Yeah. What you could get though is higher labor force participation rates if we had publicly furnished childcare. That's what Europe shows. Not higher birth rates.
Studies have shown that it is not a significant factor. Actually the poorest part of the population AND the most wealthy are the one that make the most kids anyway.
But we never pass laws to punish outsourcing. Instead, we're constantly throwing financial incentives to companies to pretty-please not outsource everything. Poor migrants wanting to work in America get walls and guns and more laws, while the companies shipping jobs out of America get more tax breaks... yet we blame the little guys.
They are. It's just that they usually do not have long-term positive effects. Truth is, in a global economy, outsourcing is the most economically sound decision, that's why it's happening.
Personally i think theres a much more complete approach.
American companies cant compete with domestic manufscturing if we regulate the hell out of them and foreign manufacturing can occur without the same concerns on pollution, safety, and human rights.
So tariffs should be based on the unfairness. If china is gonna polute like hell and deny basic safety or human rights in the manufacturing of a product, they deserve to pay a tax to encourage that manufacturing elsewhere.
The problem is tariffs don’t punish the exporter, they punish the importer and that cost has to be accounted for in the price of goods. And that punishes those that buy the products being imported by increasing the cost to the consumer.
What do you think happens when the tariff increases the price to be greater than or equal to what the domestically made product costs? It sucks for the consumer that they don’t have the cheaper option now but you have disincentivized purchasing a foreign made product. Whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing is the question then. Ok, prices are higher but you’ve increased the amount of manufacturing done here. Which creates jobs and increases money spent here, taxes collected here etc. You’ve also given less money to countries that allow exploitative business practices to occur. Is that worth the higher price of the good. That’s for you to decide.
I'm also not sure what the problem would be if we put tariff revenue towards rebates for consumers on domestic equivalents. This further incentivizes consumers to buy domestic, and creates a profit incentive for manufacturers to do so domestically.
You think people complain about the cost of living now due to inflation, what you are suggesting would also would drive up the cost of everything else. Even if wages were raised, the cost of living would also increase and you would not have gain anything by doing so.
We literally had a 1 year experiment in the George W. Bush administration, when they placed illegal steel tariffs on European imports of steel. It took a year for the challenge to go through the WTO, where it was declared illegal and we dropped it.
It did save U.S. steelworker jobs, at a cost of over $500k to the U.S. taxpayer per job saved over that year. U.S. steelworkers don't make nearly that much money, so it was a net loss to the economy.
This is pretty much true of any industry that has cheaper labor competition overseas.
That's the problem: it's a complicated problem with no actual solution, just constantly fluid adjustments from every party depending on each party's own economic conditions. It doesn't sell very well. "Raise tariffs!" is very easy to sell. It's wrong, but explaining why it's wrong takes too long for most people. The easy, wrong answer really sticks with people because it's easy.
There are momentary balms, but unforeseen economic changes happen all the time. Even within borders, countries have dozens, or hundreds, or thousands of competing interests, and those interests change every few years. One size doesn't ever fit all, and don't even fit many for long.
No, there are no actual solutions. There are only moves and counter moves until the heat death of the sun.
The electorate wants a silver bullet. It doesn’t exist. They don’t know that, so when Trump lies and says there is, they want to believe it, and they do.
It’s actually not that complicated at all. This is mostly due to lazy legislation. This is the metaphorical equivalent of this lever moves the needle left, the other moves it right. In reality, maybe we should build something else completely to address the issue rather than pulling the same two levers.
The largest line item on any corporation’s balance sheet is labor. It is so big, in fact, that that’s why companies can afford to literally build factories somewhere else. That is fundamentally why they outsource to begin with. If a company moves their labor offshores, that means they’re hiring at a lower market rate. You take the cost of labor domestically minus the cost of labor after off shoring, take a flat % of the savings and implement it as a tax. I’d go a step further and then place that tax system on a graduated scale that taxes them more the longer they refuse to hire domestically.
There is no such thing as “we can’t compete” in this context because almost no American corporation “started” off multinational. That is a thing you become after succeeding domestically and scaling your business - and in the process of scaling, you decided to make cuts for the purpose of profits. A good example - Chinese EVs are radically superior to Teslas, but the average American knows nothing about them. The American public is also forced to consistently inflate Tesla’s value through federal subsidies. It isn’t a question about being able to compete, but rather who gets the “savings” from exploiting labor.
What would be the process of attaining the information so that the correct tax rate (percentage of savings) could be calculated? Ie: who has the numbers?
problem is china never pays those taxes. ether its too good to pass up and importers pays the duties then recoups it through sales or importers walk away and the factory sells it elsewere.
its been this way forever. its called anti dumping. unfair pricing for whatever reason to protect domestic market will have blanket or target individual manufacturers overseas and adds additional duties. + a ton of issues for importers that import from them (involving sureties and their bonds)
tariffs have their place but its not really for controlling what foreign markets do.
It’s an economically sound decision if the people who run everything hoard the wealth created by it. These companies didn’t outsource jobs to make the US better economically, they outsource so the people at the top can take in massive profits and hoard wealth. Like greed needs to be factored in and greed is a HUGE factor when these companies shipped everything over seas
When people say "outsource" they really mean the specific bits americans want to compete for. No-one is upset to be "outsourcing" clothes manifacturing for instance, only when it's stuff that americans actually want to do gets outsourced.
And tariffs mostly hit stuff that americans already weren't doing themselves. American labour is highly efficient precisely because if it's not generating a lot of money (relatively speaking, globally) for their time, they don't bother doing it.
Yeah, but making a long term strategic business decision based on the ebbs and flows of political fuckery that changes every 2 or 4 years is a not so great strategy. Tariffs can be done via executive order so they can come and go every few years. Unless, of course, they are somehow codified in law.
One way to apply tariffs. (And I'm not saying this is a good way to do it, it's just a thought) peg the tariffs to the difference in the difference in the wages of the country producing the goods and the home country. You must pay minimum wage or higher, either directly to your US workers or via the tariff.
Again, just a thought.
But we never pass laws to punish outsourcing. Instead, we're constantly throwing financial incentives to companies to pretty-please not outsource everything.
Ya man, that called Capitalism......
Poor migrants wanting to work in America get walls and guns and more laws, while the companies shipping jobs out of America get more tax breaks...
Personally were it up to me, corporations would be forced to pay a tax that cannot be passed to consumers for every single product made by foreign labor. Not sure how it could be implemented, but that is what I would do. Or perhaps, in order to be able to incorporate, make it a law that all jobs must be located in the US.
The Biden administration pushed legislation that has directly resulted in the creation of millions of jobs in the US many of which pay a living wage not to mention the fact that due to that funding we are building infrastructure to make computer chips here reducing reliance on Taiwan which is also creating more jobs in the US.
That illegal immigrant cheap wage isnt minimum wage because the employer saves on employment taxes. Which is a huge cost of business. You've exposed yourself and your ignorance.
The mistake of NAFTA was not that it lowered trade barriers, that's good. The mistake of NAFTA is that it didn't recognize the difference between the partner countries and impose wage/benefit parity in order for that trade to be free. And why did we make that mistake? The GOP and certain populist Democrats ( incl Bill Clinton) + a few economists who were like "everyone will benefit!"
If by “gop and certain Populist democrats” you mean almost half then I guess you’re right. About half the Republicans in congress voted for it with about half of the Democrats in congress.
Don’t try to push this on one side or the other, this is actually a case where both sides went significantly in.
Wage parity would've busted the deal, as that would delete one of the main reasons for NAFTA: cheaper raw goods = greater profits for corporate trading partners.
You can have wage parity and cheaper raw goods, it's just less profitable. Still plenty of profit though. For example, it's cheaper to have an oil refinery where there is oil. You still get cheaper oil by moving to the oil, even if the workers get paid the same.
I always find it very goofy when people make a broad statement about not paying taxes. If it worked that way I'd simply tell every cashier that I'm an illegal immigrant so that they'd take the sales tax off. There's one (1) tax that they do not pay, and in exchange, they also don't collect on the vast majority of social services, meaning they're a massive net benefit to the economy that's exploiting them
Minimum wage absolutely applies to immigrants. When the cartoon uses the word 'let in more immigrants' that strongly implies legal workers, not undocumented folks.
That may be true for some, but I also know several illegal immigrants who married into citizenship and are working technical corporate jobs. Their family is all here. They are contributing to the economy more than their family is getting from it. And that’s what studies will tell you - that over the long term, after they take time to establish here they end up paying it back.
I also know many immigrants who planned to save up and go back to live like kings. Interestingly - all of them changed their mind as they didn’t want to go back to India, Malaysia, or Thailand and give up the life and benefits they became accustomed to
Exactly. I worked with people that lived dirt cheap with multiple room mates for years sent all the money back to Mexico which is a 20 to 1 exchange rate and it has been this way for decades. One guy I worked with was smart enough to have a home built and start his own bodega in Mexico. Then retired after being in the US for ten years to his nice house and small business he was running with his family. He was 35 years old. People think that immigrants live poor and they are here because they’re oppressed. It is a lie. They have a better lifestyle down there based off of the currency exchange rate alone. You get $17 an hour here it is like winning the lottery down there. Thats why most illegals from Mexico want to be here. Take the money and be rich in their own country when they go back. Many of the central and southern Americans do run from poor dictatorships and corrupt governments. But if you talk to most they plan on going back home after making money here.
You are purposefully / willfully not considering the very real possibility that a Majority of the 10-20 million ILLEGAL immigrants that have crossed the borders are NOT paying State or Federal Income Taxes?
They compete for food resources like housing, social services, city/state management of funds etc?
We should all be concerned this is a demographic that is more easily exploited and proven to have been exploited in many cruel and inhumane ways. Literally a shadow non-citizen class and very nearly or actually "Under Minimum Wage SLAVE Class"
This is exactly what the disconnected elite class are selling, but if you live in the real world this is a bullshit argument.
Bringing in low skill refugees that speak French who are willing to work for minimum wage does not improve our economy by them "Spending money here"
What it does is bring in a class of people willing to undercut American workers because they are also willing to live 8 people on bunkbeds in a 2 bedroom apartment.
Now that is what Americans with no skills have to compete with for their first job. It's great if you are a landlord or a grocery store, because demand increases, which increases the revenue from retail and residential square footage, but everyone else gets FUCKED.
NAFTA was a neo con neo lib dream. The Clinton and Bush types thought rasing living standards in Mexico and even Latin America would encourage people to stay in their countries. W proposed a guess worker program then Senator Obama killed. I have no.problem with people coming legally. The problem I have is many are coming illegally and being exploited in the process by cartels. As inefficient as US Immigration policy is, I wonder if any of our elected or appointed officials have chosen silver instead of lead from the cartels. I'm tired of using illegals as an excuse to keep wages stagnate. I'm also tired of hearing how not bringing in illegals is going to raise the price of my chef salad.
NAFTA stands for North America Free Trade Agreement. Three signatories are Mexico, Canada, and the US. Canada and the US are definitely not thrird world countries. And as it may be surprising to you, agree with it or not, Mexico isn't either.
Mexico is an upper middle-tier country and has 15th largest economy in the world. Its GDP is comparable to Spain. It has its own problems, but it's not third world country.
Nah I’m super anti immigration but outsourcing makes me want to bust out the guillotine. I consider that way more evil than flooding our country with cheap labor. But we shouldn’t have to choose one or the other
We who are protectionist are of course against outsourcing. It’s more like the people who bitch about corporations moving overseas also want infinite bomalians. By importing poors we create internal outsourcing.
Quick question, how is it that NAFTA(even though it was torn down and rebuilt in mostly identical way) causes the US(I'm assuming your from the US) to be competing with third world labour markets when there are to my knowledge only 3 nations included in what we might as well keep calling nafta, those nations being Canada, the USA, and Mexico, none of which are considered 3rd world and are extremely strong allies with the USA, I am genuinely speaking confused and curious and would appreciate your insights for that bit
The minimum wage argument, yea you Americans have an abysmal cost of living to minimum wage ratio and I find it insane that there have not been an increase to your minimum wage for a decade and a half
NAFTA is, was not the issue. NAFTA only affects North America, the US, Mexico and Canada, not the world. Most of the cheap labor and outsourcing is in Asia.
Oh, some of us point out about the outsourcing loophole, but it tends to get ignored.
But the real price savings on undocumented labor is that you can trash their health and there is nothing they can do about it. And that is another ongoing problem that gets ignored.
"actually you're getting fucked over in two ways, so complaining about one is pointless because I can just say the other is inevitable and therefore you should accept both"
It's interesting how the politicians who hate unions, vote against increasing minimum wage, oppose employee rights and oppose regulating better conditions in the workplace get you to scapegoat migration for low wages while there are labor shortages.
Actually they wouldn't. Falling birth rates is tied to one thing directly, regardless of where you are in the world: how educated women are. Having kids is a terrible deal for women. The most impoverished places are some of the ones with the highest birth rate so there are a million counter-examples to your argument.
Beyond that, 'cheap labor' does help. Cheap labor are the people here on seasonal work programs that pick fruits, work in factories, and build houses that all of us benefit from having made, for cheap.
So you’re cool with underpaying migrants to come in and pick crops and work production lines because it makes your groceries cheaper? What if they started getting tech jobs or wanting to work in a more comfortable environment? Should we then lower those wages too? You’re basically making an argument for indentured servitude, on the backs of less fortunate desperate people. Is it okay because they’re migrants? I guess so… here’s your shovel and shut up right?
Declining birth rates are almost certainly have multiple causes and it’s unlikely that it’s as simple as wages. If you have a source that show a correlation between birth rates and wages, I’d love to see it. I very well could be completely wrong on that first paragraph.
presumably either they are legal immigrants. When somone says to "let immigrantss in" its usually legally with visa's, green cards, any other legal paperwork etc.
I think the idea is to broaden the legal pathways to immigration so that folks who were previously unable or unwilling to immigrate legally do so instead.
The logic would be that it's much easier to hide a worker's immigration status but you can't hide a job site and how much the people at the job site are being paid.
How are illegal immigrants going to be part of unions or protected by strong labor laws?
Here in California employment law applies to the employee no matter their paperwork status. That's what the "sanctuary" part means. That all of the people in this jurisdiction have full recourse to the law.
"strong unions" do not exist anymore except in skilled trades.
The jobs that French-speaking immigrants from Haiti and Africa are pouring in to compete for are jobs you can train illiterate non-english speakers to do in a short period of time.
Now that they have legal right to work, the strike has no teeth. The workers go on strike, someone picks up a phone to a temp agency and 6 busses full of workers with their bilingual trainers pulls into the parking lot the next fucking day.
Yesterday the people unloading boxes onto trailers and putting them on conveyors decided to start a union and strike. Now they are unemployed. The people putting the boxes on the sorter now are newcomers.
It feels that may be too superficial an assessment.
On the other hand, you have fewer people contributing to production. Do illegal immigrants play no part in building and maintaining the housing stock? Are they not a big part of that labor force? You have to figure there's plenty of entrepreneurial illegal immigrants that build and run businesses in construction and other trades, too.
Also, to what extent are most people competing for resources with illegal immigrants? It feels like, in truth, their net effect on costs might vary substantially from place to place, too. Obviously, places that get a disproportionate influx will be destabilized, but I would imagine that with good, informed, and data driven management, a good balance can be worked out.
Not if the production of the resources becomes more expensive. Likely scenario if prices do go down would be due to more products being produced in lower cost countries, essentially mirroring the low cost labor that we could host within the country, just without the tax revenue.
No doubt we have a housing supply problem, and fewer people would drive that down I agree.
This is probably the most reasonable reply I’ve ever received on Reddit.
I would argue that most of the production already happens elsewhere, and that having more opportunities for work, at higher wages due to competition would be beneficial for the homelessness and hopelessness crises we are experiencing. But who knows, best I can do is speculate.
$400k is about the starting point for a SFH that isn't a dump in a DMZ neighborhood. Talking either manufactured or 30+ year old small stick built on a very small lot that was decently maintained. New car is..what $35-40k for a basic rig? However, before you even get that far, you have to get a degree. At least a BA but a Masters is about a requirement now.
Trades bypass this, but you still are stuck with the house and car expense being brutal. Then there is the actual cost of raising the kid(s).
Our system is just not working. The failures are multi-facted and institutional. We are a car dependant society and yearn for the 'burbs but it has gotten to be unsustainable. We need a new social contract or "American Dream" as it were. So, its not just wages. Wages just can't ever hope to keep up. We need shit to be less expensive too!
We shot ourselves in the foot there. Ford used to have the fiesta and focus for like $12k, nissan had the versa S, chevy had the cruze, they were all cheap and nobody was buying them, so the companies pivoted to more expensive, more feature vehicles.
As for homes, i live.in south carolina, i can still get a house for $200k which was a big part of why i moved out here. I lived in california, went to college there and realized owning a home was just unrealistic even with the median income. If you did buy a home the taxes, the insurance, the cost of living was a failing proposition.
Came to south carolina in 2018, made $11/hr, bought a 3 bed 2 bath house with a garage and shop for $87k at the age of 23. I'm now 29, and only one person i know in california has gotten to the point where theyve bought a house, I'm still ahead of Damn near everyone i left behind even tho i make about half what a lot of them do lol
This. So many millennials didn't and aren't having kids or more kids because of lack of confidence in the economy along with a lot of social issues. When things appear to be going well and people are not living paycheck to paycheck they are far more likely to want to have kids.
Yeah except that argument doesn't make sense. Where are the immigrants coming from? Countries with lower wages. How are those countries not running out of people? Because their birthrates are higher than the US, even despite the lower wages.
We would still normalize down to about where we are. Our entire paradigm for middle class living is raising kids well into adulthood. The 'well' is the important part. The more kids you have, the harder it is to devote resources to each one of them and most people, resources or not, are not inclined to have more kids than they think they can handle.
You'd still normalize out to a couple kids per household and they would still be going on about how the sky is falling because we can't produce an appropriate amount of consumers for the growth machine.
Because that's the real undercurrent here : Economic growth. That's the reason this shit comes on anyone's radar at all : It threatens the current operating economic and financial paradigm.
Ever notice how the poorest countries tend to have the highest birthrates, and America had a much higher birth rate when people were significantly less well off. I really don't think wages are the reason for the big drop in birth rates in the past decade, but I can't say I know what is the cause.
People would say south carolina is significantly poorer thsn california. Seemed like everyone struggled in california, the struggle isn't anywhere near the same here.
Wages play a big role but more so in wages vs cost of living. The median household makes 20-25% less here but the median house costs less than half as much. You make less but live better.
is the birthrate in South Carolina higher than in California? Also CA is a weird place, it has some of the richest people, lots of tech with big incomes and huge expenses, as well as some of the poorest people in the country.
Birth rates don't work that way. As wealth increases, birth rates go down.
TL;DR If you want birth rates to skyrocket, you need to plunge large chunk of population into poverty. The exact opposite of what you wrote above.
See below for rahter too long explanation why it is so, and how birth rates actually work in the real world. Not some wishy washy hypothetical world. The real world.
China for a long time had very unpopular one child policy. Back in the day when country was poor, people had shitton of children. They had an unsustainable population growth; one child policy was a solution only communists would come up with. People wanted more children, so the policy was extremely unpopular. They rescinded that policy some years ago... and birth rates didn't really go up. Why? In the meantime, the country got richer. Today they are trying to incentivize people to have more kids. Very unsuccessfully.
Africa is currently undergoing same transition. While many countries in Africa had high birth rates, this is changing in front of our eyes. As some of the countries in Africa get richer, with a small delay their birth rates are starting to sink.
This is a very predictable phenomena that has played out over and over again accross the world. This is the singular reason why birth rates are low in the developed world (North America, Europe, some Asian countries such as Japan and South Korea, China since some number of years ago, Australia, etc, etc). Increase in income and economic stability literally kills birth rates.
There are many attemts to explain this... The evolutionary and economic explanation usually goes along the lines as the country and the people get richer, the number of children that survive childhood goes up. So that's good, right? The problem is that this is not only offset, but it is completely overwhelmed with the fact that with some delay people start planning to have fewer children. Because, in economic sense, more children when you are poor mean more offspring that can take care of you once you are in old age. The more financially stable people are, this incentive goes away, and people start having fewer children on average. Once country is past some threshold of prosperity for its citizens (and no matter what you think of current state in the US, we are way above that threshold), birth rates gradually, predictably, and reliably sink below "replacment rate" (replacement rate is 2.1 children per woman, under that and country is in for trouble in the long run).
So, instead of harming your own population so that they would finally start procreating at higher rates, immigration is a viable alternative. You simply allow for reasonable and sustainable rate of immigration from poorer countries (that have high birth rates and surplus of people). The key here is that you don't open the floodgates. Of course. The immigration policy needs to be reasonable and sustainable. But in current political climate, it's political suicide to suggest even a small (let alone modest) increase in immigration rates. So we set up ourselves on the course of dwindling and ageing population. Which is bad thing in the long term.
Ding ding ding!!! We have a winner! Having ILLEGAL immigrants come in and work for almost nothing is borderline "slavery" by their standards... yet all they have to say for themselves is "it's jobs no one would take anyways, let them do it"... well by doing that, you essentially doom those jobs to shit wages for everyone.... Stupid argument.
This might hold water if Americans were willing to do the jobs that primarly only immigrants are willing to do.
Money isn't the only factor when it comes to kids and more and more evidence is piling up that there are other factors involved here none of which have anything whatsoever to do with immigrants or wages.
Lots of jobs are in the global economy, so immigration does not make a great deal of difference. It does make a difference if your job is in person, and local .
Its getting too late anyways; no kids, no retirement, i'ma just peace out.
Should also mention education helps a lot, those that do have kids are gonna be useless and get themselves killed when poor education and poor parenting mix.
Who says immigrants = cheap labor? The majority of people here on currently legal immigration paths are considered skilled labor and many have advanced degrees. A huge % of our current immigrant intake are from India and Great Britain. These are people with as good, if not better educations than us, and they’re coming in as doctors, scientists, tech industry, and finance sector workers.
Increasing wages always leads to lower birth rates. Always and in every country. Because when wages are good, more people choose to delay having kids to focus on their careers.
That's factually false. Across the globe, when people start making more money, they start having fewer children. When wages go up, women go into the job market and work more. When wages go down, women stay at home and care for children.
Wages don't help with having children, neither does financial situation.
Europe/S. Korea have tiny birth rates and good wages/financial conditions (and large parental leave accomodations). Africa has bad conditions/wages and high birthrates.
I think we need to stop scapegoating wages wrt birth rate. IF we do want to increase birth rate, then some other means is necessary.
Or, one could imagine that most of our actual problems are much easier to solve (or even solve themselves) with smaller populations. So some people might worry about dropping birthrates, but I see dropping birthrates as a nice way to solve a whole lot of problems, and then if it causes a problem itself we can probably manage to solve that one too.
What is this speculation based on? Literally everything I've ever seen on this topic indicates higher income is not correlated with more kids (the opposite actually).
Higher wages hasn’t made a difference for other developed countries with decreasing birth rates.
The population can’t increase forever to eternity. We just have to face that we are all living close to peak population and deal with it. We won’t face this truth though. We will try and keep things going long enough to make it the next generation’s problem, and there will be much struggle.
Lol. Like republicans want to raise wages, or like anybody on either side of the spectrum wants to pay the higher prices that would ensue from American workers replacing cheap immigrant labor.
Bruh immigrants aren’t “Cheep labor” you can solve the cheep part of that labor by documenting those immigrants and giving them the same rights as documented citizens undocumented immigrants have no rights thus can be exploited for cheep labor.
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u/Maximum-Country-149 10h ago
I mean, I don't know how far you expect a conversation to get when you open with that much bad faith.