Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#1
Apparently, they're going to try using something called a "budget".

Only time will tell whether this radical process (that is being used by, you know, every other government in the world) will make it through the House or the Oval Office.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#2
The US government is already dealing with massive debt, and they now want to add another 300 billion to the deficit. I don't know what game Washington has been playing, but right now?

The US national debt is about 80% of the GDP. And rising.

I'll be honest; that debt is not solely the result of Republican spending, but a good case can be made it's a result of Republican economics. And now they want to make it worse.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#3
Yeah, nowadays the correct answer to the question "How would you balance the books: cut spending or raise taxes?" is "That's not an 'or' question any more; we have to do both." Less so in Canada, but we're at that point too.

Nobody's going to admit to that fact, though, until the World Bank steps in and bails out the country.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#4
Here's a radical notion: how about forcing companies to pay actual living wages so that we not only need to support people through welfare, but also gain more tax revenues.

Really, that's just one other way corporations here in American have been passing the buck... or rather, making the bucks, as it were.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#5
We need to deal with capital mobility in a way that neutralizes or blunts the effect of just moving operations when the regulatory regime is not favorable to their brand of exploitation, just "forcing them" to pay living wages is not going to work.

Another thing that we have to be aware of is the rise of automation which is eliminating manufacturing jobs, warehouse storage, and soon transportation. How is the US economy going to handle between 3.5 million to 8.7 million people who suddenly don't have jobs and cannot or refuse to train for anything else?

Some of my thinking on these issues come from reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corpora...rik+loomis
“We can never undo what we have done. We can never go back in time. We write history with our decisions and our actions. But we also write history with our responses to those actions. We can leave the pain and the damage in our wake, unattended, or we can do the work of acknowledging and fixing, to whatever extent possible, the harm that we have caused.”

— On Repentance and Repair: Making Amends in an Unapologetic World by Danya Ruttenberg
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#6
The ever increasing globalisation has created one major problem; shipping is so easy and inexpensive these days that it works for large companies to pay tariffs and duties on otherwise expensive to import things like luxury goods. Which means that it works for them to just pay someone in a low wage country to do the work and hike the price massively when selling when compared to the cost of transportation and manufacture.

If you want to do something about that your best bet isn't national. You need to think worldwide.

Or, you know, take the economic hit of increasing tariffs and international trade isolation. And if you do that the situation might not improve; personnel is one of the greatest cost factors. It has always been one of the greatest cost factors; people are expensive. It's just that only now that it's become comparatively cheaper to eat the large cost of automation infrastructure up front and letting the much lower costs of maintaining that infrastructure pay you back after some time.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#7
Here we you go again...
U.S. Congress scrambles to avert another shutdown ahead of Friday deadline
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#8
(02-17-2018, 02:26 PM)SilverFang01 Wrote: We need to deal with capital mobility in a way that neutralizes or blunts the effect of just moving operations when the regulatory regime is not favorable to their brand of exploitation, just "forcing them" to pay living wages is not going to work.

Another thing that we have to be aware of is the rise of automation which is eliminating manufacturing jobs, warehouse storage, and soon transportation. How is the US economy going to handle between 3.5 million to 8.7 million people who suddenly don't have jobs and cannot or refuse to train for anything else?

Some of my thinking on these issues come from reading this book: https://www.amazon.com/Out-Sight-Corpora...rik+loomis

Your argument assumes that manufacturing is still a viable course, even though you turn around and say that automation is going to eliminate jobs.

First of all, for every manufacturing job out there lost, there's another job in the IT field that opens up.  Data center technicians, website designers, programmers, PCB and IC designers, engineers...  Need I go on?

I have it on EXCELLENT authority that in a few years America is going to be desperately short on printed circuit board designers.  Source?  My dad, who's pretty much a PCB Design Guru.  You know, the guy I mentioned who did the QA on circuit boards that went into several of NASA's probes: New Horizons, and Juno.  He ensured that those designs were perfect before the CAD files ever went to the manufacturers, and that saved NASA and Johns Hopkins APL a load of time and money.  He knows the industry.  Many of the designers in the field right now are coming up on their retirement.  And there's not enough fresh faces in the field to make up for when all these older designers retire.

Oh, and most of these jobs?  They pay in the $20-25/hour range just at the opening levels.  All of these fields are CLAMORING for warm bodies.

And let's not forget vocational trades.  Welders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, masoners...  These fields are also desperately short-handed, and that is the reason why people in these fields can command such outrageous prices for labor.  Supply and demand, you know.  It applies to man hours available as well.

The future of America's industry is not in manufacturing.  It is in IT and services.

Let China, India, and Taiwan take all the manufacturing jobs they want.  There are plenty of other things Americans can do to make money - the majority of us just has to get past the mental block that they can't work in these fields - that they're too technical to learn.

We need fair wages.  We need more vo-tech schools.  We need more community colleges offering software engineering programs.  And we need government programs to help funnel people into these schools.

And yes, there have been programs in the past to help people realign their careers.  There were several at work in West Virginia, providing training to the coal miners out of a job to become software coders.  It was succeeding very nicely until Trump's administration cut their funding.

So don't tell me people are unwilling to change careers.  Don't tell me that businesses aren't willing to pay these wages.  The only ones that argue otherwise are the ones that stand to gain the most off of forcing the government to pick up the tab on everything they can get away with.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#9
(03-22-2018, 01:05 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: ...
Let China, India, and Taiwan take all the manufacturing jobs they want.  There are plenty of other things Americans can do to make money - the majority of us just has to get past the mental block that they can't work in these fields - that they're too technical to learn.
...

Or, in the case of welders, plumbers, carpenters, etc, that these jobs are somehow "beneath" them. They're all skilled jobs.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#10
That's why I said we need more Vo-Tech schools and more programs to funnel people into these schools.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#11
Sorry, I meant to say that those jobs are nothing to be ashamed of doing.
--
Rob Kelk

Sticks and stones can break your bones,
But words can break your heart.
- unknown
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#12
(03-22-2018, 01:05 PM)Black Aeronaut Wrote: Oh, and most of these jobs?  They pay in the $20-25/hour range just at the opening levels.  All of these fields are CLAMORING for warm bodies.

And let's not forget vocational trades.  Welders, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, masoners...  These fields are also desperately short-handed, and that is the reason why people in these fields can command such outrageous prices for labor.  Supply and demand, you know.  It applies to man hours available as well.

The biggest reason I can see why those vocational trades aren't filled is because blue collar jobs aren't respectable, or at least not as respectable as other, white collar jobs. It's not a US exclusive problem; Western Europe has a considerable shortage in the same areas, and is currently drawing considerably on the expanded manpower pool of the EU by bringing in Polish, Bulgarian and other former Eastern Block countries that have joined the European Union.

Either the culture needs to change to consider them respectable again, so that more children are interested in those jobs and more likely to join those professions, or we need to figure out machinery that supports these jobs, which means effective loss of jobs by replacement with automation for greater work efficiency by hour worked.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#13
For too many years the line fed to the masses has been that "You cannot have a decent job with a decent wage if you don't have a college degree." We here, understand that this is bullshit, but the majority of people belbelieve because that is what they were always told growing up. The next problem is that the teachers unions promote this thinking along with the belief that working with your hands to build or fix things is beneath the abilities of everyone who is a citizen intellectual and that those who do such things are beneath them, ie, lower class.

People accuse me of being anti-intellectual because I don't like their politics, don't like their attitudes, because I enjoy living a simpler life, and because I backed Trump. (This only after the last election.) To them i am every -ist in the book because I don't agree with them or bow and scrape to them, (because they feel they are my betters).

I have no problem with people who actually do know more than me, I actually enjoy learning new things, viewpoints and cultures. But gods please, don't think that just because you have some piece of paper from some group of people just as stuck up and rich as you that you know everything there is to know.
Wolf wins every fight but the one where he dies, fangs locked around the throat of his opponent. 
Currently writing BROBd

Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#14
Rajvik has identified several threads of discussion that are important here. One, the election of Trump was largely about social class, not economics. Americans like to pretend that we don't have social class outside of wealth, but that's ridiculous. He's also realized the original meaning of the word "meritocracy", where it's rule by the people who have received merits. Finally, he's gotten that people who are of high social class are really bad at talking to people of a lower class, and assert their own superiority as justification for why their opinions are right and others are wrong. I hear "these people don't know what's good for them" a lot.

Trump is perhaps bad at governing because he is lower class, though -- he doesn't know how to code switch effectively enough. International relations is a game that's always been played by the upper class, and because Trump is willing to break all of the rules, all of the time, he's not playing the same game as everyone else. Not checkers and chess, though -- no value judgements here. They're playing polo, while Trump is playing Calvinball. So it's not so much polo is a great game, it's just that him just being on the field is unhelpful to all of the other players. You can't change the rules to polo, or win at it, if you're not even trying to play it.

That said, if I back up a topic, I'm a software developer. It's pretty much you can write your own ticket if you're any good at it. Jobs are easy to find. A friend of mine had 3 months notice that he was going to be out of a job -- he started working at my company only 2 months later. It's a job that is definitely not for everyone, and we're kidding ourselves if we think putting programming boot camps out in coal country is going to help 55 year olds who are out of work. Less than 10% of them, I'm sure. The same goes for many other skilled labor jobs. (The only non-skilled job that seems to be growing rapidly is medical assistant, and I continue to marvel at how non-skilled they are.)

Our schools are designed to train manufacturing workers. You're punished if you can't keep a schedule, you're expected to do standard work, there's a daily cycle. Creativity and specialization are not encouraged. As a Democratic party official, I am definitely not going to say anything malicious about teacher unions, for teachers are the backbone of our educational system. But I can't help but say that we are preparing students nationwide for a future that simply does not exist. People say that university is necessary for a good job now, and that's generally true, but that's only because secondary education in the U.S. is simply not designed to produce workers for the jobs that are needed. Not for working with your hands or your head. The merit of the diploma is bullshit, sure, but people hire them anyway because they need assurance that the employee can think outside the high school model.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#15
This isn't a uniquely US problem, Australia suffers from the same thing. I myself spent two years in a university course I had no interest in, chosen almost at random, solely because my high school had spent six years beating it into my head that university was the only option and a manufacturing trade meant I was a failure as a human being. As a side note, after crashing out of uni, I've spent the past fourteen years in the same manufacturing job, and done reasonably well for myself. The shame schools and the media attach to trades is bullshit, and even though we've made progress in Australia over the past decade or so, especially with the growth of trade schools and traineeships, more still needs to be done.
Reply
RE: US Senate comes up with an idea to avoid future government shutdowns
#16
(03-25-2018, 06:50 AM)Matrix Dragon Wrote: This isn't a uniquely US problem, Australia suffers from the same thing. I myself spent two years in a university course I had no interest in, chosen almost at random, solely because my high school had spent six years beating it into my head that university was the only option and a manufacturing trade meant I was a failure as a human being. As a side note, after crashing out of uni, I've spent the past fourteen years in the same manufacturing job, and done reasonably well for myself. The shame schools and the media attach to trades is bullshit, and even though we've made progress in Australia over the past decade or so, especially with the growth of trade schools and traineeships, more still needs to be done.

Yeah, I've noticed that here myself in Colorado. Plus, there's the whole "WHY ARE YOU MAKING THAT FOR YOURSELF YOU COULD JUST GO DOWN TO THIS STORE AND BUY IT FOR CHEAPER ONCE YOU FACTOR IN YOUR HOURS SPENT!" Which doesn't help for those who even want to do it as a hobby.
"You know how parents tell you everything's going to fine, but you know they're lying to make you feel better? Everything's going to be fine." - The Doctor
Reply


Forum Jump:


Users browsing this thread: 1 Guest(s)