Allen you did indeed have your ass handed to you, then you sulked away and came back with the same losing argument 3 or 4 pages later. All your points have been dealt with and rendered elementary, despite your master debater qualification, LOL. Good one (are you serious?)
Allen you think you are so smart and work so hard and therefore deserve all you have. You think auto workers are dumb, lazy and uneducated thusly deserving of next to nothing. Again you are horribly wrong.
Your tales of growing up in Michigan or whatever and having firsthand knowledge that ALL UAW workers are “as Allen describes” is nuts, and then to extend your harsh critique into the decades since (when presumably you worked a long way from Detroit) is really double nuts. No sane person thinks you intimately know UAW workers and are therefore qualified to cast judgment over them and an entire manufacturing industry.
So you and your Dad or whatever saw some lazy people at work; I see that every day at offices, stores and just driving around watching Cal-Trans and construction workers chat more often than work. I bet I could spend a week at your business (if it’s big enough to have a fair amount of employees) and show you many examples of laziness.
Employees sometimes waste time, its life, its human, get used to it. I bet you wasted time occasionally when you worked for others. It’s not some phenomenon that Allen discovered that justifies the death of an entire industry or some twisted self loathing of your own country’s efforts.
Allen whatever business it is that you do can be eliminated very quickly if the Gov. decided to make it harder on you by changing a law or two (kinda like our auto industry has had its back pushed against a wall by its own Gov. for decades). Also if a foreign country targeted your business and that same foreign county was able to take advantage of our retarded trade policies and use predatory trading policies to gain market share over you, you might not look so smart and successful in a year or two (again there are parallels to our auto industry). You might also find yourself on the other side of this argument.
It would be nice to see posts from Allen stating he did everything right but our trade policies and outrageous healthcare costs made him uncompetitive.
Let’s say Allen makes a widget in Fallbrook. Temecula, facing a budget disaster and unemployment courts XYZ company from Japan to open a factory making the same widget and offers massive tax breaks, far below what Allen pays. XZY Company imports parts from its Chinese plants and assembles them in their shiny new (subsidized to be immediately more competitive) Temecula branch. Allen’s US made, full tax paying, no currency manipulation benefiting, widget company suddenly is facing a really tough time.
Even if Allen starts importing his parts from China he is still at a disadvantage because XYZ Japan uses its manipulated currency advantage to play us for chumps and gets its China widget parts for 20% less than Allen. What does so smart Allen, so much more deserving than the UAW worker and the hundreds of thousands of associated workers, do? Does Allen keep spouting about how hard he works and how that makes all the difference?
Maybe if Allen had fired that employee that took an extra 15 minutes at lunch or the guy who spent 30 minutes on the phone taking to his daughter about a problem she was having, maybe Allen would have remained competitive? Of course not.
You can have all the f@cking work ethic in the world my friend and it won’t do shit with the policies of your own country and many foreign countries combined, bearing down on your efforts.
Allen all it would take is for the weight and force of our Gov’s retarded trade policies to turn its stink eye on your business and predatory trading partners to bare down on you to shut you up for good and have you singing a vastly different tune. Are you smart or fortunate Allen? Are UAW workers in Michigan and Ohio and parts suppliers in Texas and LA dumb or maybe a bit of unfortunate victims of really poor trade policies and predatory trade practices?
If your business actually makes something tangible and Japan decided they wanted to take over that industry, they would, and our trade policies would help them. And all your hard work would mean nothing to the outcome. Then some bloggers would say you were lazy, uncompetitive and deserved to go out of business.
And why the hell do you and others keep on saying that “if or when we start building good cars” BS. Have you not read the thread you are participating in? You guys spout the same shit over and over and ignore the answers and facts. OUR county, yours and mine, builds good quality cars that we can stack up against any country’s and be proud; for Christ’s sake read the damn thread and follow the links!
And Flu, the same goes for you and your so successful IT self. If you had a brain you’d realize your success hangs in the hands of those who decide if or when to outsource your efforts to India or compete with you with Chinese or Indian IT guys. Then what? Poof, just like that Flu goes from so, so smart hard working American to victim of bad trade policies.
Really man, surely you can’t be so arrogant as to believe fate and luck aren’t playing a hand in keeping you gainfully employed in a world full of people eager to take your job and do it for half the $. (Save us you lame reasoning as to why you are special and different, you are not).
You are lucky right now; the stink eye of suicide trade policies has not gazed on you YET. UAW and hundreds of thousands of non-UAW workers are not so lucky right now.
For you to think that reality came about because you are smart and hard working and they were dumb and lazy says everything we need to know about you, Flu. Americans are paying a premium for whatever it is you provide over what we could be paying if some guy in India was providing the same product/service for half or a 3rd the price. Right? Why is that any less reprehensible than GM paying a premium to provide healthcare and pensions to its workers? Where does it stop?
Most things other than low paid, non-benefit service industry jobs can be outsourced to some eager country for much less. Either we chose to recognize that we need jobs that pay well and provide for us in retirement or why not let ‘em all go, including Flu’s IT gig? Why are you more deserving than the educated tool and die guy working 50 hours a week or a parts supplier who now is out of work or the small business owner who got wiped out in the Chrysler BK and now is destitute and debt burdened. To add insult to injury they get to listen to pompous asses spout off about how smart they are and how dumb they were and how they had it coming because Flu and Allen know “stuff” about this.
Please, please, please. Anyone who wants to add to this thread, please notice that there are 10 pages and think that maybe, just maybe, your really clever anti-American blather has already been cleverly brought up by some equally intelligent self loathing American, and summarily dealt with.
