Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune, “It came up during Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate when CNN host John King — a self-confessed Apple aficionado — put this question to the former Senator from Pennsylvania: ‘Let’s talk about something: Apple Computer [sic] is a breathtakingly important American company. It’s one of the most respected companies in the country. I carry Apple products to do my work every day. It employs about 500,000 people … in China. It is based in the United States. Has some employees here — about 46,000 — most of them in retail stores and at the headquarters. 500,000 of them are in China. As a President of the United States, what do you do about that?'”
MacDailyNews Take: How much of an Apple aficionado can you be if you can’t even get the company’s name right on a national TV broadcast? Apple Computer, Inc. became Apple Inc. over five years ago, on January 9th 2007.
“Santorum didn’t quibble — and we won’t either — about whether Apple’s U.S. headcount is 46,000 or 60,400, or whether the kids on Foxconn’s payroll are really Apple employees,” P.E.D. reports. “Instead. the candidate launched into an answer that tied together two of 2012’s hottest issues: unemployment and taxes. This, he told King, is the signal he’d send to Apple: ‘Apple, you have all those employees over there, you make all those profits over there. If you want to bring that money back, right now you pay a 35% tax. Under our plan, if you bring it back and invest it in plant and equipment here in Charleston – you pay nothing. You put that money to work, if you invest it, you pay nothing – it’s a powerful incentive.'”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Tax repatriation, maybe, but even more than you don’t want an $1200 iPhone (after carrier subsidy), the U.S. doesn’t want those kinds of subsistence-level (or worse) assembly jobs. Today, in a global economy, where great wage disparities exist, those type of jobs generally cost more than they are worth as they simply don’t pay enough to allow people to live independently. You want the kind of jobs Apple has already proven to have created. Read more: Apple’s real market value: How many U.S. jobs it creates.
From where comes the rediculous idea that Apple employs a half-million people in China?
John King.
Spelling “ridiculous” over and over is ridiculous.
Well. If this factory
http://www.smashiphone.net/1.1-billion-invested-in-boosting-iphone-production-by-foxconn
has now 130,000 workers, and it is producing 200,000 iPhones per day. Then there has to be lots more people in the other factories. They are going to double that factory, so that it will be 230,000 workers and this boost will produce more than 350,000 iPhones daily. 500,000 workers today is very realistic when you remember how much Apple has upped it’s manufacturing capasity.
Apple doesn’t employ anyone at FoxConn.
Foxconn, and every other Chinese assembler you care to name, is a separate company that serves as manufacturer and supplier to Apple (and many other electronics firms too). None of it’s employees are Apple employees. They assemble goods for Apple under contract, and ship them to Apple.
The people who assemble electronic devices in FoxConn plants are FoxConn employees, the same way Samsung employees (screens) are not Apple employees, Borg-Warner (transmission assembler) employees are not GM employees, and famers aren’t employees of supermarkets.
Regardless, Rick Santorum would make an excellent president!
Hey, a fake Mikey! The REAL Mikey knows that Rickey Unsanitorum is a dolt.
Shirley, you must be joking. Either that or you’re a racist idiot.
Racist? Really, that is the best you can do?
That term has been so overused that it means absolutely nothing anymore.
Seriously.
It’s like screaming ‘fire’ in a swimming pool.
Of course, some fools will believe it….
only to “Towertone” is racism nothing. To the other 99% of the world, it is a very real issue: the embodiment of hatred and the direct cause of innumerable wars.
Don’t bother replying, Towertone, i won’t dignify your willful ignorance of racism with a reply.
Good, Mike, because I will be using an open mic like you are (isn’t that silly?).
Only to “MIke” is the term ‘racist’ a catchall to use to put anyone down that you don’t agree with, regardless of their views on race relations.
“Mike” is the kind of guy that can read a statement like I made regarding the overuse of the term ‘racist’ to the point where is has lost it significance and make the leap that I am claiming that racism doesn’t exist.
Don’t blather replying Mike because you have lost your dignity already….
Regardless, Rick Santorum would make a frothy president!
i know he would not.
If he’s the best the Republicans can do, then get ready for four more years of Obama.
It’s either Mitt Romney or defeat.
Actually it’s Ron Paul or Obama according to several polls and just facts.
Many of Obama voters from 08 are unhappy with him and that he did not do as he said. They wanted free markets no bailouts and more freedom.
These disinfranchized democrats and independents like Ron Paul freedom message and do not like Romney. They feel Romney is just Obama number 2 which is very true.
Also in voting for the 3 states do far Ron Paul draws far more independents then Romney and also draws blue coat rep. People who say they are democrat but vote rep some of the time.
Then you add In all the people who vote for the GOP nominee you have a landslide against Obama.
Plus Gingrich and santourm can’t win they would need a landslide in every state left since they are not elegiable for around 540 delegates for the states ballots they are not on. Do the math.
Just staring facts not trying to start a political argument on who is better or not
If the good people of South Carolina wish to work for $500 a month assembling iPhones I think Apple should build the facilities to enable those folks to work 12 hrs a day, 6 days a week for that $500 a month.
Of course, if the good people of South Carolina want that union goal of a ‘living wage’ that can just go fsck themselves.
1. I don’t want an iPhone costing $2000
2. That would mean every tech company would beat Apple.
3. Sanitorum is too conservative to get the moderate voters. He would never win.
Where did Santorum make his money? He was from a coal miner family, was a member of the House of Representatives and a US Senator. How did he get so rich all of a sudden?
Probably got all his money from lobbyists telling him what way to vote when he was in the House. It happens to just about everyone in Washington
He’s a lawyer, and after leaving office he became a “political consultant” and commentator for various media organizations.
Wikipedia. It’s your friend.
His grandfather was a coalminer.
His late father was a board-certified psychiatrist who acquired his qualifications studying under the GI Bill on his return from WW II and his mother was a nurse-adminstrator (?) at the same Veteran’s Admin hospital.
After graduating from Penn State, Rick became a lawyer where, bizarrely, he argued for the “professional wrestling” industry that it wasn’t a real sport and therefore shouldn’t be subject to the laws that govern steroid abuse. So basically he argued for the rights of drug dealers and drug users which is a strange position for someone who holds such conservative social values even if you are a paid lawyer.
But anyone who is trying to imply that Rick is working/middle-class because his grandfather dug coal out of the ground is – quite frankly – a bit of fraud. Rick comes from a professional middle-class background – that’s it.
Robots – here in the U.S. They’ll employ fewer people, since they’ll just need robot maintenance people, but they’ll be out of China.
The globalization of labor in the 1990s and the human population explosion makes this a moot point; American workers will never be able to compete with impoverished peasants. And anyway, now Foxconn now complains they spend too much on workers and have begun a program to add over a million new robots. When a Chinese slave-wage is too expensive, what does that bode for the future of low-skilled workers on this planet?
Back in the 1970s there were many studies carried out that predicted governments should invest in leisure and education facilities, because even then automation was beginning to result in large numbers of long term unemployed and underemployed. We now have far more people on this planet that are needed to support our civilisation and the population is still increasing. So the old model of human society, where everyone needs to be economically useful, has already passed the point where it’s an unachievable dream. As a result, and much as it probably pains US conservatives, we really do need to rethink the way our societies work. Acting on it is already 40 years overdue.
And no, by that I don’t mean communism 😀
People need to get in on the ground floor of robot maintenance. Someone is going to have to it.
Yeah right, we don’t need low paying assembly jobs competing with low paying retail and burger flipping jobs. Bullshit! A hell of a lot of the manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are not high paying jobs, but they a jobs! We need manufacturing jobs in this country now, even if they aren’t paying $30 and hour, and even if they don’t have great benefits.
For years we’ve been fed the same old crap about getting a college education and all will be well. Anyone with half a brain can see how that’s panned out. A large percentage of people simply don’t have what it takes to get a degree, even if they could afford it.
The ones who mouth off about low paying jobs are those who have never gone without or are members of the corrupt unions. We need all the jobs we can get, and manufacturing is where almost anyone can fit in, if they are willing to actually work for a living.
a proper outlook, indeed.
Wrong. There are jobs that end up costing society more than they are worth. This is a fact.
You can’t magically make U.S. manufacturing viable again in today’s global economy. There are reasons why manufacturing jobs have evaporated in the U.S. If they assembled in the U.S., Apple would not be able to compete with Samsung in smartphones or tablets. If Apple was magically exempted from minimum wage laws and opened U.S. assembly plants, the workers would not be able to provide for themselves and they would leech the system to death. It’s a catch-22.
Until China and everywhere else pays their low-level workers comparable U.S. wages, U.S. assembly jobs are a non-starter.
And every time you or your neighbors go shopping at Wal-Mart, you make the prospect of U.S. manufacturing even more of a pipe dram.
To a communist state, the masses are canon fodder to their economy. So either China pays their people US-level wages (which won’t happen), or the US slides down to the level of a has-been nation, like Egypt slid from being the exalted civilisation of the world to the 3rd world basket case. And it might not take thousands of years, only a few hundred. Your great-grandkids might be living at Egypt-level of living.
You are nothing but a hater who adds little to this discourse but contempt for those who disagree with you. Might I suggest that you grow a heart and learn to have compassion for those less fortunate than you? But then, there’s no profit in doing that, is there? I feel sorry for you; you’re obviously a very unhappy person who has nothing to offer but anger and hate. Good luck getting through life carrying that baggage around. I’m sure it’s quite attractive to those around you.
Unsurprisingly, I believe that you lack vision, F10T12. I don’t believe that you comprehend the future of high tech manufacturing and assembly – robots.
Foxconn plans to add one million robots to its factories over the next few years. How many low wage jobs will that displace in China? In the long term, my bet is a whole lot of them. And that spells huge trouble down the road for China as that displaced labor becomes highly disgruntled. In fact, China has already lost a lot of its edge as a low-cost producer with jobs going to Malaysia and other countries in a never-ending search to save a buck, no matter the cost. With high tech manufacturing, that search for low cost labor ends and the economic drain that started in the 1970s leads to economic gain in this decade. That’s because high productivity beats low cost, low skilled labor almost every time unless you are building giant stone pyramids.
The U.S. desperately needs to take a page out of Apple’s book and *reinvent* manufacturing. Take a leap towards the 22nd century and invest in cutting edge factories that leverage advanced robotic technology. In parallel, put more emphasis on educational and vocational programs focusing on designing, programming, and maintaining robots. Those are the middle-class jobs of the decades to come – the equivalent of the industrial jobs that served as the foundation of the middle class in the U.S. from the early 1900s through the 1960s. And the productivity of these factories will reinvigorate the upward trend in standard of living in the U.S. that began to stall in the 1970’s and stagnated in the past decade or so.
One more thing…regarding your “pipe dram.” You don’t have to shop at a Walmart to purchase goods made in China. They are absolutely everywhere, from the plastic toy in the McDonald’s Happy Meal ® to the parts in your car. You “buy China” at Target, Sears, and nearly everywhere else. In fact, I stopped buying Craftsman hand tools from Sears around 2003 when they outsourced their manufacture to China. Craftsman tools are mostly crap now, and that was a stupid move by Sears (Kmart/Sears Holdings) because decades of building a reputation have been squandered in a desperate search for profits. At one time it would have been understood that I would pass on the Craftsman legacy by setting up my kids with their own Craftsman tool kits before kicking them out the door as adults. Now? No way. Along the same lines, in the 1980s and early 1990s it was understood that buying Sony was a safe bet. Sony products cost a bit more, but the quality was generally there and you were not as likely to get burned. Quality dropped in the mid-1990s and Sony products are just another name on the department store shelf, for the most part.
Back to the topic. China is everywhere. Once again your “truisms” are behind the times.
Those low-level assembly jobs are not what the U.S. needs. Might as well leave them on the unending Obama/Reid unemployment benefits – as Newt said recently, 99 weeks of unemployment equals an associates degree. That is something Obama would never, ever say because he wants dependents. Obama wants dependents because such citizens are desperate, they need the party that takes from the producers to provide them with subsistence-level existences under the guise of “caring.” I’m still waiting for U.S. African Americans to wake up, look around and see what voting in lockstep for Democrats for the last 50 years has given them.
Back to the point: Crap jobs create poor citizens who take immeasurably more from the system than they provide. They can’t provide for their healthcare needs, so they sap the system and clog up emergency rooms. They can’t provide for their own food, so they sap from the system and go on food stamps. Beyond meager sales taxes, in states that have them, they don’t pay any taxes, but they send their kids to public schools anyway (where they’re enrolled in the free lunch program). Etc.
It’s not compassionate to give them never-ending handouts. It’s evil, hurtful, and hateful.
99-weeks of unemployment is emblematic off all that is wrong with this country and of how far off the track the Democrat party has veered.
The U.S doesn’t need any more takers. The U.S. needs more producers that favor doing as much as possible to break the handout mentality –which creates generations of dependents who leech off society — and instead help the takers finally break the cycle of dependency and become producers themselves.
Jeez, you don’t want to create jobs here and you don’t want unemployment for those who don’t have jobs. You want it all for you, and to hell with the 61 yr old guy with an engineering degree (me) who no one will hire because they can hire a young kid instead who they can insure for less.
No, I want to have an environment where good jobs are created and to help those who don’t have jobs get good jobs that frees them from dependence.
Nobody wants to live dependent on their fellow citizens, I would imagine. People would rather provide for themselves and do the best they possibly can with the talents they have and the skills they can develop, not sit around collecting checks for 99-weeks, hoping they can vote in another Democrat enabler in order to continue their miserable dependency.
Maybe I think too much of people, but I’ve seen it time and time again: Someone gets good training and becomes a productive member of society. That is the goal, not unending handouts.
I hadn’t realized that insurance rates would make a younger person more hireable. To hell with experience! Thank all the gods I live in a country with National Health Care. I wouldn’t trust an insurance company to wipe my bum.
No, but you trust the government to wipe your bum, you gullible fool.
Raise the level of discourse, please.
Love F10T12!!!!! Great posts
Not saying the our system does not need work, but someone in my position would be a dead man if I got sick in the US. Open competition would be a great thing we could all get our surgery at Walmart.
Sorry, going to have to disagree on this one. Three points:
Jobs, import export laws and taxes.
ON JOBS
There’s a huge flaw with the ” the U.S. doesn’t want those kinds of subsistence-level (or worse) assembly jobs” mentality. Mainly, there are a level of people who, for whatever reason, cannot get any higher level jobs. Period. They need jobs. There are not enough service (food, retail, etc0 jobs to go around. The US needs manufacturing jobs. Unless people are employed, they cannot afford the $400 iPhone or any level of luxuries.
IMPORT v. EXPORT
Most of our goods cannot be sold in China or many other nations in Asia. Their laws protect them from US imports. The second tact to take is, if you want to import goods into the US, your economies need to be open to our goods. If you have something you want to import into the US, you need to have the same consumer protections, labor laws etc. If you don’t, you cannot sell here.
Some will cry, “you’re forcing our laws on other countries” No, sorry, we’re not. No one is forcing you to make stuff and ship it here. BUT if you want to, feel free to pay a living wage, make workplaces safe, and have environmental laws in place to make the world as safe as we strive to. OTHERWISE, your goods are not welcome.
ON TAXES
Make the tax structure on domestic goods conducive to production and manufacturing here.
1
You are wrong on jobs. There are jobs that end up costing society more than they are worth. If you paid iPhone assemblers enough, the iPhone would cost too much and Apple wouldn’t be able to sell them and then real, good Apple jobs would be lost.
You are right on import vs. export.
Again, taxes or not, certain jobs simply cost more than they are worth. This isn’t the 1950’s where Mom stays home baking while Dad goes to work on the assembly line at the plant and his wages pay for everything while the products he assembles have no competitors that cost 1/4 the price at equal or better quality.
You are living in a dreamland when it comes to jobs. Not all “jobs” are good to have. At a certain level, they cost more than they are worth. That is the problem.
Bluefin, you are so close to being spot on I want to cheer.
A couple points that I’d like to make. Minimum wage laws sound great in theory, but all they do is make all jobs more expensive, cause inflation, and drive manufacturing off shore. The people most in need of jobs, the unskilled and young are being priced out of the work force by minimum wage laws, and these are the very people that consume government services.
Level the playing field. There are those in DC that say American corporations don’t pay enough taxes. That’s the purest form of crap on the planet. Corporations don’t pay taxes you do every time you buy an American made product. That’s where Corporations get the money to pay “their” taxes. Foreign products are not taxed in the same manner as US products. Our trading partners have structured their taxlaws to favor export (no, or very little embedded taxes), making them less expensive in the US than in the country where they are made.
We tax production (income tax), they tax consumption (sales tax). If the US adopted the tax laws of our competitors the incentive to move jobs offshore would go away.
Tax holiday has already been tried. Didn’t create jobs then, and won’t create jobs now.
Allow tax holiday for funds repatriated for payment of dividends. Government gets its 15% tax and shareholders will recycle the money through the economy buying goods and services. With global competition only manufacturing jobs with low labor content relative to the value of the product, low volumes, or semi-monopolies work. US auto industry does final assembly, but much content is imported. Hyundai went to Alabama because of lower labor costs and no union, plus better access to US markets.
The thought of finding even a 100,000 iPhone assembly workers in Charleston is problematical. There are manufacturing jobs which are skilled and well paying.
If you want to know what would happen if Apple sought employees at minimum wage, one has to look no further than the highly repetitive jons at the poultry processors. They have to import labor from Mexico and central America.
Jobs are available (the military – before the current drawdowns), the oil patch, skilled manufacturing, etc. Many don’t want to make a sacrifice to go after them until the “dole” runs dry.
Every time government policy kills jobs such as stopping drilling in the gulf, stopping the pipeline,etc. , it has an effect well beyond the number of direct employees.
By the way, US employee protection is not so great, especially with dumb sh*t employees not following the safety procedures. Hawaii has almost as many job related deaths in a year as it does traffic deaths.
Tax holidays are politically expedient bandages to make our “leaders” appear to be doing something. If the bandaid (tax holiday) is beneficial, then it should be cure cure. Wherever governments have shifted taxes away from production (income taxes) to consumption (sales tas) their economies have grown…due to an increase in exports.
@Get Real. You are correct sir. There is nothing wrong with enticing companies, Apple or otherwise, to manufacture in this country. If they can get the labor, and they don’t have confiscatory taxes, they will come. MacDailyNew’s notion that we don’t want companies to hire our laborers because they can’t pay our people enough is moronic. We have people working in canneries, lumber mills, textile plants, and many other places that are not high paying jobs but they do put food on the table. Let the market, rather than tax policy decide.
But let the tax policy not prevent the market to do its work
MacDailyNews Take: Tax repatriation, maybe, but even more than you don’t want an $1200 iPhone (after carrier subsidy), the U.S. doesn’t want those kinds of subsistence-level (or worse) assembly jobs. Today, in a global economy, where great wage disparities exist, those type of jobs generally cost more than they are worth as they simply don’t pay enough to allow people to live independently. You want the kind of jobs Apple has already proven to have created. Read more:
What elitist BS are you throwing around now. wow. If I was you guys I would rethink that one.
It’s not elitist to simply state the facts. Not all jobs are worth having. Some cost more than they are worth.
You should actually read the article link that MDN provided in their Take.
And *you* need to read this, F10T12. You repeat the same lines over and over again, so I suppose that is the technique that I have to use to get through to you…
Unsurprisingly, I believe that you lack vision, F10T12. I don’t believe that you comprehend the future of high tech manufacturing and assembly – robots. This approach is especially well-suited towards the manufacture and assembly of high value electronics like the iPhone, iPad, etc.
And, by the way, from what dark, odorous place did you pull that $1200 cost for a U.S. sourced iPhone? Do you have any data to back that assertion? How many hours of labor go into the assembly of a single iPhone? Adding hundreds of dollars to the cost of an iPhone, even assuming a fairly high U.S. labor rate delta, would imply at least ten hours of manual labor each, possibly twenty or more. I don’t believe it.
Foxconn plans to add one million robots to its factories over the next few years. How many low wage jobs will that displace in China? In the long term, my bet is a whole lot of them. And that spells huge trouble down the road for China as that displaced labor becomes highly disgruntled. In fact, China has already lost a lot of its edge as a low-cost producer with jobs going to Malaysia and other countries in a never-ending search to save a buck, no matter the cost. With high tech manufacturing, that search for low cost labor ends and the economic drain that started in the 1970s leads to economic gain in this decade. That’s because high productivity beats low cost, low skilled labor almost every time unless you are building giant stone pyramids.
The U.S. desperately needs to take a page out of Apple’s book and *reinvent* manufacturing. Take a leap towards the 22nd century and invest in cutting edge factories that leverage advanced robotic technology. In parallel, put more emphasis on educational and vocational programs focusing on designing, programming, and maintaining robots. Those are the middle-class jobs of the decades to come – the equivalent of the industrial jobs that served as the foundation of the middle class in the U.S. from the early 1900s through the 1960s. And the productivity of these factories will reinvigorate the upward trend in standard of living in the U.S. that began to stall in the 1970’s and stagnated in the past decade or so.
if someone making cars can get a mortgage, wtf not someone making computers. Why does a person making my lunch get paid next to nothing? Such hypocrisy in the world.
Seriously, how old are you?
40, and i think a little more balance in life would be good.
If you don’t make anything, you don’t have an economy. period. Manufacturing in the first half of the 20th century is what made America the affluent powerhouse it once was.
Taxation and government interference on virtually every level is what has driven companies like out and strangled companies like General Motors, General Electric, RCA, Chrysler, et cetera, ad nauseam.
What strangled U.S car companies were bad contracts with unions (wages, pensions, benefits, etc.) that promised too much, many times more than the companies could possibly deliver once the world’s car companies caught up and passed them thanks to exceedingly poor management at U.S. car companies that failed to innovate for decades.
you’re mistaken.
How so?
Actually, one can make a very good argument based on the data (facts) that the middle class only emerged in the United States after the New Deals introduced by the Government in the early 1930s and increased taxation on the most wealthy in society.
Prior to that, you had an economy much like today’s where economic disparity between rich and poor, and the abuse of power, was the norm. And while there’s absolutely nothing wrong with one person earning more than someone else based on their efforts, when the rich begin to write the rules and stack the deck in their favour (Citizens United being just the latest farce) to perpetuate and strengthen this imbalance, that you start to create problems.
You exacerbate these problems when a manufacturer ignores the physical harm they are causing to fellow humans or the environment we all need to survive as “externalities” that don’t matter because maximized profit for shareholders is the first goal of a corporation. (Human nature being what it is I expect nothing less … as one wag said … in Communism, man exploits man. In Capitalism, at least it’s the other way around.)
Or we could look at CEO wages vs. the average US worker every decade since the 1950s based on Dept of Labor statistics …
1960 40-1
1970 130-1
1980 320-1
1990 1100-1
2000 1800-1
Unions aren’t really helping much now, are they? I’d say that the exhorbinant wages are being earned by the CEOs and not workers, no? And an economy that doesn’t make things (tangible items) isn’t really anything you can measure in any real terms anyway (and the economic fallacy of infinite growth on finite resources? tee hee).
Furthermore, it’s also factually demonstrable that the strongest US economy was between 1933 and the 1960s, when unions were at true height of their power. It was because unions were able to negotiate decent living wages for *their* members, that every other (non-union) employer had to start paying better wages to retain employees who might otherwise have left for unionized work.
While the 1950s you mention would be an ill-advised era to return to in terms of how we treated women, and cultural insensitivity to anyone who wasn’t a golf club member WASP, what’s wrong with the idea that a household could be run (well, with a nice summer holiday) on a single income? When did everyone decide they needed a 2500 square foot McMansion with every single hi-tech gadget you get suckered into “needing”? (I’m a brand guy and have been suckering people into desiring stuff they don’t need for more than two decades. But at least I recognize my hypocrisy.)
The US car companies are dying due to lack of disruptive innovation (see Christensen), poor quality control, and crappy gas mileage in an era of depleting oil. And by crappy gas mileage I mean … why don’t more than 90% of US-made vehicles get better gas mileage now than an original Model T?
@DaveyJJ
Bingo! Well said. We don’t always have cogent posts on this forum. Yours was a welcome exception.
Davey, you’re as “processed” as a dull, yellow brick of Velveeta cheese that’s been sitting out in the sun all summer.
DaveyJJ makes some interesting points, botvinnik. Your response…that was processed. By a bowel.
If you want to be successful in spreading your viewpoint, then I suggest you adequately support it and cogently debate it. That goes for the rest of your RWN coven, as well.
Exorbitant wages foisted by Union membership was the result of paying and keeping valued employees that were the middle class bearing the brunt of federal taxation. No manufacturing, no middle class = no economy: Capitalism 101.
We agree, at least in part, as to the cause of U.S. car companies’s strangulation.
The middle class does not require U.S. manufacturing jobs nor are U.S. manufacturing jobs in today’s global economy capable of creating the “middle class” that you are remembering.
uh there’s been a “global economy” since the Spice Trade of the Fifth Century BC…difference is now, we ain’t makin’ any “spice”, therefore the capital leaves our economy and enriches the exporting nations. American-made products were once the world’s best in every phase: electronics, automobiles, steel production, oil production, on and on.
In the case of Apple, the vast majority of the profits stays with the company (much of it offshore until the tax issue is dealt with) and does not go to Hon Hai, etc. Read the related article in MDN’s Take.
You are living in a dreamland. You want the 1950’s. I don’t disagree, but wishes don’t make truths. This is 2012. Samsung is ripping off Apple’s IP and using cheap Chinese labor to mass produce iPhone and iPad knockoffs.
And some very misguided Americans are buying them. They deserve ridicule and worse.
There is no way Apple can bring assembly to the U.S. unless they paid U.S. laborers $1 a day and put all 200,000 of them on government assistance. Just because you want it doesn’t make it doable.
U.S. manufacturing generally doesn’t pay. That’s why all of those jobs have gone and continue to go offshore.
as I originally noted, you are mistaken. You need to check your premises as to the original cause of economic stagnation..it has always been the same throughout history: the inherent dishonesty of taking income from those that produce and enriching those that do not through force (taxation).
Making statements that other people are wrong based only on your beliefs padded out with nonsense puts you squarely into a camp of the ignorant. There are many other camps (although two major ones drive most of the comments) evident in these postings. There are very few balanced postings devoid of political bias and self interest. I acknowledge you have a right to your opinions, however it is glaringly evident that you lack even a basic knowledge of socio-
political and socio-economic factors and systems making up and driving mankind.
Many corps (AAPL included simply don’t repatriate foreign earnings unless desperate for cash). Tax holiday just postpones purchases people would make anyway. If nO tax on repatriated earnings for mfg here then some amt of assembly could be done – even if only pack out the final product and accessories into the packaging… Folks should read freakonomics. Incentives drive behaviors – good and bad.
Jobs for China will bring her into the 21st century and she will become more of a world citizen. Apple is doing the right thing in helping developing nations move forward. Our neighbours are our responsibility.
The world is but one country and mankind its citizens.
I have senators, congressmen, candidates of all kinds, Obama etc talk about Apple.
Why doesn’t ANYBODY talk about Google?
Google gives away american intellectual property ANDROID (partly stolen from Microsoft, oracle, Apple etc) and GIVES IT AWAY FREE TO FOREIGN COMPANIES LIKE HTC, SAMSUNG ETC.
The only big American company that uses Android significantly is Motorola and it is going broke due to Samsung, HTC, Huawei etc.
If politicians count Apple Foxconn workers then why don’t they count how many people Google indirectly employ? Count all those dozens of foreign phone makers making what 48% worldwide market share which is android …
Worse! Foreign companies fueled by Google competes with Microsoft, Apple, HP (web OS) etc worldwide. hurting american workers.
AND for all that Google makes peanuts off android, maybe $1 billion a year . Apple makes at least 50 times that off mobile. So for all the damage Google does with android it pays near nothing taxes.
If politicos want to hit Apple why don’t they look as Google as well and stop annointing Google with immunity and sainthood?
(I believe in free trade etc but I’m just pointing out the double standards politicians have)
Amen.
Wasn’t it on the front page that Apple could buy Greece? Just buy Greece and keep all of your money there!
In chapter 41 of the Jobs biography, Steve is quoted as saying Apple had about 700,000 people employed making Apple products in China. He told the President that many of those jobs could be returned to the US if Apple could find the 30,000 engineers needed to supervise the process. He said there were simply not that many available in the US, but if they could be provided they could do more manufacturing in the US. It is not the availability of cheap labor in China, but the access to educated labor that keeps Apple there. Jobs pleaded with the President to implement educational programs to produce the 30,000 needed engineers. With all the screaming for less spending and the draconian cuts to education budgets, it appears the jobs will remain safely in China no matter how many tax cuts are offered.
‘draconian cuts to education budgets’…?
Really?
And where did we get all those engineers in the 1950’s and 60’s?
Money won’t solve the cultural problems that schools face.
We have told children from the moment they can turn on MTV that the world is owed to them.
Who needs school…?
1950’s we didn’t sell much out of country. We produced goods mainly for our own people. You don’t need the same number of engineers in 1950 to support a country of 200million. In 2012, Apple sells to the world of about 4billion people. They could not survive selling their product to only 300million in the USA. It is a global economy, not national. If you want to compete on the world scale, you have to be able to have the resources to do it. Apple has the cash, the ideas, the technology. Apple does not have the people in the USA to make the products at the quantities needed to support world demand. They barely have the manufacturing now to keep up with demand. To come up with 30k engineers in the USA would be very difficult. Yes, we have 1000’s of them here, but do we have 30k ready to either change jobs, or with the expertise needed to be hired in the next 60 days?
I’m sorry, you lost me at “1950′s we didn’t sell much out of country. We produced goods mainly for our own people.”
This is so completely wrong that you may need to change your entire outlook of the US from 1945-1970.
http://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch5en/conc5en/shareworldexports.html
I won’t argue the engineering point. China and India both produce more for a much larger population. It IS ironic that we used to discuss how wonderful our universities were because so many foreigners came here to learn engineering and medicine.
My previous point was that money is not the answer to our education needs. THAT will require a shift in cultural priorities aimed at kids way before they are old enough for college.
Without those, they will not have the desire to be better educated.
There are two outcomes if Apple were to bring back manufacturing jobs to America: (1) more expensive iPhones, or (2) less profit to Apple. There comes a point where a corporation could even decide to make less profit.
If $80 billion is a reflection of corporate greed’s desire to squeeze as much cash from the system as it will allow, why wouldn’t Apple be content with, say, $55 billion if it had to manufacture in the U.S.?
Would America be on its downward spiral, if all corporations chose to have less, but still reasonable profits, by choosing to manufacture in the U.S.?
Where’s the concept that corporate citizens have a role to play in developing the society by creating, not just retail jobs, but jobs in all spheres including manufacturing?
Whatever you guys reply, we’re going to see the result of this in 30 years time – within most of your lifetimes. If the U.S. turns into a developing world basketcase like Russia, remember what you wrote here.
This insane obsession with taxes (both the desire to abolish them and the ignorance concerning why they are paid) is the exact reason the US economy is in the toilet and routinely requires massive injections of capital, from tax payers, to corporations that already get subsidized. The ship has sailed on electronics manufacturing plants in the US and Canada, and Canada’s financial situation is a running experiment that exposes almost all the US right wings financial fantasies about taxation and deregulation.
agreed. If we brought back glass-stegall and TARIFFS and tax incentives we could bring manufacturing back. Make an iPad in China = $100 $100 tariff or make in USA = $200 with 10% tax break, then cost is less to make it in USA!!!!!! Import tariff as well to offset it and protect US labor and costs.
1) NO ONE is listening to anything Ricky is muttering. ZERO BRAINS.
2) As Steve Jobs told the president to his face ‘those jobs are not coming back’. And with Steve passing and Tim running the show, the likelihood of a change in that position probably went DOWN. The US needs to figure out how their economy AND civilization are going to be re-tooled before this conversation even starts. Gotta do the fundamentals first.
Santorum needs to take an introductory economics course, and pay particular attention to the concept of “comparative advantage.” Apple HAS operated factories in the USA, and so did NeXT, and the long and short of it is that they contract out manufacturing to Chinese vendors because those vendors can do it more efficiently than Apple can do it in-house.
-jcr
Assembly in SC? Oh, please! How do you organise the supply chain? The Asian assemblers have the suppliers right next door. That way they can have a low inventory and few disruptions. They also get the latest parts, and replacements for faulty delivery batches can arrive within a day.
That, and only that, is the reason for the production in Asia. Workers’ wages at final assembly plants are peanuts. The real issue is the logistics for production.
If you want assembly plants in SC, you have to have hard drive and SSD plants as well, plus the main board and graphic card producers. That ship sailed a decade ago. Wanna go with IBM processors again?
Great, then the price of benefits (helping the fat South Carolinians with their diabetes and dental issues) will be reflected in the iPhone price and will be way too much to afford. Give me a Chinese built phone any day.
Santorum would plant a flaming cross on Apple’s front lawn.
Or he could go in drag (his preferred outfit) and try to impress Tim Cook. (Hint: Leave the feather boa at home and bring your kneepads, Rick!)
Besides, how would they find enough South Carolinians with enough education to mop the floor, never mind assemble Apple devices?
Odd that these two companies are so often compared
http://www.bmwusfactory.com/
Odd that so many elitist feel their best only when putting others down.
You DO know that your comments could be perceived as racist, don’t you?
(But only if uttered verbatim by a Conservative, of course….)
U.S. Presidents have the power to wage war and make appointments. That’s about it. Legislation is handled by Congress.
Bravo MDN:
Today, in a global economy, where great wage disparities exist, those type of jobs generally cost more than they are worth as they simply don’t pay enough to allow people to live independently.
That is the fact of the matter, sad to say. Consider the remarkable demand for illegal immigrant labor around the country, despite all the rhetoric. Where I live, the apple growers moan and grown every year that they can’t find anyone to pick their apple harvest except the illegal aliens to whom they can pay slave wages.
You and I want cheap goods. That happens in part from using cheap labor from poorer, low cost of living countries. I call it the ‘Slave Wage Labor Movement’ and it’s a sad fact of life in our modern “New World Order” global economy. Imagine how poor the USA would have to become in order for US workers to be willing to be paid the far-less-than living wage Foxconn pays.
[BTW: Lest anyone believe I am contradicting my request that Apple get the hell out of China: No. China is a criminal nation with a criminal culture and a criminal government. I don’t want Apple dealing with criminals. That’s why I’d rather Apple pulled all its investments out of China and instead focused on manufacturing in saner, humane countries such as Brazil, where Foxconn not coincidentally is expanding.]
I know…. Read ‘groan’, not grown. (I’m obsessed with plants today. Apologies).