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Profits soar amid mass layoffs

Tell me how are our government polices forcing business to ship jobs overseas? Is it because we regulate them to some extend to provide protection for those who work there and to protect the environment? Is it because our workers demand a decent pay check and won't accept 10 cents an hour? Let me ask this, do you believe that American workers need to accept the conditions of Chinese workers in order to be competitive in a global market?
I make it short and sweet, just a few examples and there are many many more that can be given. I'll start by saying that at one time the Boston area had the largest shoe and textile industry in the country, this is no more and nor could you open another one with being heavily regulated and taxed not to mentioned sued by just about all the surrounding towns and citizens.
Industries that are next to impossible to open in or near Boston, North Shore or South Shore;
Trucking companies
truck stops
shoe factories
Textile factories
chemical companies
food plants
jelliten plants
meat processing plants
furniture striping or restorations companies
steel plants
chemical warehousing

These types of companies I have mentioned are all heavily dependent on blue collar workers, and this is in a liberal state, pro union, pro environmental, pro workers rights etc., yet will be stonewalled every step of the way until it is unaffordable and unattainable to continue to pursue and operate in this state. This is what I am talking about in regards to regulations and taxation and this is why youngster are unaware of these things for the most part..
 
I make it short and sweet, just a few examples and there are many many more that can be given. I'll start by saying that at one time the Boston area had the largest shoe and textile industry in the country, this is no more and nor could you open another one with being heavily regulated and taxed not to mentioned sued by just about all the surrounding towns and citizens.
Industries that are next to impossible to open in or near Boston, North Shore or South Shore;
Trucking companies
truck stops
shoe factories
Textile factories
chemical companies
food plants
jelliten plants
meat processing plants
furniture striping or restorations companies
steel plants
chemical warehousing

These types of companies I have mentioned are all heavily dependent on blue collar workers, and this is in a liberal state, pro union, pro environmental, pro workers rights etc., yet will be stonewalled every step of the way until it is unaffordable and unattainable to continue to pursue and operate in this state. This is what I am talking about in regards to regulations and taxation and this is why youngster are unaware of these things for the most part..
You say that you can't open a business because of the taxes and regulations in place. What regulations and taxes are you referring to. The reason I'm asking is, I want to know if the regulations that are in place are regulations that are needed or if they actually are bad policy.
 
Business must be profitable to exist. All business looks to what will make them MORE profitable. Heavy regulations, taxes and artificially inflated wages and health care costs are bad for businesses.

The stock holders, the ones whose money is at stake, want a return on their investment.

Guess where their money goes when that return goes down? Elsewhere. Be it layoffs, forcing the company to move to a new state, a new country, or investing in other places... once that money goes, it's over. Ball game.
 
Business must be profitable to exist. All business looks to what will make them MORE profitable. Heavy regulations, taxes and artificially inflated wages and health care costs are bad for businesses.

The stock holders, the ones whose money is at stake, want a return on their investment.

Guess where their money goes when that return goes down? Elsewhere. Be it layoffs, forcing the company to move to a new state, a new country, or investing in other places... once that money goes, it's over. Ball game.

So are you saying we should adopt the wages and polices of China for our workers?
 
You say that you can't open a business because of the taxes and regulations in place. What regulations and taxes are you referring to. The reason I'm asking is, I want to know if the regulations that are in place are regulations that are needed or if they actually are bad policy.
There are hundreds if not thousands of regulations, it all depends on what town, county, states, district, and the local, state and federal laws you must abide by. That said, let also talk about the permits a company must acquire to operate, the amount of money it must put forth even before opening, again it depends on your location. Now in this state before you even break ground, you must get a environmental impact study, but forth your petition open a business at the city or town council, then it must be put forth to public and for awhile wait and see if any objections occur. Objections that are made from the public must go before a public hearing, this cost money. After a few months or sometimes 10 years as it was with my company, then you must put forth your plan, then again it must be approved by the city or town council.......

This can go on for several pages, but do you get the jest of it. Now if your large corporation, then the fees, permits, public hearings are ten fold .
 
So are you saying we should adopt the wages and polices of China for our workers?
No one here is advocates ten cents per hour, the average blue collar non skilled worker in MA. makes $16.00 per hour, the ones with very low skills make between 7.50 an 11.00 per hour. Now for the skilled and union workers, they make between 19.00 to 68.00 per hour.
Companies cheating their employees by under payment, wrongful confiscation of pay, bad working conditions, forced over time, dangerous work environment, OHSA violations, ICC violations, (CPAT, IATA, DOT, TSA, DEP NLRB violate any of these regulations) and a company will be sued and most likely shut down. This is a far cry from some 10 cents per hour job in China.
 
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So are you saying we should adopt the wages and polices of China for our workers?

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Child labor, slave labor, yep, you read me perfectly! (just in case you don't get sarcasm, I'm being sarcastic)

The point I'm trying to make here is that money goes where it is most productive. Being regulated, taxed, penalized or what not by outside forces... the money goes away and jobs go with them.
 
if they don't start hiring, i find it difficult to believe that people will have the discretionary income to continue purchasing their products.
they are hiring just not legal americans.
 
No one here is advocates ten cents per hour, the average blue collar non skilled worker in MA. makes $16.00 per hour, the ones with very low skills make between 7.50 an 11.00 per hour. Now for the skilled and union workers, they make between 19.00 to 68.00 per hour.
Companies cheating their employees by under payment, wrongful confiscation of pay, bad working conditions, forced over time, dangerous work environment, OHSA violations, ICC violations, (CPAT, IATA, DOT, TSA, DEP NLRB violate any of these regulations) and a company will be sued and most likely shut down. This is a far cry from some 10 cents per hour job in China.
or they hire illegals.
 
The last part is a key reason for wealth disparity. Read Tom friedman's The World is Flat. The average American factory worker has to compete with factory workers all over the world. The capital to build the factories which employ these factory workers will go wherever it can make the greatest return. That is just the way things work. If we want more of a middle class you have to lure capital here.
not just factory workers all over the world but illegals right here.
 
Yes, that's what I'm saying. Child labor, slave labor, yep, you read me perfectly! (just in case you don't get sarcasm, I'm being sarcastic)

The point I'm trying to make here is that money goes where it is most productive. Being regulated, taxed, penalized or what not by outside forces... the money goes away and jobs go with them.

While looking for something else, I found this which goes to prove this point out.

The idea was to simultaneously improve our physical facilities while putting people back to work, which in turn would provide a badly needed surge of adrenaline to the overall economy. But it hasn't quite worked out that way.

The Wall Street Journal reports that 19 months after the plan was approved, federal agencies have managed to use only one-third of the infrastructure money. Federal contracting rules and labor requirements are among the hurdles that have slowed the process down.


RealClearPolitics - The Failure of Obama's Stimulus

Much like how Boeing is being stopped by the administration from putting people to work in North Carolina.
 
The folks harming employment aren't the businesses that are laying people off, it's the folks putting more and more regulations, taxes and uncertainty on business that are to blame.

yes, because safety in the workplace is so over-rated.
 
yes, because safety in the workplace is so over-rated.

yup - nobody was ever hurt in a mine... and if you brought your eight year old with you to work in those really tiny places where a grown man could not go, they even gave them a potato at the end of the day for their wages and it saved you the trouble of feeding them. What a country!!!!
 
yup - nobody was ever hurt in a mine... and if you brought your eight year old with you to work in those really tiny places where a grown man could not go, they even gave them a potato at the end of the day for their wages and it saved you the trouble of feeding them. What a country!!!!

Living in coal country, I can tell you that hasnt been true in over a century.
You are offering a strawman up. Unions at this point are not about representing workers with job difficulties they are about securing more power through increased wages and benefits for their workers irrespective of company profit or what the workers may actually want. I will say again that if unions were truly for the working guy they would be trying to create inroads in retail outlets and distribution.

They are not. They are working at strengthening their hand in places like government where the pushback from an owner never occurs with great strength when a democrat is in office. This dynamic is changing somewhat as the fiscal reality begins to be plain that the benefits and wages claimed by public sector employees is just too much for budgets.
 
I say rock on for the companies. They are doing what is smart for the business. They don't exist to provide jobs.

So, let me get this straight...

The private sector doesn't exist to provide jobs. The government shouldn't do anything to create jobs at the federal level. Where exactly is employment to come from? I guess we should all just go back to running our own farms and making our own cloths.
 
Everytime the "Masses" take from the rich it ends in untold horror, or do you not read history?

They dont think nor worry nor care about the end result
 
MrVicchio said:
Everytime the "Masses" take from the rich it ends in untold horror, or do you not read history?

Interesting...

So, what you're saying is the Great Depression, the 1979 recession, the Housing Bubble and every other mini-recession in between was started by poor people? I think you need to retake your history classes.

Every time a deep recession ensued in this country it was the result of greed by the wealthiest among us. The working class may have made runs on the banks, but that was only to take out what was rightfully theirs - their savings deposits that they rightly feared would be erraticated. Judging from the sheer volumn of funds lost in hundreds of thousands of 401K plans since the housing bubble burst, I'd say they were justified to demand their money.

Neither the poor nor the working class had much, if anything, to do with originating such economic crisis. Recheck your historical facts, buddy.
 
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So, let me get this straight...

The private sector doesn't exist to provide jobs. The government shouldn't do anything to create jobs at the federal level. Where exactly is employment to come from? I guess we should all just go back to running our own farms and making our own cloths.

No, the private sector (does no one else think that's a really stupid term?) exists to make money. Corporate owners only employ more people if they think it will increase profits. They will also fire people, en masse, to accomplish the same goal. Why hire more people when you can simply intimidate someone into doing the job of two or three people? Profits increase, and no more salaries need to be paid. This is, if course, what happened in the last few years. Massive layoffs, and workers poured even more time and energy into their jobs to keep everything running smoothly. Owners realized that they didn't need to replace the people they'd fired. And they still don't. Hence why unemployment is still so high. A corporate leader whose only duty is to increase profits has no need to hire more people.
 
So, let me get this straight...

The private sector doesn't exist to provide jobs. The government shouldn't do anything to create jobs at the federal level. Where exactly is employment to come from? I guess we should all just go back to running our own farms and making our own cloths.
That is why I hate this "job creator" meme that the Right is pushing. If the private sector is failing to create jobs for American and it is, then we need to do something about it. How about a massive public works program to fix our crumbling infrastructure for starters. We can pay for it by making the rich who caused this mess pay their fair of taxes or does shared sacrifice really mean shared between the members of the poor and working class?
 
No, the private sector (does no one else think that's a really stupid term?) exists to make money. Corporate owners only employ more people if they think it will increase profits.

By your simplistic analysis, every company should become an investment company or hedge fund manager if all the private sector exists to do is make money. Everyone should just become mathmaticians and work on the trading floor at Wall Street.

They [corporations] will also fire people, en masse, to accomplish the same goal. Why hire more people when you can simply intimidate someone into doing the job of two or three people? Profits increase, and no more salaries need to be paid. This is, of course, what happened in the last few years. Massive layoffs, and workers poured even more time and energy into their jobs to keep everything running smoothly. Owners realized that they didn't need to replace the people they'd fired. And they still don't. Hence why unemployment is still so high. A corporate leader whose only duty is to increase profits has no need to hire more people.

I think you're wrong here. Many people lost their jobs not because of some grand purposely plan to thin their payrolls, but rather most did it out of necessity. The markets began to dry up as a result of a lack of consumer demand. Demand for consumer goods and services fell off because those financial entities at the top, i.e., commercial banks and investment companies, i.e., Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc., all had serious liquidity (capital) problems; these companies lost billions between 2007 and present day. And why did they have these money woes? Because they took on too much risk!!! They were over-leveraged and as a result, the financial markets began to respond accordingly by making short sells on the Dow and NYSE...faster than these banks and investment companies could bring in new revenues to beat back the shorts!!!

You want to know how real trickle down economics work in the extreme? Well, we're experiencing it right now!!! Those financial entities at the top of the economic food chain started hemorraging capital at a rapid rate and just couldn't raise revenue fast enough to keep up. And before some of them new it, they were filling for bankruptcy or being bought-out by their competitors or forced to close their doors altogether either from a hostile takeover or mandated by the Fed (FDIC). From there, every other company these investment companies and commercial banks touched began to fold. So much so, that even the small mom and pop small businesses began to suffer because they couldn't get loans based on their credit worthiness anymore. The rules of the financial game had changed. Yet, folks blame this change on financial reform regulations - regulations designed to stop big banks from coming back to Treasury begging for more bailouts; regulations designed with the intent to protect the taxpayers and force these too big to fail financial empires from repeating their same unethical "mark-to-market/off-balance sheet" shady accounting practises that do more harm to our nation's economy than they do to protect it.

You can continue to fool yourself into believing the conservative profitability mantra, but it's a farse! Ask yourself this one very simple question: At what points in our nation's history did our financial system experience extreme chaos? What specifically action occurred that caused things to spiral out of control?

Now, it is true that when a company begins to experience deep economic problems after they've tried everything else to shore up their balance sheets and generate revenue, that they do start to cut payroll and pink slips begin to fly, but the only time we see unemployment numbers on a massive scale like this is when there has been a severe disruption in our financial markets. Again, ask yourself what is the primary catalyst to these disruptions?
 
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or they hire illegals.
Yes this is true, and it is yet another problem we the people need tor rectify. Fixing the illegal problem I assure you will not run off business like over regulating and a heavy tax burden would.
 
By your simplistic analysis, every company should become an investment company or hedge fund manager if all the private sector exists to do is make money. Everyone should just become mathmaticians and work on the trading floor at Wall Street.

This is akin to saying that since bacteria are the most successful form of life, complex life should never have evolved. There's a niche for it, just like there's an niche for all the various forms of businesses. People will do anything they think they can make money doing.

I think you're wrong here. Many people lost their jobs not because of some grand purposely plan to thin their payrolls, but rather most did it out of necessity. The markets began to dry up as a result of a lack of consumer demand. Demand for consumer goods and services fell off because those financial entities at the top, i.e., commercial banks and investment companies, i.e., Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc., all had serious liquidity (capital) problems; these companies lost billions between 2007 and present day. And why did they have these money woes? Because they took on too much risk!!! They were over-leveraged and as a result, the financial markets began to respond accordingly by making short sells on the Dow and NYSE...faster than these banks and investment companies could bring in new revenues to beat back the shorts!!!

You want to know how real trickle down economics work in the extreme? Well, we're experiencing it right now!!! Those financial entities at the top of the economic food chain started hemorraging capital at a rapid rate and just couldn't raise revenue fast enough to keep up. And before some of them new it, they were filling for bankruptcy or being bought-out by their competitors or forced to close their doors altogether either from a hostile takeover or mandated by the Fed (FDIC). From there, every other company these investment companies and commercial banks touched began to fold. So much so, that even the small mom and pop small businesses began to suffer because they couldn't get loans based on their credit worthiness anymore. The rules of the financial game had changed. Yet, folks blame this change on financial reform regulations - regulations designed to stop big banks from coming back to Treasury begging for more bailouts; regulations designed with the intent to protect the taxpayers and force these too big to fail financial empires from repeating their same unethical "mark-to-market/off-balance sheet" shady accounting practises that do more harm to our nation's economy than they do to protect it.

You can continue to fool yourself into believing the conservative profitability mantra, but it's a farse! Ask yourself this one very simple question: At what points in our nation's history did our financial system experience extreme chaos? What specifically action occurred that caused things to spiral out of control?

I don't think you addressed his point. All those things you listed are what caused the recession in the first place. Now, some businesses are starting to pick up again, but they're not hiring more people. They've learned they can get the same work out of fewer people, so why hire more? It's a self perpetuating cycle, because as long as there's a large pool of unemployed workers, businesses will be able to get more work for less pay out of the workers they do have.
 
By your simplistic analysis, every company should become an investment company or hedge fund manager if all the private sector exists to do is make money. Everyone should just become mathmaticians and work on the trading floor at Wall Street.



I think you're wrong here. Many people lost their jobs not because of some grand purposely plan to thin their payrolls, but rather most did it out of necessity. The markets began to dry up as a result of a lack of consumer demand. Demand for consumer goods and services fell off because those financial entities at the top, i.e., commercial banks and investment companies, i.e., Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, etc., all had serious liquidity (capital) problems; these companies lost billions between 2007 and present day. And why did they have these money woes? Because they took on too much risk!!! They were over-leveraged and as a result, the financial markets began to respond accordingly by making short sells on the Dow and NYSE...faster than these banks and investment companies could bring in new revenues to beat back the shorts!!!

You want to know how real trickle down economics work in the extreme? Well, we're experiencing it right now!!! Those financial entities at the top of the economic food chain started hemorraging capital at a rapid rate and just couldn't raise revenue fast enough to keep up. And before some of them new it, they were filling for bankruptcy or being bought-out by their competitors or forced to close their doors altogether either from a hostile takeover or mandated by the Fed (FDIC). From there, every other company these investment companies and commercial banks touched began to fold. So much so, that even the small mom and pop small businesses began to suffer because they couldn't get loans based on their credit worthiness anymore. The rules of the financial game had changed. Yet, folks blame this change on financial reform regulations - regulations designed to stop big banks from coming back to Treasury begging for more bailouts; regulations designed with the intent to protect the taxpayers and force these too big to fail financial empires from repeating their same unethical "mark-to-market/off-balance sheet" shady accounting practises that do more harm to our nation's economy than they do to protect it.

You can continue to fool yourself into believing the conservative profitability mantra, but it's a farse! Ask yourself this one very simple question: At what points in our nation's history did our financial system experience extreme chaos? What specifically action occurred that caused things to spiral out of control?

Now, it is true that when a company begins to experience deep economic problems after they've tried everything else to shore up their balance sheets and generate revenue, that they do start to cut payroll and pink slips begin to fly, but the only time we see unemployment numbers on a massive scale like this is when there has been a severe disruption in our financial markets. Again, ask yourself what is the primary catalyst to these disruptions?

Allow me to add to his post; private companies exist to make money...providing goods and services.
 
That is why I hate this "job creator" meme that the Right is pushing. If the private sector is failing to create jobs for American and it is, then we need to do something about it.

What should be done about it?


[/b]How about a massive public works program to fix our crumbling infrastructure for starters.[/b] We can pay for it by making the rich who caused this mess pay their fair of taxes or does shared sacrifice really mean shared between the members of the poor and working class?

How do you intend on paying for that, exactly? You won't be able to do it by just taxing the rich. You're going to have to tax middle class folks, too. How-da-ya think that's going to go over? Why does the Left have such a disconnect between tax revenue and revenue generation? Why don't you see that the easiest--and most politically expedient way--to create more tax revenue is help the private sector create more taxable revenue?

Nice use of the, "crumbling infrastructure", scare tactic talking point, too, BTW.
 
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