Economists dump on Trump boast to bring jobs back from China

[bkepley]

PAUL WISEMAN
AP
...
Announcing his presidential bid June 16, Trump declared: "I'll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I'll bring back our jobs, and I'll bring back our money."

Economists were unimpressed. "It's completely implausible," says former Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economist who has studied the offshoring of American jobs.

Companies shifted low-skill jobs to China in the 2000s because American workers couldn't compete with Chinese workers earning around $1 an hour. Now China itself is losing low-wage manufacturing jobs to poorer countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam.

If America tried to block foreign-made products and make everything at home, prices would skyrocket and foreign countries would likely retaliate by blocking U.S. goods from their countries. "You can't turn back the clock," Blinder says.

But there's an even bigger problem for those who want to restore U.S. manufacturing employment (now 12.3 million) to its 1979 peak of 19.6 million: Technology has taken many of those jobs for good. Today's high-tech factories employ a fraction of the workers they used to. General Motors, for example, employed 600,000 in the 1970s. It has 216,000 now — and sells more cars than ever.
...

more here:

No chit Sherlock?

[jmyrlefuller]

Here's the link, BTW:
http://news.yahoo.com/economists-dump-trump-boast-bring-jobs-back-china-072657240--finance.html

But it's curious that they don't offer a solution to put ordinary Americans back to work. If there is one.

Look, the 1950s are never coming back. That was a unique situation where Europe's economy was devastated by war and we were able to sweep in and pick up the slack, plus the huge boom in childbearing here in the U.S., a wave of new and useful technologies for the consumer, and other factors that simply can't be replicated today. Even a 90% tax rate couldn't stop an economic boom in that environment. The closest we ever got to replicating that was the 1990s, when the Internet took off.

Even so, we have to take a serious assessment of how we are going to utilize the workforce we have. The current super-specific education for every single job system doesn't work. We need a more versatile education and training system that allows the common man or woman to qualify for more than just a few narrow career paths. Employers need to start training their own employees again.

[Bigun]

You want to see manufacturing jobs come back to America in droves? 

Pass the Fairtax into law and I guarantee it will happen virtually overnight!

http://fairtax.orghttp://

[EdinVA]

Even so, we have to take a serious assessment of how we are going to utilize the workforce we have. The current super-specific education for every single job system doesn't work. We need a more versatile education and training system that allows the common man or woman to qualify for more than just a few narrow career paths. Employers need to start training their own employees again.

The elites decided that everyone had to be like them, hyper educated and live to work.
That is not everyone's idea of a life.  Some want to work to live, they don't need to be kings or live in a million dollar mansion
So the elites shipped all the jobs off shore that did not fit their twisted view of what life is and belittled our military and veterans and those that did not agree with their lifestyle.

It can be rebuilt, but it will take time.