4 ms·

it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars

it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?

mschuster91 1y ago
There's a difference between private companies and state-run companies / authorities. When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition. But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.
- rangestransform 1y ago
  https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandalized-days-after-similar-incident-at-lirr-amid-overtime-scandal/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandaliz... this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up against. american union labour should absolutely at least be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere, including european bus manufacturers.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  The thing is the public sector does have competition. We have a surplus of houses with XXL master bedroom suites in Arizona and a deficit of high speed rail. If they used union labor to build houses in Arizona and non-union labor to build high speed rail it would be the other way around. If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    The problem with rail isn't just labor, it's land acquisition. For the old freight lines that was done centuries ago, now that virtually all land has been claimed by someone it's much more expensive by default. On top of that, California got Musk disrupting everything with Hyperloop. You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US scales. Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do what the CCP wants. > Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice that has also come under fire for creating the same abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for cash" [2]. The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both of that has been tried in the US and in other countries worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay that for people from almost across the whole of Europe. > If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it. It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut. People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and I don't see that on the horizon at all. [1] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-america-moves-its-homeless/ https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-americ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
- myrmidon 1y ago
  I disagree with this. You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry. I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.
  - mschuster91 1y ago
    The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time, you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing facilities into making tanks and airplanes. That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power. And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
    - myrmidon 1y ago
      > The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons. First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability. But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient. Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks. > we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past! 100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
- jltsiren 1y ago
  Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be explicit. Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.
lenerdenator 1y ago
> it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition _What benefits_? > Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Been through Flint, MI lately? How about Gary, IN? Camden, NJ? East St. Louis, IL? > Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy? They already do have to compete with Airbus for pretty much everything that doesn't involve the US Government as a customer. That's the majority of the global aircraft market. How's that working out? The incumbent still got "lazy", not so much from entitlement but from a "need" to constantly reduce costs while simultaneously increasing revenues for the benefit of shareholders. You can only make aircraft building (or anything else) so profitable before you hit a ceiling. Boeing hit that ceiling, but of course, that doesn't matter. Number must go up. People in postindustrial economies cannot work as cheaply as people in developing economies because they must pay local prices for goods and services required for them to live. Going with the global competition because "it's cheaper" doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of people in the US who now don't have the ability to earn a living in the way that they did before while still being forced to consume using the value of their labor. Worse yet, it enriches people who don't have our national best interests in mind. This kind of "globalization benefits Americans" mindset is why we're in the mess we're in now with a tyrant in office and people having no faith in the economy or the future. It's not 1990 anymore. The experiment's over, it failed. Horribly.

mschuster91 1y ago

There's a difference between private companies and state-run companies / authorities. When a US airline thinks it's better for them to switch over to Airbus, by all means do so, that's competition. But taxpayer money should not be used to prop up other countries' economies unless explicitly designated that way (e.g. contributions to international agencies, economic aid), and certainly not if that replaces domestic union labor.

rangestransform 1y ago
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandalized-days-after-similar-incident-at-lirr-amid-overtime-scandal/ https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/mta-time-clock-vandaliz... this is the kind of domestic union labour you're up against. american union labour should absolutely at least be subject to competition from union labour elsewhere, including european bus manufacturers.
PaulHoule 1y ago
The thing is the public sector does have competition. We have a surplus of houses with XXL master bedroom suites in Arizona and a deficit of high speed rail. If they used union labor to build houses in Arizona and non-union labor to build high speed rail it would be the other way around. If it costs the public sector 3x as much to do things as the private sector people are going to turn against the public sector. Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The problem with rail isn't just labor, it's land acquisition. For the old freight lines that was done centuries ago, now that virtually all land has been claimed by someone it's much more expensive by default. On top of that, California got Musk disrupting everything with Hyperloop. You need to use eminent domain on straight lines as much as possible for HSR, both to keep costs low and to allow for actually high speeds, but that's risky for legal challenges and even then, horribly expensive at US scales. Yes, China has larger scales and still gets it done, but they a) just throw money at the problem and b) just do what the CCP wants. > Have crazy people screaming on the street corner in the city and people will retreat to the suburbs and order from Amazon instead of going shopping, order a private taxi for their burrito instead of going to a restaurant. That's not made easier by the fact that many cities just hand one way bus tickets to local homeless and nutjobs that bus them off to somewhere else [1], often to Democrat-run cities. In addition to that, there are almost no asylums left to take care of the nutjobs because a lot of them had been forced to shut down for sometimes atrocious violations of human rights many decades ago. Some areas now (ab)use jails and prisons to punish homeless people for being homeless, a practice that has also come under fire for creating the same abusive conditions, on top of scandals like "Kids for cash" [2]. The obvious solution to a lot of the problems with nutjobs, homeless and drug addicts would be a sensible drug policy combined with a "housing first" policy. Both of that has been tried in the US and in other countries worldwide to a sometimes massively positive effect, the problem is it has to be done federally - otherwise you end up like Frankfurt here in Germany, where Frankfurt pays the bill for drug addiction treatments and somewhat safe consumption facilities, but ended up having to pay that for people from almost across the whole of Europe. > If the public sector were efficient, responsive and pleasant people would be voting for more of it. It could be at least pleasant and responsive, the problem is you need (a lot) of money to pay for it, and no one likes paying taxes. It's a chicken and egg problem across Western countries - ever since up to the 80s, when neoliberal politics, trickle-down and lean-state ideology took over, public service has been cut and cut and cut. People don't believe any more that paying higher taxes would yield a net benefit because they lost all trust in politicians, and I don't see any way of fixing that - not without a stint of a good-willing dictator at least, and I don't see that on the horizon at all. [1] https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-america-moves-its-homeless/ https://awards.journalists.org/entries/bussed-out-how-americ... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kids_for_cash_scandal
myrmidon 1y ago
I disagree with this. You are basically asking taxpayers to fund an uncompetitive (i.e. wasteful) local industry. I think that's justifiable when you have high local unemployment (making the thing a job program, really), or when you really need the industry for strategic reasons (food and weapon manufacturing), but when that is not the case, doing this raises labor costs in general and hurts your actually useful and globally competitive industries, too.
- mschuster91 1y ago
  The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. A big ass diesel engine and literal tons of steel. And in war time, you can convert the bus and truck manufacturing facilities into making tanks and airplanes. That is why even something as manufacturing cars, trucks and airplanes is vital to be resilient. And in addition, it's bad enough how much of a grip China has on our balls with rare-earth metals, pharmaceuticals, chemicals and the threat of snacking a piece of Taiwan. India isn't much better, they keep buying up Russian oil despite sanctions. We don't need to hand them more economic power. And yes, resilience costs money. We need to explain that to our populations - and most importantly, we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past!
  - myrmidon 1y ago
    > The thing is, fundamentally there is very little difference between a truck, a bus and a tank. I can see your point, but I'm not buying this argument for multiple reasons. First, if you do blanket-protectionism like this, the actual strategic gain per "wasted" tax-dollar is abysmal. You could have just bought those singaporean busses, and spent the money on skunkworks and lithium mine subsidies instead if you actually needed that resilience and military capability. But secondly, I would argue that you really don't. What kind of war are you even anticipating where you would need massively scaled up tank production of all things? The US, currently, could fight an offensive land war against the whole continent pretty much (regardless of foreign support), and for anything else tank production capabilities are more than sufficient. Being independent sounds really good on paper (and looks appealing when glancing e.g. at the European gas situation), but isolating your nation economically has a really shitty track record, historically, especially when you are not sitting on top of a global empire to circumvent some of the drawbacks. > we need to make sure that our populations actually get some more of the wealth and income that is being generated every year so they can afford it, like in the past! 100% agree with that, but I think this is a (tax) policy failure most of all: my take is that in a capitalist society capital inevitably accumulates at the top, and regulatory backpressure (progressive taxation and antitrust law) is needed to keep the wealth/income distribution somewhat stable; the US has been shitting the bed in that regard for more than half a century now with predictable outcomes for wealth/income distribution (similar for other industrialized nations). Redistribution/balancing dynamics ("poor people getting paid for labor") are also getting weaker because unskilled labor lost lots of relative value.
jltsiren 1y ago
Taxpayer subsidies to domestic entities should also be explicit. Public sector organizations should focus on their operational requirements when deciding what to buy. When a transit agency wants to buy buses, it should not pay extra due to unrelated policy goals. If the best option is foreign, and there is an equivalent but more expensive domestic option, the price the agency pays should be the price of the foreign option. If politicians want to subsidize domestic labor, they can tell the transit agency to choose the domestic option and pay the rest from an appropriate budget.

lenerdenator 1y ago

> it's not a question of "offloading" it, it's a question of reaping the benefits of global competition _What benefits_? > Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Been through Flint, MI lately? How about Gary, IN? Camden, NJ? East St. Louis, IL? > Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy? They already do have to compete with Airbus for pretty much everything that doesn't involve the US Government as a customer. That's the majority of the global aircraft market. How's that working out? The incumbent still got "lazy", not so much from entitlement but from a "need" to constantly reduce costs while simultaneously increasing revenues for the benefit of shareholders. You can only make aircraft building (or anything else) so profitable before you hit a ceiling. Boeing hit that ceiling, but of course, that doesn't matter. Number must go up. People in postindustrial economies cannot work as cheaply as people in developing economies because they must pay local prices for goods and services required for them to live. Going with the global competition because "it's cheaper" doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of people in the US who now don't have the ability to earn a living in the way that they did before while still being forced to consume using the value of their labor. Worse yet, it enriches people who don't have our national best interests in mind. This kind of "globalization benefits Americans" mindset is why we're in the mess we're in now with a tyrant in office and people having no faith in the economy or the future. It's not 1990 anymore. The experiment's over, it failed. Horribly.