build a HDD plant in 4 years now can they.
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Tuesday 24th January 2017 16:11 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: That's far too complicated
"I forsee lots of plants planned and even construction started but never finished. "
I see lots of plants announced, not necessarily planned or construction started. There's another issue in this though - whether the factories "move home" or tarriffs are apploed, prices go up, and another batch of politicians crop up talking about unfair pricing / gouging.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 14:08 GMT Dr. Mouse
You're seriously trying to defend offshoring of employment as "fixing global inequality"?
With a dash of: You deplorables are part of the top 10% richest in the world anyway?
I'm not defending anything. I'm just pointing out the obvious contradiction of using "fixing inequality" as an excuse for protectionism.
The majority of the world would jump at the chance to be in the bottom 10% of the American (or UK/European etc) population. As stated above, too, the worse it is for the RoW, the more people want to come to "the West" (or get peeved that the West is so rich, and attack/overthrow governments etc). Every job lost in poorer countries means more money must be spent on "keeping the immigrants out", or dealing with uprisings/wars etc.
Consider the car factory which was being built in Mexico that's now been cancelled. Just in building it, there were a hell of a lot of Mexican workers employed. These workers would be much less likely to want to go to the US. The same with those who would be employed in the factory when it was finished. Instead, the plug has been pulled, loads of people find themselves back to barely having enough to put food on the table, and the factory will not employ workers as it won't open.
You now have hundreds more who may consider trying to enter the US illegally. The US, in addition to having to pay more for their cars, will have to spend more on policing the border (or accept an increase in illegal immigration).
It's all so counter productive. The best way to reduce illegal immigration is to make it less attractive by improving the quality of life of those elsewhere. Of course, the other options are the ones being taken by Trump:
- Spend a fortune on protecting the border, and
- Make the US less attractive to foreigners by making it a horrible place
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Monday 23rd January 2017 18:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
The majority of the world would jump at the chance to be in the bottom 10% of the American (or UK/European etc) population.
Not the American population. Being broke and homeless in the USA isn't necessarily better than living in a hut with 10 families and eating berries somewhere else in the world.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 14:26 GMT Anonymous Coward
wholeheartedly agree
Couldn't agree more .. which is why i get even more pissed off by lefty christian charidy types like Oxfam and Christian Aid banging on about inequality etc in the west and putting it down to globalisation .. these people need to remember that whilst a few hundreds of millions of westerners aren't getting rich as quickly as they were, in general the standard of living has continued to increase for the vast majority and poverty is relative ... objectively, all but the very bottom end of the ladder in the west are in no way "poor" in the way the real poor are around the world. Meanwhile BILLIONS have been raised out of poverty worldwide and large middle classes have emerged in China, India, Mexico, Brazil etc and the middle class is growing fast in Africa too... globalisation is a sort of issue for rich western societies who have lived off the backs of the exploited global poor for centuries .. but even though there has been a downside for us, there has been a huge upside with no real inflation for a couple of decades and generally much much cheaper imports and a higher standard of living.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 15:00 GMT Shaha Alam
Re: wholeheartedly agree
I think their criticism about inequality is mainly that the system, as it is, pushes wealth upwards. so whilst globally more people have improved their circumstances, more and more wealth is still moving upwards - and at a faster rate.
if you follow the trend, this means that those who managed to climb out of poverty will start sinking back into it. much as how citizens in western countries are now less well off than their parents generation, for example.
i'm not saying that rich shouldnt be rich or that they should give wealth to the poor. the point is that we need to fix a system where that gap seems to only get wider and wider. eventually we went even be having this discussion in terms of relative wealth, but in terms of absolutes, ie the 'haves' and the 'have nots'. some people will simply own *everything* and everyone else will own nothing. that the 'have nots' dont die off of hunger will be dependent on the generosity and benevolence of the 'haves'. democracy will cease to function (given the power of the wealthy to effect democratic outcomes suggests we're not far off) and the gulf between the two worlds will be so vast it will be difficult to describe the two groups as sharing any semblance of humanity (other than a genome)
its a mathematical certainty, if wealth continues to accrue in fewer and fewer hands,
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Monday 23rd January 2017 15:11 GMT Dr. Mouse
Re: wholeheartedly agree
I think their criticism about inequality is mainly that the system, as it is, pushes wealth upwards. so whilst globally more people have improved their circumstances, more and more wealth is still moving upwards - and at a faster rate.
I agree. However, the move to "bring jobs home" is stealing from the poorest to give to the slightly less poor. Or, looked at from the point of view of the poorest, stealing from the poor to give to the rich (as the poorest in the world will see the poorest in the USA and the West as rich).
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Monday 23rd January 2017 23:00 GMT Adam 52
Re: wholeheartedly agree
"lefty christian charidy types like Oxfam and Christian Aid banging on about inequality etc in the west and putting it down to globalisation"
Christian Aid and Oxfam bang on about inequality. I don't recall them blaming globalisation. Indeed both are strong advocates of fair trade as a mechanism to lift people out of poverty.
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Monday 23rd January 2017 13:57 GMT Chris G
Re: Major Flaw
Buy American? That's a laugh, I don't doubt the quality of US products because that is usually good to high but with the bringing home of all these industries will come higher prices and with a currently unfit for purpose work force possibly a drop in the usual quality. Add to that the crazy cost of US shipping charges to foreign parts as well as import duties and nobody will be buying American unless they have a gun to their head(figurative or literal), that is likely to include a lot of Americans too.
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
