For example, in the early 90s, Caterpillar opened an engine plant in Northern Mexico to manufacture engine blocks. The product was trucked to an Illinois engine plant where initially they had a 99% defective rate, and those were melted down and the scrap trucked back to Mexico. When the defect rate was down to something like 75%, the company moved the Illinois engine plant to Texas where the process continued. The Illinois engine plant sits idle in state of the art condition, except for the engineering and clerical support staff work at the site in an expanded wing, with IIRC 7,000 employed.
There are not three engine plant sites because of some superior manufacturing technique, this is a company seeking to gain from public policy inefficiency. And there are a few ways this might go, and possibly the most likely is that the American plants eventually close and move to Mexico, including the 7,000 professional and white collar jobs. Production engineering ultimately follows production. Everything could be moved back to Illinois, or stay the same or move to Texas. Relocation is not the obstacle it once was.
An American company selling widgets in Mexico will pays corporate taxes in the U.S. and a VAT in Mexico. Relocating a plant to Mexico means the corporation will pay a VAT. For about 20 years, the VAT was reduced on Mexico's border region to give incentives to relocate from the U.S. The more subtle forms employed by the biggest companies are to have the primary work performed in Mexico and shipped to the U.S. for assembly, in order to take advantage of the different tax treatments for income versus sales.
Trump did not use the word tariff last night, he said "incentives."
Well, I agree that his reference to VAT was meant to convey he was going to do something about it, either though trade renegotiation or tax reform. (Though the easiest tax reform would be to shift to a VAT)
I disagree that there is no problem. Mexico set a lower VAT on its Northern border to encourage companies to relocate(*), and when companies export goods from Mexico to the U.S. they get a rebate of VAT taxes paid in production of the good. When U.S. companies exports goods to Mexico, they pay a full VAT. Many multinationals set up joint operations on both sides of the Rio Grande as a tax maximization strategy against both countries tax systems. This is the Texas miracle.
(*) The VAT border differential I believe started in the early 90s and lapsed a couple of years ago, so this particular aspect is not a current issue.
If your point is that completely unskilled manufacturing jobs are disappearing or are already gone, I agree. When I worked on an assembly line 25 years ago, my job required me to watch a heat knife cut the top off of what would become a plastic bottle. About once an hour or two, the plastic would stick to the knife and I was supposed to clear it to allow bottles to continue down the line to be finished and labeled by other workers. That company still exists, but its hard to imagine the job still exists, nor likely the jobs immediately up and down the line from me. But I do work for a number of growing manufacturing companies today, and they are smaller (family-owned), rely more on work-stations than conveyor belts, and employ people with vocational math skills, who I would consider semi-skilled.
My points: (1) While these changes were taking place, No Child Left Behind was directing resources away from high school vocational programs that provided an entry point for these jobs. (2) If workplace/environmental standards are not flexible enough to allow for the benefits of customized manufacturing, these jobs will move to Canada or wherever the regulatory system is less puritanical. (3) If other countries have tax advantages that make up for the added transportation costs (particularly NAFTA countries), the employers will locate elsewhere.
Yesterday morning 538 had Trump's chance of winning at 54.5% (screenshot here), but by the afternoon positions had reversed. I couldn't tell in the A.M. what state had moved; Colorado was bisected on the snake chart, but still showed Clinton as 55% likely to win Colorado.
I think the important point is that "Western companies can bring those same customizable technologies back home, and eliminate their overseas factories altogether." This will especially be the case if Western policies are modified to eliminate tax preferences for overseas production, to permit regulatory flexibility for dynamic processes, and to provide education paths for non-academic careers.
Just bought a printer from that company, but didn't feel like messing with tanks. The existence of that product though made me feel that their claims about cartridge life might not be totally fraudulent.
McDonalds was hit with a large punitive damage award because (a) their coffee was kept much hotter than industry standards; (b) their coffee could cause third degree burns within seconds when spilled or drunk; (c) McDonalds had 700 previous burn complaints but decided to do nothing about it because this was a relatively small number; (d) the warning that coffee was hot was inadequate because the coffee was much hotter than a reasonable consumer would expect; and (e) McDonalds defense was that it saw its ultimate consumer as drinking their coffee at work, but did not warn vehicular consumers that they were not selling to them.
This was pretty classic punitive damage case, defendant was not going to change its behavior because it was making too much money with the status quo, and the cost to pay for people's injuries was pretty small.
I think fact-checking political candidates is rarely useful. People seem to rarely quote Trump when they accuse him of lying, most likely because they are merely repeating third-hand tweets or Trump's statements are oblique enough not to be truly falsifiable. And the corrections don't tend to be important, a wall is like a fence, but there are differences; crime may be bad in certain cities, but crime isn't as bad as it was 20 years ago; or some Muslim Americans were celebrating 9/11, but not thousands and thousands.
I don't necessarily agree w/ Saul that 80% of the electorate will vote on party-lines regardless of the candidate; I might go for 70%, but at this point the remaining available votes are not forming opinions on policy points and almost certainly don't care about NATO. If 86% of college students don't know about U.S. commitments to NATO, (source), then perhaps the media deserves some of the blame.
I believe the video should not be released to the public until investigators can take statements from all of the eye witnesses. One potential take-away from the Ferguson mess was that witnesses, in many cases coached to avoid police investigators, had their memories/ recollections influenced by the media and ultimately discredited themselves perhaps innocently. There is a reasonable amount of time to do this, measured in weeks if not days.
I think now that the major parties have nominated two unpopular candidates (presumably for the first time), we need to think about how to do a lot of things earlier. I don't think the taxes/medical record disclosure complaints have any meaning after the convention. Ought to be a law about disclosures one-year out, even if unconstitutional.
But by my way of thinking opening up the debate to different viewpoints weeks before the election when the system is essentially rigged for two is like having the conversation after the field has been planted.
I think the only reason to open the debate at this stage to third-parties is if they are potential spoilers, and if one believes in informed spoiling. I tend to think that informed spoilage will make the parties better/stronger and one of my underlying preferences where I assume we differ is that I want the two parties to be better/stronger.
I think its pretty obvious that the community w/ the meat packing plant I mentioned is better-off with the Africans than the Mexicans on the basis of intent to stay. Probably a rough stereotype would be would you like to buy a home in a neighborhood of renters or owners? Also, what is the Keynsian multiplier effect from immigrants sending a percentage of their salary home?
The local meat-packing industry cut wages across the board 25% and reached a 100% job-turnover rate that could only fill by sending recruiters to the Mexican border. These were not jobs Americans weren't willing to do.
Italians in the early 20th century had high rates of reverse migration, but I think that is a failure of assimilation, to which one can probably point at multiple causes. But transportation costs were still much lower than previously. My wife's grandfather immigrated from England after WWI and they were still going back to England every few years on his working-class salary. Their last trip before WWII, Katharine Hepburn looked after my father-in-law for a short while.
The problem with those who on a temporary basis is that they are not investing in America or the communities they live-in. In many cases, they are sending the money they make to another country, acting as a reverse stimulus to the community, while their children encumber the public school systems.
Lack of assimilation is a problem, and the problem starts with groups of people that don't intend to assimilate even if for entirely rational reasons. But if you don't consider the people who leave the country, either as always planned or because they are having difficulty . . . assimilating, then your analysis is going to be the product of survival bias. This is a border issue, but as the cost of transportation decreases and the government subsidizes immigration, it becomes larger.
Mexican immigration is greatly different than previous immigration because so many of them only intend to stay for a period of time. See the second article in the OP. That wasn't really an option for immigrants coming from further away when transportation costs were higher.
A local city with a meatpacking plant had two waves of immigration, and when the immigrants were polled: Do you think you'll stay in the U.S.? 42% of Mexicans said yes, compared with 75% of West-Africans (Francophones). Mexican-Americans are refusing to assimilate because being in the U.S. is just a temporary gig, and the cost of immigration and reverse immigration is very low.
Nate Silver: "Democrats Should Panic … If The Polls Still Look Like This In A Week" Link I think the trend will reverse and stabilize, but if this were the Republican primaries and the media was hijacked for 24 hours on a Trump announcement on birther issues, I would think he was punking them and taking up all of the oxygen from his opponents.
On “Postmortem: Parsing Policy Platforms and Personalities”
For example, in the early 90s, Caterpillar opened an engine plant in Northern Mexico to manufacture engine blocks. The product was trucked to an Illinois engine plant where initially they had a 99% defective rate, and those were melted down and the scrap trucked back to Mexico. When the defect rate was down to something like 75%, the company moved the Illinois engine plant to Texas where the process continued. The Illinois engine plant sits idle in state of the art condition, except for the engineering and clerical support staff work at the site in an expanded wing, with IIRC 7,000 employed.
There are not three engine plant sites because of some superior manufacturing technique, this is a company seeking to gain from public policy inefficiency. And there are a few ways this might go, and possibly the most likely is that the American plants eventually close and move to Mexico, including the 7,000 professional and white collar jobs. Production engineering ultimately follows production. Everything could be moved back to Illinois, or stay the same or move to Texas. Relocation is not the obstacle it once was.
"
An American company selling widgets in Mexico will pays corporate taxes in the U.S. and a VAT in Mexico. Relocating a plant to Mexico means the corporation will pay a VAT. For about 20 years, the VAT was reduced on Mexico's border region to give incentives to relocate from the U.S. The more subtle forms employed by the biggest companies are to have the primary work performed in Mexico and shipped to the U.S. for assembly, in order to take advantage of the different tax treatments for income versus sales.
Trump did not use the word tariff last night, he said "incentives."
"
Well, I agree that his reference to VAT was meant to convey he was going to do something about it, either though trade renegotiation or tax reform. (Though the easiest tax reform would be to shift to a VAT)
I disagree that there is no problem. Mexico set a lower VAT on its Northern border to encourage companies to relocate(*), and when companies export goods from Mexico to the U.S. they get a rebate of VAT taxes paid in production of the good. When U.S. companies exports goods to Mexico, they pay a full VAT. Many multinationals set up joint operations on both sides of the Rio Grande as a tax maximization strategy against both countries tax systems. This is the Texas miracle.
(*) The VAT border differential I believe started in the early 90s and lapsed a couple of years ago, so this particular aspect is not a current issue.
"
Wall vs. fence. (though I don't recall that coming up last night)
Also, one is the IRAQ WAR candidate and the other is the iraq war candidate.
On “Morning Ed: World {2016.09.27.T}”
If your point is that completely unskilled manufacturing jobs are disappearing or are already gone, I agree. When I worked on an assembly line 25 years ago, my job required me to watch a heat knife cut the top off of what would become a plastic bottle. About once an hour or two, the plastic would stick to the knife and I was supposed to clear it to allow bottles to continue down the line to be finished and labeled by other workers. That company still exists, but its hard to imagine the job still exists, nor likely the jobs immediately up and down the line from me. But I do work for a number of growing manufacturing companies today, and they are smaller (family-owned), rely more on work-stations than conveyor belts, and employ people with vocational math skills, who I would consider semi-skilled.
My points: (1) While these changes were taking place, No Child Left Behind was directing resources away from high school vocational programs that provided an entry point for these jobs. (2) If workplace/environmental standards are not flexible enough to allow for the benefits of customized manufacturing, these jobs will move to Canada or wherever the regulatory system is less puritanical. (3) If other countries have tax advantages that make up for the added transportation costs (particularly NAFTA countries), the employers will locate elsewhere.
On “2016 Presidential Debate No. 1”
Yesterday morning 538 had Trump's chance of winning at 54.5% (screenshot here), but by the afternoon positions had reversed. I couldn't tell in the A.M. what state had moved; Colorado was bisected on the snake chart, but still showed Clinton as 55% likely to win Colorado.
On “Morning Ed: World {2016.09.27.T}”
I think the important point is that "Western companies can bring those same customizable technologies back home, and eliminate their overseas factories altogether." This will especially be the case if Western policies are modified to eliminate tax preferences for overseas production, to permit regulatory flexibility for dynamic processes, and to provide education paths for non-academic careers.
On “Morning Ed: Money {2016.09.26.M}”
Just bought a printer from that company, but didn't feel like messing with tanks. The existence of that product though made me feel that their claims about cartridge life might not be totally fraudulent.
"
McDonalds was hit with a large punitive damage award because (a) their coffee was kept much hotter than industry standards; (b) their coffee could cause third degree burns within seconds when spilled or drunk; (c) McDonalds had 700 previous burn complaints but decided to do nothing about it because this was a relatively small number; (d) the warning that coffee was hot was inadequate because the coffee was much hotter than a reasonable consumer would expect; and (e) McDonalds defense was that it saw its ultimate consumer as drinking their coffee at work, but did not warn vehicular consumers that they were not selling to them.
This was pretty classic punitive damage case, defendant was not going to change its behavior because it was making too much money with the status quo, and the cost to pay for people's injuries was pretty small.
On “Journalism vs. Trumpism: On Playing the Gentleman’s Game”
I think fact-checking political candidates is rarely useful. People seem to rarely quote Trump when they accuse him of lying, most likely because they are merely repeating third-hand tweets or Trump's statements are oblique enough not to be truly falsifiable. And the corrections don't tend to be important, a wall is like a fence, but there are differences; crime may be bad in certain cities, but crime isn't as bad as it was 20 years ago; or some Muslim Americans were celebrating 9/11, but not thousands and thousands.
I don't necessarily agree w/ Saul that 80% of the electorate will vote on party-lines regardless of the candidate; I might go for 70%, but at this point the remaining available votes are not forming opinions on policy points and almost certainly don't care about NATO. If 86% of college students don't know about U.S. commitments to NATO, (source), then perhaps the media deserves some of the blame.
On “Briefly, On Disbelief: Keith Lamont Scott and Terrence Crutcher”
I believe the video should not be released to the public until investigators can take statements from all of the eye witnesses. One potential take-away from the Ferguson mess was that witnesses, in many cases coached to avoid police investigators, had their memories/ recollections influenced by the media and ultimately discredited themselves perhaps innocently. There is a reasonable amount of time to do this, measured in weeks if not days.
"
Manslaughter and other lesser crimes were charged in the Freddie Gray cases as well; the State simply did not have evidence of any underlying crime.
On “The Debatekeepers”
I think now that the major parties have nominated two unpopular candidates (presumably for the first time), we need to think about how to do a lot of things earlier. I don't think the taxes/medical record disclosure complaints have any meaning after the convention. Ought to be a law about disclosures one-year out, even if unconstitutional.
"
Without pixels where would we be?
But by my way of thinking opening up the debate to different viewpoints weeks before the election when the system is essentially rigged for two is like having the conversation after the field has been planted.
I think the only reason to open the debate at this stage to third-parties is if they are potential spoilers, and if one believes in informed spoiling. I tend to think that informed spoilage will make the parties better/stronger and one of my underlying preferences where I assume we differ is that I want the two parties to be better/stronger.
On “Morning Ed: Society (2016.09.21.W}”
Can one defeat the celebrity candidate with the power of celebrity, or will it just make him stronger, or at least more "relevant."?
On “The Debatekeepers”
But Anderson built up his support in the Republican primaries, then withdrew on April 24, 1980, after he had basically peaked with no path forward.
I assume the "Anderson" type does not exist any more under current spoiler laws.
On “Morning Ed: The Americas {2019.09.20.T}”
I think its pretty obvious that the community w/ the meat packing plant I mentioned is better-off with the Africans than the Mexicans on the basis of intent to stay. Probably a rough stereotype would be would you like to buy a home in a neighborhood of renters or owners? Also, what is the Keynsian multiplier effect from immigrants sending a percentage of their salary home?
"
The local meat-packing industry cut wages across the board 25% and reached a 100% job-turnover rate that could only fill by sending recruiters to the Mexican border. These were not jobs Americans weren't willing to do.
"
Italians in the early 20th century had high rates of reverse migration, but I think that is a failure of assimilation, to which one can probably point at multiple causes. But transportation costs were still much lower than previously. My wife's grandfather immigrated from England after WWI and they were still going back to England every few years on his working-class salary. Their last trip before WWII, Katharine Hepburn looked after my father-in-law for a short while.
"
The problem with those who on a temporary basis is that they are not investing in America or the communities they live-in. In many cases, they are sending the money they make to another country, acting as a reverse stimulus to the community, while their children encumber the public school systems.
"
Lack of assimilation is a problem, and the problem starts with groups of people that don't intend to assimilate even if for entirely rational reasons. But if you don't consider the people who leave the country, either as always planned or because they are having difficulty . . . assimilating, then your analysis is going to be the product of survival bias. This is a border issue, but as the cost of transportation decreases and the government subsidizes immigration, it becomes larger.
"
Mexican immigration is greatly different than previous immigration because so many of them only intend to stay for a period of time. See the second article in the OP. That wasn't really an option for immigrants coming from further away when transportation costs were higher.
A local city with a meatpacking plant had two waves of immigration, and when the immigrants were polled: Do you think you'll stay in the U.S.? 42% of Mexicans said yes, compared with 75% of West-Africans (Francophones). Mexican-Americans are refusing to assimilate because being in the U.S. is just a temporary gig, and the cost of immigration and reverse immigration is very low.
On “The Cubs Win the Pennant!”
Those are just numbers. You play baseball with grits, kid. Next thing you're going to tell me is that it matters is if it's an even year.
On “Linky Friday #184: Here On Planet Earth”
Nate Silver: "Democrats Should Panic … If The Polls Still Look Like This In A Week" Link I think the trend will reverse and stabilize, but if this were the Republican primaries and the media was hijacked for 24 hours on a Trump announcement on birther issues, I would think he was punking them and taking up all of the oxygen from his opponents.
On “The Cubs Win the Pennant!”
Unfortunately, the best Cardinal team in my lifetime helped lift that curse. Baseball can be weird.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.