A reality check for the United States

November 7, 2010

SouthAmerica: A reality check

The United States from China's perspective
http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/11/02/our_little_round_eyed_friends_will_buy_anything


.

 

Reality check for SA:

I dare you to move to China and live there for the next ten years. You know you won't. LOL

 

.

November 7, 2010

SouthAmerica: Reply to Fortune Teller

I can't speak Mandarin, but I love Chinese food.

By the way, here is more “Reality Check” for the USA:


*****


“Our Banana Republic”
By Nicholas D. Kristof
Published: November 6, 2010
The New York Times

In my reporting, I regularly travel to banana republics notorious for their inequality. In some of these plutocracies, the richest 1 percent of the population gobbles up 20 percent of the national pie.

But guess what? You no longer need to travel to distant and dangerous countries to observe such rapacious inequality. We now have it right here at home — and in the aftermath of Tuesday’s election, it may get worse.

The richest 1 percent of Americans now take home almost 24 percent of income, up from almost 9 percent in 1976. As Timothy Noah of Slate noted in an excellent series on inequality, the United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana.

…And if Republicans are worried about long-term budget deficits, a reasonable concern, why are they insistent on two steps that nonpartisan economists say would worsen the deficits by more than $800 billion over a decade — cutting taxes for the most opulent, and repealing health care reform? What other programs would they cut to make up the lost $800 billion in revenue?

You can read the entire article at:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/07/opinion/07kristof.html?_r=1


.

 

Thanks for posting SouthAmerica. I'm in a mood to put more jackasses on ignore today.

c 'ya. Or I guess not.

 

So what? Doctors, lawyers, architects small business owners make more than burger flippers. THAT'S ONE THING THAT HAS MADE AMERICA GREAT. Another thing which has made America great... ALL OF US HAVE THE CHANCE TO BECOME ONE OF THE 1%.

You can't have the great economic power of a Capitalist economy without winners.

(You don't think business owners in China make $Millions while their employees make $1/hr? Seems the only people who are worried about "income inequality" are Socialists and government tit-suckers.)

 

November 7, 2010

SouthAmerica: Reply to Scataphagos


Today the Financial Times (November 6 / 7 2010) had an interesting article on The Lex Column and the article said: “US's missing workers”

Quoting from that article: ....pay attention to the labour force participation rate. Only 64.4 per cent of working-age population either has a job or is actively searching for one. The proportion has fallen to the lowest since 1984 (when the job-shy were likely to be homemakers) – and the trend is still down. That is not good.

.

 

Capatalism out of control with one hell of a lot of corruption right now. You don't seem to understand the middle class is losing ground. CEOs of corporations ( including unsuccessful ones ) are taking in monstrous salaries and options they don't really earn.

Even worse is the political corruption.

If it was all above board and truely successful people were adding value to their companies it would be somewhat ok. But that's not the deal these days in most cases. You got idiots running the government ( eg Bush ), and idiots running Lehmann and Citigroup etc, and they all still think they deserve to be paid like demigods in your country. But their really huge losers running America into the ground.

System needs some work. No doubt about it. If the changes don't occur it won't be long before everyday American's will pay the bill.

 

You, like much of the left, don't know the difference between capitalism and cronyism. Your masters have indoctrinated you to believe that they are the same thing. Do your self a favor and become educated outside the bubble of the PC orthodoxy.

 

.
November 8, 2010

SouthAmerica: This article covers a subject that I have been writing about on my articles and postings for years.


***


The Economist - November 6, 2010
Schumpeter: “The other elephant” - Barack Obama thinks that the rise of India will be good for American jobs. There is another side to the story

...Yet the rise of new economic powers always brings problems as well as opportunities for incumbents. New companies displace old ones. New business models disrupt established ones. Comfortable workers in the rich world are forced to compete with hungrier ones in the poor world.

India is producing a legion of new global giants that are competing head-to-head with established American companies. Look at Arcelor Mittal and Tata Steel in steelmaking; Bharat Forge and Sundram Fasteners in car parts; Hindalco in aluminium rolling; and a host of companies, including Infosys, Tata Consulting Services (TCS), Cognizant and HCL Technologies, in information services. Twenty years ago India had no global companies worth mentioning. Today the Tata group earns 60% of its revenues abroad, and Indian companies ranging from natural-resource firms, such as Reliance Industries, to health-care companies, such as Pirmal Healthcare, have been snapping up American brands.

American companies are also setting up shop in India. Bangalore and Hyderabad have “electronic cities” crowded with America’s leading companies. In Bangalore Cisco spent $1 billion on its Globalisation Centre East and General Electric (GE) opened a swanky research centre. IBM employs more people in India than in the United States.

For American workers the most worrying thing about all this is the flight of brain-intensive jobs to India. Americans reconciled themselves to the loss of manufacturing jobs with the thought that they would keep the smart jobs. But they reckoned without two things: the power of the internet and the hunger of emerging-market companies.

India has long since turned itself into the world’s back-office—subjecting paper-processing hubs such as Kansas City to the same forces of competition that devastated former industrial cities such as Gary, Indiana. Now Indian-based companies are moving into an wider range of services: reading CT-scans and X-rays, processing legal documents and helping with animation. They are also moving into sophisticated niches. TCS and Infosys compete directly with IBM and Accenture in consulting. American companies are adding to the trend by moving more of their important operations to India: John Chambers, Cisco’s boss, has decreed that 20% of the firm’s leadership should be in Bangalore.

Companies in India are challenging American ones in an area that they have long considered their own—innovation. The Boston Consulting Group’s 2010 survey of innovation notes that the number of American companies on its list of top innovators is declining while the number of Indian companies is rising. It also points out that the Indian firms place a higher value on innovation than the American companies.

Most strikingly, Indian companies have produced a new type of innovation, variously dubbed “frugal”, “reverse” and “Gandhian”. The essence is to reduce the price of a product or service by a breathtaking amount—80% rather than 10%—by removing unnecessary bells and whistles. Tata Motors is selling its “people’s car” for $3,000; GE’s Indian arm offers a medical ECG machine for $400; Bharat Biotech sells a single dose of its hepatitis B vaccine for 20 cents and Bharti Airtel provides one of the cheapest wireless telephone services in the world. These frugal products are likely to disrupt established Western companies (including GE itself) by forcing them to engage in a bloody price war.

Luring them back

To add to this general turbulence Indian-based companies are also on a hiring binge. For decades America has gorged itself on a seemingly limitless supply of brilliant Indian PhD students and entrepreneurs. Half of Silicon Valley’s start-ups were either founded or co-founded by Indians. But these paragons are now returning en masse to the mother country (just as America makes life more difficult for immigrants). Why work for a sluggardly American firm when Infosys is growing at double digits? Why live in a flimsy bungalow in the Valley when an Indian company will provide you with a villa in a gated community, membership of a country club and a chauffeur-driven car?

http://www.economist.com/node/17414206?story_id=17414206&CFID=152853871&CFTOKEN=82180811

.

 

what will happen when americans (and others) ask for jobs back or blacklist the company outsurcing in india ?

sure source country loses on tax revenue, etc,etc,etc.

i dont see this beeing longterm trend. Helps cutting down on salaries, but again, what about tax revenue, property prices, all the phony jobs taht exist ?!!?