All You Americans Are Fired

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Naw, if the graphs don't work, he'll move on to brow-beating.

It defeats the whole point to me if those jobs aren't available to Americans, it's not a fair trade to me so I'd call their bluff. Automation is inevitable anyways, then we will have to guaranteed basic income with the majority of the population being useless as war as work is concerned so more people wont help, this country can't take care of it's own people and infrastructure as it is. I don't think it is fair that other countries can take advantage of us and have protectionist policies but we're expected to bend over and take it while our jobs and industry go with it.

Well, you didn't actually come up with any examples of *what* these countries should actually do, so I'm not exactly obliged to take your word for it.

That being said, there are indeed multiple policies that a country may introduce in order to increase the competitiveness of its workforce. The most obvious one would be to increase focus on education and (re)training, making sure that US citizens - to a greater extent - are educated within the fields where there is in fact demand for their labor. And as I demonstrated in a previous post, it might be a good idea to take a good hard look at math skills in the US.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of opposition in the US to the implementation of Common Core (and the results of its introduction are only modestly positive on educational scores), meaning that an ambitious focus on education is unlikely to surface in the US any-time soon.

Furthermore, even if the US did double down on education, the effects of this policy would take years (or, for highly skilled professions with long educational programmers, perhaps even more than a decade) to take effect.

Companies are in need of skilled personnel now. Immigration fills that need. So does off-shoring. But waiting for a government initiative years in the future that may or may not even be implemented while having to turn down orders and seeing projects delayed by shortages does not fill that need.

It all comes down to whether or not you believe the premise that they can't find Americans to fills these positions and I do not believe that is the case with the vast majority of the positions. If they pay a fair wage with decent working conditions the there is more than enough people that need work.

Since November 2008, The United States has been one of the most protectionist countries in the G20:



Source: http://www.globaltradealert.org/sites/d ... 0Turns.pdf (see page 22)

Also note that Russia and India (the only ones more protectionist than the US) export more to the US than they import (see page 66 and 86). Russian and Indian businesses are thus much more likely to be harmed by US protectionism than vice versa.

My brother-in-law was an electrical apprentice in houston before he lost his job to undocumented workers. I also have a cousin who doesn't work in construction anymore because undocumented workers were cheaper. Trade work is not a reliable career option anymore.

For the record, the US could do a better job of investing in post-secondary education; but that still doesn't address dishonest business practices, especially abuse of the h1-b visa system which has affected even our skilled employees.

We need more people-pleasing, dumb people in America.

Low wage service jobs is where the job growth is.