"ls" wrote in message
...
George Patterson wrote:
Jay Honeck wrote:


Both, of course. Our economy has grown strongly and well --


Not in the NY-NJ area it hasn't.

I must have missed it here in our area too (central TX) because, last I
checked, the local economy was anything but red hot. For example, a little
over a year ago I applied for a job answering phones for Sears - they had
had _1700_ applicants for that one job at that time. That was basically
the story for every job I applied for.

Regarding the cost of our infrastructure, it's not a simple equation. One
of the reasons labor is so expensive in the US is because it's so well
protected. You have to pay a minimum wage, you have to provide a minimal
level of safety in your work environment

It is cheaper to prevent an accident than to deal with the aftermath.

, you can't hire 15 year
old children, nor make them work 14 hour days for 5 dollars,

This is bad?

you have to follow various rules as far as time off and benifits and so on.

Now it should be clear why "globalization" is so seductive for US
businesses - other economies such as China and India don't have the same
protections in place for their labor pools. In fact, they're just ripe for
the picking as well as cheap, cheap, cheap.

When you can hire and use a foreign laborer for 1/10 of the cost of an
American equivalent to do the same job, well, there goes your
high-fallootin' principles against exploitation of cheap labor.


If US based companies hired workers for 10X the wages of their (foriegn)
competitors, do you think that anyone would buy their products? What would
happen to the jobs then?

Mike
MU-2