Bain Capital sends more jobs to China, Romney profits

[NM_Shooter]

  When did we give up our rights to question someones business practices if we feel those business practices are immoral,  unethical and ultimately distructive to the nations economy?

When your criticisms are directed primarily at conservatives.  That's when.

[archimedes]

As an informed, educated American citizen I reserve the right to exercise my free speech rights any way I chose.   I guess we all can't be as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.   

Quit your whining. 

P.S.  And when are your critcisms not directed entirely at liberals (whatever that is)    I guess it's anyone who disagrees with you.

[NM_Shooter]

As an informed, educated American citizen I reserve the right to exercise my free speech rights any way I chose.   I guess we all can't be as "fair and balanced" as Fox News.   

Quit your whining. 

P.S.  And when are your critcisms not directed entirely at liberals (whatever that is)    I guess it's anyone who disagrees with you.

Well, now you are being downright funny.   

Your sentence one, you demand to exercise your free rights any way you choose. 

Your sentence three, you tell me to quit whining. 

All in a thread in which I accuse liberals of hypocrisy.  Thank you for the reinforcement. 

I never said you shouldn't be vocal.  I just pointed out that liberals tend to be hypocritical whenever they do so regarding wealth. 

When you start vilifying Kerry/Heinz, Soros, John Edwards, and other liberals for being mega-rich, or any liberal for wanting a pay raise, then I'll back off a hypocrisy label. 

You won't be a hypocrite any longer, but you'll still be wrong re your stance on capitalism.  One step at a time I guess.

[archimedes]

I was being facetious because you brought up the whining charge earlier.  All you (and some others) ever do here is bitch and whine about liberals.  When do you ever offer a balanced critique?  Humm?  So does that make  you a hypocrite?  Obviously your own hypocracy completely eludes you.

There is nothing wrong with being rich,  by most standards I am rich.  Most Americans agree with that statement, even liberals.  But [b]how[/b] you made your money does matter.  Especially when you are using your business experience as the primary qualifier for you being elected to public office.

Being rich is not bad,  but how you attained that wealth matters.  It really is quite a simple concept.  One you apparently can't or won't grasp.       

You seem totally unwilling to accept the concept that people,  of good will,  could possibly disagree with you.

Anyone who disagees with you must hate the rich,  or be resentful,  or be a liberal,  or whatever pejorative you decide to sling there way.

[archimedes]

You want to read a great article about who Willard really is;

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-20120829

[NM_Shooter]

Lessee.... did I start the attack on a liberal figurehead here?  Nope.  Only spoke up to defend a conservative, and to show that the attack on that conservative was hypocritical by definition. 

I think you are confused by the definition of hypocrite.  It is not hypocritical of me to defend capitalism or the pursuit of wealth by others.  It is also not hypocritical of me to bash liberalism and to point out its many, many flaws.  It would be hypocritical of me to pick a specific flaw that is shared by both sides and to only bash liberals for it.  I try my damndest to not do that, and if I do, I'll acknowledge it. 

Any wealthy person with a large radius of influence is going to have some unpalatable things that have happened within that radius.  Every single one.  However, that does not mean that person had direct control (or any control) over the situation. 

I am not naïve and I also know that plenty of capitalists are dirty and that power is easily taken advantage of.  But asserting a person is dirty just because they are a successful business man is wrong.  Even more wrong is to only apply that filter to conservative figures and to completely ignore wealthy and successful liberals.

Read that last sentence again.

BTW, that's a slimy trait you displayed... to make a clear statement, get hung on one's own petard, and they to say "that's not what I meant".  "I was being facetious."

Yeah... right. 

[Windpower]

This is but one clip from the Rolling Stone article about Mittens ( as Celente calls him ) 

one of many examples of a relatively unbiased left/right tone of the article (emphasis mine)


"The private equity business in the early Nineties was dominated by a handful of takeover firms, from the spooky and politically connected Carlyle Group (a favorite subject of conspiracy-theory lit, with its connections to right-wingers like Donald Rumsfeld and George H.W. Bush) to the equally spooky Democrat-leaning assholes at the Blackstone Group."



And here is another clip which dispells the 'all corporations are evil'  nonsense


"In the old days, making money required sharing the wealth: with assembly-line workers, with middle management, with schools and communities, with investors. Even the Gilded Age robber barons, despite their unapologetic efforts to keep workers from getting any rights at all, built America in spite of themselves, erecting railroads and oil wells and telegraph wires. And from the time the monopolists were reined in with antitrust laws through the days when men like Mitt Romney's dad exited center stage in our economy, the American social contract was pretty consistent: The rich got to stay rich, often filthy rich, but they paid taxes and a living wage and everyone else rose at least a little bit along with them."


Which brings back my point about workers that have spent their entire working life (like me) have not shared the wealth since the 70's as is shown in the graph several posts back and described eloquently by Smith talking about his book "Who stole the American Dream ?"

[flyingvan]

Quoting from 'Rolling Stone' as an unbiased source? Next you're going to claim Nancy Pelosi is a moderate.

[Windpower]

Fly, you have a very annoying habit of misquoting me

I said "one of many examples of a relatively unbiased   left/right tone of the article"

and then pointed out that the author called people in the Blackstone group "spooky Democrat leaning  ASSHOLES" ---- 

and I never even brought the congress-whore Pelosi into the conversation

[Native_NM]

Interesting Chart

Note that from 1948 to 1973 or so Wages and productivity tracked very closely

Also note that this time frame was ' virtuous cycle'  that lifted the economy and the wealth of everyone especially the middle class

Ever wonder what happened in the mid 70's until the present -- this is not an accident

Hedrick Smith made some interesting discoveries 

Personal computers?  duh!

[Windpower]

Personal computers?  duh!

I do not understand

Are you saying that personal computers made Americans stupid ?

Certainly you can't be implying that the very expensive and largely useless personal computers of the 70' s and 80's disrupted the ecomomy
by making workers extremely 'productive'.   

In fact the productivity increase in the graph is essentially a straight line.  Productivity increased linearly from the end of WWII until 2010

What changed in the 70's was the the wages paid no longer kept pace with the increase in productivity. The middle class was no longer getting its share of the 'profits' from the increase in productivity as they had from 1948 to the mid 70's

The result has been a predictable decline in the middle class and with it the decline of health of the US economy


The question is: what changed and how do we get back to the virtuous economic cycle that worked from 1948 to 1973 where the middle class gained wealth and fueled the economy by buying things it produced and consuming commodities.

[Native_NM]

What I'm saying is that personal computers allowed the rank/file workers to become far more productive.  Tasks that once required large back-office support disappeared, replaced by a computer.  The surplus of labor, partially fueled by the large influx of women into the workplace, lowered wages.

My dad's office in the 70's had a dozen people who handled everything from scheduling, travel, typing, dictation, and similar.  Today, there's an app for that.  We have 300 employees and one admin assistant who handles everything.  We book our own travel, fill out our expense reports online, email instead of memos, etc. etc. etc.....

[Windpower]

OK,  I think you missed my point about the shift in the graph

The abrupt change occurred in the early to mid 70's -- computers were not a factor at that time -- as you point out from your anecdote of your fathers office in the 70's

The other item was that there is no abrupt change in the increase of productivity from 1948 to 2010

There is a steady very linear increase in productivity ---

Workers shared in this increase in productivity with wage increases along with corporations profitability until
(let's call it) 1974 according to the graph.

The rate of increase in productivity fueled the economy because the 'middle class' had a proportionate increase in their relative wages -- which they spent into the economy.

After 1974 the corporations apparently decided the old 'social contract' (as espoused and practiced by Henry Fords Carnegies and Rockefellers et al) of sharing a portion of their profits with the workers was no longer needed.

The predictable result is the failure of the US economy that now seems to be happening.

[NM_Shooter]

Business owners / risk takers have always deserved the lion's share. 

Think Henry Ford didn't make some serious coin?

Once again, that chart is a tribute to a boom in efficiencies in the 70's.

We are in a global economy.  If you think that wages should have followed that same chart, you know nothing about business.  Had hourly wages followed that chart, the average hourly wage would be on the order of $53 an hour. 

Think we are losing a lot of jobs offshore now?  Think how that would have crippled America. 

The real threat to the U.S. is the abundance of people with entitlement attitudes, and politicians who put them on the dole in exchange for their vote. 

[Windpower]

"Think Henry Ford didn't make some serious coin?"

Of course he did -- He also made the decision to pay his factory workers wages that allowed them to purchase the cars they were making. IIRC they were making the then incredible sum of $5 day. this is about $115 in 2012 dollars. Right at $17/hour 

Did it 'cripple' the economy

"Once again, that chart is a tribute to a boom in efficiencies in the 70's."


ONCE AGAIN THERE WAS NO BOOM IN PRODUCYIVITY IN THE 70'S


Can you not understand a simple graph that shows a linear increase  in productivity ?

If it is linear there was no boom.


"We are in a global economy.  If you think that wages should have followed that same chart, you know nothing about business.  Had hourly wages followed that chart, the average hourly wage would be on the order of $53 an hour. "


Germany is in the 'global economy' too. They are not shipping jobs to China and India and their economy and their workers are doing very well.

(Well I do have a BS in Business mangement from a real university)

Actually it would be closer to $38/hr by my calculations

So are you implying then that we should race to the bottom in wages with the slave labor from China et al

[Native_NM]

OK,  I think you missed my point about the shift in the graph

The abrupt change occurred in the early to mid 70's -- computers were not a factor at that time -- as you point out from your anecdote of your fathers office in the 70's

The other item was that there is no abrupt change in the increase of productivity from 1948 to 2010

There is a steady very linear increase in productivity ---

Workers shared in this increase in productivity with wage increases along with corporations profitability until
(let's call it) 1974 according to the graph.

The rate of increase in productivity fueled the economy because the 'middle class' had a proportionate increase in their relative wages -- which they spent into the economy.

After 1974 the corporations apparently decided the old 'social contract' (as espoused and practiced by Henry Fords Carnegies and Rockefellers et al) of sharing a portion of their profits with the workers was no longer needed.

The predictable result is the failure of the US economy that now seems to be happening.

Actually the computer revolution did begin in the 70's.

[NM_Shooter]

Check this chart.  Compare an average across decades for both.  See that an average productivity line is up and to the right and that the average # of jobs is flat and then declining?  Boom in productivity.

http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/library/chart-graph/us-manufacturing-output-vs-jobs-january-1972-january-2009

Output vs. Jobs : "Employment from the BLS (via Economagic), monthly from 1972-2009. In the last 37 years, manufacturing output in real dollars has more than doubled, while manufacturing employment has dropped by more than 26%."

Your hourly wage calculations are off.
What sort of math are you using?   

Here is a reference to the average hourly wage in the US as of Sept 2012 = $23.58

http://ycharts.com/indicators/average_hourly_earnings

Using your graph, if hourly compensation had tracked productivity and grown at the same rate,  then
$23.58* (254.3/113.1) = $53.02 per hour.

Also, your argument that Henry Ford's employees made more is full of holes. 

That $5 a day relating to $17 an hour now?  Nope.  The UAW rates are way, way higher.  Heck, even the AVERAGE rate in the US at $23.58 is way above $17 an hour.  What was your point?  That they are getting paid less per hour now?  Wrong.

Think they had nice, juicy benefits back working for Ford?  Pensions? Healthcare? Vacation time?

In 2006, the average UAW worker had hourly compensation including benefits of almost $40 an hour.  Rougly $28 per hour rate plus $10+ in benefits. 

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070924073107AAuGk8O

Which, of course, is why that industry is pretty much out of the country or going bankrupt.  Or in the case of GM, both. 

Hey... I have a cool idea.  Mortgage your house, put your life savings into a startup company, and pay your employees at $53 an hour.  Let us know how that goes a year from now.

Your chart is a productvity chart.  Not a wage repression chart.

Let's hope Romney can bring profit like that to the US.  We'd all be better off. 

P.S.  Depending on which bit of reporting you believe, the auto manufacturers say that the rate including benefits is more like $70 an hour, primarily that the pension benefit adds about $30 in burden alone.  I'm not sure I buy this, so I used the more conservative $10 per hour that liberal reporting likes to use.

http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2008/12/uaw-workers-actually-cost-the-big-three-automakers-70-an-hour

[Native_NM]

$5/day = 0.63 per hour.  Year: 1914

Fast forward 100 years.  At 2.5% inflation = 1.025^100 = 11.81 x $0.63 = $7.44 per hour.  Sounds about like minimum wage. 

At 3.5% inflation, 1.035^100 = 31.19 x $.63 = $19.65 per hour.

Depending on which numbers you believe, the long-term inflation rate is between 2.5% and 3.5% over the last 100 years.  Assume 3.5%: $5 a day then is about the same as $19.65 an hour now.  Now compare that to the average hourly UAW rate today. 

Remember that the $5 did not include healthcare, pension, or even FICA match. 

Suggest you revisit that argument....

[flyingvan]

   "Cumulative Percent Change Since 1948"....That graph gets lots of forwarding even though it doesn't stand up to scrutiny.  Lawrence Mishel produced it to bolster his own point in his own article. --"Source: Author's analysis of unpublished total economy data from Bureau of Labor Statistics, Labor Productivity and Costs program and Bureau of Economic Analysis, National Income and Product Accounts public data series".  The article was later rejected by peer review,  since his data came from 'unpublished' sources.
   Lawrence Mishel is president of The Economics Policy Institute, a liberal think tank devoted to trying to convince people liberal economics work, even though they fail all over the world.  Mishel has been caught playing fast and loose with data in the past.  Can you provide an unbiased source showing an increasing gap between hourly compensation and productivity?  How much of that productivity falls on machines now instead of manual labor?  How is productivity quantified?   
   

[NM_Shooter]

Van, you nailed it. 

I'm guessing the answer to your first question is no.

[archimedes]

   Can you provide an unbiased source showing an increasing gap between hourly compensation and productivity?   

Yes. 

http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110224.htm

[flyingvan]

Thanks for sharing that---it IS a good source, and contradicts the other chart by a very significant margin.  The first chart shows productivity up 250% since the 70's and compensation up 113%.  The one you posted shows "Average Annual Percent Change" as 2.5% and 1.1% respectively.  I'd still like to know if we're comparing apples to apples and couldn't find data--Is productivity measured by number of units produced?  If so, the 'gap' would arise due to more efficient production lines and less individual effort needed to produce whatever it is you are producing. 
This is not a bad thing.  When sewing machines were invented, seamstresses protested---they thought they'd be put out of the only work they knew, sewing shirts---they even wanted sewing machines banned.  They could, on average, sew one shirt a day.  Most people owned two shirts--one for work, one for church.  (Bear in mind deodorant wasn't popular yet, too)  Once the new technology was embraced though, the same seamstresses produced dozens of shirts per day.  The cost of shirts fell to the point everyone could afford a closet full.  People that didn't embrace the new technology suffered, but Singer did great, as did J.C. Penney, and the cotton industry.  Everyone's standard of living went up.  If you graphed the seamstress occupation thus same way, if she made 24 shirts a day instead of 1, it would be a 2400% increase in productivity.  A 113% increase in income (more than double!) is a pretty darned good raise.
 

[Ajax]

Thanks for sharing that---it IS a good source, and contradicts the other chart by a very significant margin.  The first chart shows productivity up 250% since the 70's and compensation up 113%.  The one you posted shows "Average Annual Percent Change" as 2.5% and 1.1% respectively.  I'd still like to know if we're comparing apples to apples and couldn't find data--Is productivity measured by number of units produced?  If so, the 'gap' would arise due to more efficient production lines and less individual effort needed to produce whatever it is you are producing. 
This is not a bad thing.  When sewing machines were invented, seamstresses protested---they thought they'd be put out of the only work they knew, sewing shirts---they even wanted sewing machines banned.  They could, on average, sew one shirt a day.  Most people owned two shirts--one for work, one for church.  (Bear in mind deodorant wasn't popular yet, too)  Once the new technology was embraced though, the same seamstresses produced dozens of shirts per day.  The cost of shirts fell to the point everyone could afford a closet full.  People that didn't embrace the new technology suffered, but Singer did great, as did J.C. Penney, and the cotton industry.  Everyone's standard of living went up.  If you graphed the seamstress occupation thus same way, if she made 24 shirts a day instead of 1, it would be a 2400% increase in productivity.  A 113% increase in income (more than double!) is a pretty darned good raise.

You're incorrect, the BLS report ties to the previous graph.  The graph shows changes since 1948, not since the 70's

[flyingvan]

I really compared the two and couldn't make 2.5% = 254% no matter how I looked at it.  It's a red herring, anyway---among the working, do you believe we work longer hours and suffer a worse standard of living than in the past?  Do you think the non working have a higher, or lower, standard of living?  From what I can find, compared to the 1940's, we work 11 hours a week to meet the 1940 standard of living, instead of the 40 they had to.  Would you agree hours worked/quality of life are better metrics?

[Windpower]

Here is a bar graph from the U S Bureau of Labor Statistics (is that a 'better' source for you ?)

Notice that in the time frame 1948 to 1973 wages pretty much kept pace with productivity lagging only .2 % for this 25 year period




also notice that starting in the mid seventies wages started to really fall behind productivity at a faster rate

.2 %  for six years 1973 - 1979

.9 %  for eleven years 1979 - 1990

.6 %   for 10 years 1990 - 2000

This is exactly what the other graph shows 

And it is exactly what I have been saying: wages/productivity has made a large change for the worse to the middle class since 1974

Inflation:

Let's ask the people that own the money system what the inflation rate is shall we

http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/Data/US-Inflation/inf_calculator.cfm?first=5&year1=1913&year2=2011


$ 5 per day in 1913 equals an inflation adjusted $113.80 per day in 2011 or $14.23 per hour, about twice the current minimum wage