One more thing about the tech industry. It really drove up wages everywhere And that's really what I was saying about fire fighters. For low to mid skilled workers, wages in one industry affect wages in another because workers can move around and employers can offer lower wages cause of demand for the job
As a counterpoint, look at Germany. They're still an export driven economy in a high wage environment with high levels of union membership. These are all criteria that we assume should destroy manufacturing. Yet German productivity is high enough to actually offset the high wages that are paid. And Germany is part of a free trade area (the EU single market and customs union) that is even more cutthroat and unforgiving than NAFTA is. Yet we don't see labor jobs moving to Eastern Europe despite promises of far cheaper jobs and regulatory harmony with Germany via the single market. Thirty years of destroying unions and focusing solely on wages has also had the effect of actually diminishing productivity growth in areas of labor that we were previously leaders in. It wasn't just protectionism/a lack of free trade that allowed for something like automobile manufacturing. We flat out had more productive labor that offset higher labor costs. The US no longer has union apprenticeship programs that provided a base level of skills training in any labor setting. We wiped out decades of labor infrastructure because we basically gave up on labor and decided to only focus on wage costs rather than understanding how labor can function in a developed country. This isn't to say that we could have preserved the manufacturing economy of the 60s but the fall of manufacturing in the US didn't have to be this dramatic. And the skills that create successful manufacturing have been thrown away because we gave up on the concept. Even today we still have tremendous needs for US based manufacturing but because we have chosen to do this without unions and without the labor led infrastructure that we historically relied on, we've created new conditions for labor that are sub-optimal and less productive than similar developed economies.
Juan I apologise I have a lot on this wage issue cause of some personal things but not the following My mother was a registered nurse my dad a postman One of those jobs you can still find and make a lot and one you can't find It's just economics one of those jobs demand is growing
Really what we can do here is improve education And that's a greed issue in terms of investment but it's also a responsibility issue as far as students and their families are concerned
I can't comment at all on the Canadian or European experiences, so I'm happy to defer to you on that. I suppose I'm speaking more ideologically on this one. I'm not saying do it because it's been shown to work elsewhere, but do it because "obviously" (to me) the federal government should not be directly involved in the operations of private industry. Government-owned corporations, like Amtrak, is another way we could go, but I think we've seen already how the running of those services becomes a political football. If anything, assuming ATC is privatized without disaster, I'd like to see Amtrak and USPS severed from the government as well.
Another Trump plan to grow the deficit... Trump’s air traffic overhaul would add $100B to deficit, says new analysis http://thehill.com/policy/transport...l-would-add-100b-to-deficit-says-new-analysis
I have not been able to find an article that explains where the additional costs come from. Anyone know?
