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No, I am not being paid by the car lobby
There has been a whole splat of blogs recently about jobs leaving the country and the state of Ohio. Rowsey (I think I got his name right this time) had a good post about it that was then responded to by Lisa over at glass city jungle. The thing is, they both missed on what the problem actually is: We do not have a problem with outsourcing nor the economy (well, we have a problem with both, but neither contributes much to the jobs leaving the state), we have a problem with consumers.
Near the middle of the movie “Roger and Me” (I am well aware of the grammatical problems with this title) there is a sign on an overpass in Flint, Michigan: “Drive foreign cars and die”. Really, that seems to be the problem that this state is having. If you go out and buy a Toyota Prius, The Honda Fit, or the (you will only see one in person in your life) Lamborghini then you are the problem. Me, I drive around on my cute Ford Focus, a totally kick ass car. So, when a plant from one of the non-ohio made locations (some 'foreign' cars are okay, and the Prius will be made in Mississippi in 2010) what else would we expect. Stop buying your cars from foreign countries and our economy and jobs WOULD STAY HERE.
Lets take this one step further. If there is a product made in the US then buy it from the US. Unless there is a huge difference in quality, why would you buy a product from out of the country. Not only would you be helping to harm our economy, our jobs, and our state, you would be assisting in all forms of immoral activities. The same goes to where you shop. Buy from the places that only higher legal Americans, places that treat their employees right, places that are not Wal*Marts. If we do this, we can turn out economy around as a country, and all of us would benefit from that.
Remember children, Only you can prevent the economy from falling further.
As always, please leave any comments, no matter how large or how small about the contents of this blog post. Also, please leave any comments/suggestions about this site/post as a whole.
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Thanks,
Robert M. Barga,
Editor of http://whalertly.blogspot.com/
barga.24@osu.edu
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11 comments:
Robert - I agree with you to an extent. But I'm not sure how that helps jobs in the health insurance industry.
Robert - Despite some stats, I have found lots of high paying jobs on employment sites -
http://www.realmatch.com
http://www.indeed.com
http://www.simplyhired.com
I see 100K, 150K and 200K jobs
The problem for me is I live in a very rural area and the closest store is Wal-Mart. With gas at $4.00 per gallon I can't afford to drive 35 miles to purchase something that I can purchase at Wal-Mart 13 miles from me.
We try to make all of our shopping trips into the city at one time and buy from other stores but sometimes we forget something or miscalculate.
I buy American whenever I can but it's not always easy to find American made products.
http://mountainsage.blogspot.com/
----------Robert - Despite some stats, I have found lots of high paying jobs on employment sites -
http://www.realmatch.com
http://www.indeed.com
http://www.simplyhired.com
I see 100K, 150K and 200K jobs------
The problem is not that we have no high paying jobs, it is that we are losing the lower jobs. Frankly, for every 100+K job we have we are probably losing about 10 or so 40K jobs. Which matter more to society?
----The problem for me is I live in a very rural area and the closest store is Wal-Mart. With gas at $4.00 per gallon I can't afford to drive 35 miles to purchase something that I can purchase at Wal-Mart 13 miles from me.
We try to make all of our shopping trips into the city at one time and buy from other stores but sometimes we forget something or miscalculate.
I buy American whenever I can but it's not always easy to find American made products.
http://mountainsage.blogspot.com/-----
That is understandable. If you can not help it, do not worry about it. The problem is, there are five Wal*Marts within 15 minutes of me, and everybody shops there. I do not understand how these people can shop there and then have bumper stickers about unions or health care or any of that
I have been looking for a job for almost 2 years. I stupidly quit the job I had for a number of reasons and haven't found anything.
---------I have been looking for a job for almost 2 years. I stupidly quit the job I had for a number of reasons and haven't found anything.-----------
While I do not know your specialization, pretty much every job is getting harder and harder to get. Really, the only growing ones are nursing, teaching, and IT, all of which require additional investment
For what it's worth, The Lamborghini dealer in Marysville is the nation's largest. Strange huh? So actually, you can see plenty of Lambos in Columbus. (I see several in the Short North all the time.) And of course, you can go out to Marysville and see the entire lineup. :-)
As for cars, I think we're beyond that now. Even if people were buying American cars, the US automakers would be employing way too many people. We're not that far off from Honda being the big dog in Ohio automaking.
The Japanese sell more than quality, they sell a style and substance the American automakers just didn't fully grasp. Sure, some people buy Priuses for the full economy...many buy it for what it says about them. We'll see how the Volt does. I'm trying to be positive about GM, but GM did a lot of this to itself. For a few years, Saturn was its brightest star, today, Saturn is becoming GM's division selling German made Opels. (Disclosure: I drive a Swedish made GM car, which, for what it's worth, has an engine made by GM of England and a transmission made by a Toyota subsidiary in Japan. It's kind of bizarre now that I reflect on it.)
Economically speaking (ignoring cars here for a moment) cheap goods from other countries has allowed for the insourcing of better jobs. Essentially, we're spending several percent less of GDP on certain goods, which are made out of the US for less money, and that several percent of GDP is now sucked up by healthcare, which is almost entirely a US based industry.
Essentially, we replaced garment works in North Carolina and vacuum cleaner makers in Canton with nurses in Cleveland.
This is not a perfect system. There are obviously losers involved--people can't suddenly turn around and become nurses overnight. (You noted that yourself.)
I guess the question does remain...if the outsourcing did not occur, would health care costs have gone up anyway? I don't really know yet.
I care less about health care costs and more about jobs in general. We can deal with health care later but we need jobs now. WHich is more important, your Medicine or your food?
I wouldn't be so dismissive of health care costs. In about 15 years, health care went from about 10-12% of GDP to nearly 20%. More than just becoming expensive, health care is "taking over" the US economy in an unprecedented way, eating the rest of the economic sectors alive.
Health care is more than expensive. It was only 1/10th of the American economy, now it's 1/5th. (Or, presented in another way, it was only 4 hours of the average workweek, now a full day of the workweek goes to pay for health care.)
It's extraordinary.
Did not realize that... wow
granted, i get health care, so it is a lot easier for me to look at it that way
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