Sâok⌠those job losses will be blamed on the Affordable Care act, so itâs all goodâŚ
The well-known liberal bias of independent economists and numbers and people who want jobs.
All these FACTS! Iâm getting so fed up with FACTS!. Wonât somebody please bring back the good-olâ days of FANTASY and MAKE BELIEVE!??
ohâŚsorryâŚour folks in D.C. already did thatâŚsighâŚ
Daily Yomiuri had independent Japanese economists predicting job growth here. No link as Japanese newspapers disappear their web articles.
Thanks, Obama!
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Well, hell, for once this actually fits.
I do sort of give these kinds of headlines a little sideye. Generally because I want to know what kind of jobs. Shitty minimum wage jobs? Quality jobs that pay decently? Not that I like the idea of people being jobless and homeless and moneyless, but Iâm not exactly clinging to the status quo either.
Well, most Americans donât want to do the shitty jobs but will accuse those coming here illegally to do those shitty jobs of stealing jobs from AmericansâŚ
As usual, the Big Lie is made by twisting the truth 180 degrees. Because so few will believe that the authorities âcould have the impudence to distort the truth so infamouslyâ.
In reality, if nations imposed huge tariffs on foreign goods produced in violation of their domestic labor, environmental and safety rules, it would deliver growth and jobs domestically.
The only reason itâs cheaper to build things abroad and ship them to market than it is to build them locally, is because you can abuse foreign workers and their communities in ways that are so egregious that weâve made them illegal domestically.
The current system relies on the idea that it doesnât matter how much the 1% abuses foreigners, because theyâre bloody wogs (wogs start at Calais, you know). If you buy that $99 microwave, you know youâre contributing to evil, because obviously nobody can build a microwave for $99 and ship it halfway across the world without using pressed sailors, bunker fuel, conflict resources of various types, poor environmental controls, etc. &etc. So what? Theyâre wogs, not real people! They donât really feel pain like real people do.
So what Iâm hearing is that TPP is basically Phase 2 of the program that Ray-Gun started? Phase 1: Begin the wholesale dismantling of labor in the US, Phase 2: Finish it off.
Imagine what shape the TPP will be in if those 450,000 newly liberated USians start their own country here, which does not sign onto the TPP.
I think itâs pretty unsafe to say that this paper contains facts. There is no way to simulate the effects of the TPP. We donât have the understanding of how the economy works to make such bold statements. We have trouble understanding how markets work in general. That is not to say that we economists donât have the tools. Itâs the fact that we have no access to data at a high enough granularity to be able to accurately describe how economies work.
So, really we should be asking for more detailed data and time to analyse them instead of appealing to simulation studies that use aggregate statistics to predict the far reaching effects of the TPP. Itâs clear this thing is a bad idea but to quantify its effects requires detailed data and modelling that has not been possible at all.
Maybe we should start considering what a truly jobless society would look like, especially considering that so many of the existing jobs are bullshit. I know most people consider it science fiction crazy talk, but I love Buckminster Fuller, and I look forward to our post-scarcity anarchist utopia. 
I like the one more where you open the toilet lid and the hand comes out and closes it again.
this deal was written and promoted by big business for big business. itâs much worse than the flawed ACA that was mostly written by insurance companies for insurance companies. as the ACA is solely a domestic program it does provide benefits here at home that the TPP would not. already the canadian oil industry, transcanada i believe, is suing the USA for damages they assert are the result of our rejection of the keystone XL pipeline. that lawsuit is only a preview of the lost sovereignty countries would lose. the TPP is nothing but a race to the bottom to reduce wages and increase profits mostly untaxed under the current tax code that rewards offshoring company headquarters and other tax dodges.
First we kill you, then we let you see it.
Anything to protect the precarious state of our hedge fund managers
I suspect thatâs the real point of the TPP, along with just about every other policy purported to âdeliver prosperityââŚ
There is a distinction between exploitation colonies and development colonies. Exploitation colonies are places like Jamaica where younger sons went to get rich as soon as possible by exploiting both the land and the inhabitants. Development colonies are places like New Zealand, Australia and the US. Exploitation colonies end up as crime ridden, poverty stricken shitholes.
China and India present contrasts. India was a curious mixture of exploitation and development. In China the British accidentally created a development colony which then became localised and very successful. China is a country that is turning into a major development country with skills acquired from Hong Kong and Taiwan.
What has changed is simply cost of transport. Ships have almost always been more efficient than land transport. South of here, the glassworks at Shaftesbury in Dorset in the 17th century had a thriving trade with the West Indies and New England because it was cheaper to send goods down the river to Poole or Weymouth and across the Atlantic, than by land to Bristol.
However, despite your comment, really big ships are really,really efficient. I donât excuse burning what is basically the residue after the good stuff has been refined off, but I suspect more and more ships will use LNG for operating cost reasons; the really big MAN dual fuel engines can run on 95% LNG with only 5% of bunker fuel to ignite the charge. They are increasingly automated, so sailors are an almost incidental cost - you can helicopter out expensive officers only as needed. The result is apparent paradoxies such as it being cheaper to ship a car by sea from Korea to England than it is to get it from the port to showroom.
As automation increases and the need for labour gets less and less, the important things about where things are made become the availability of low cost reliable energy and water, regulatory and taxation frameworks, and markets. Weâre in a major transition and we need to make it quickly with minimal fuss.
I personally think that TPP is a mistake because it is about the last battle fought by capitalism - to break down tariffs and destroy worker rights - when it should be about the next battle in which, in the interests of species survival, we the people fight back against the capitalists. We have to ensure that this time the benefits of improved engineering and better thermodynamics reach everybody so that the population realignments caused by climate change have minimum disruptive effects. Job losses should not matter because they should be offset by shorter working weeks, better benefits to people affected by economic change, and hew forms of employment. But that means that the present system of asset concentration in the hands of the people who bribe the politicians has to stop.
Great comment with one small piece I take minor exception to. I think your comments about China, Hong-Kong and Taiwan is about 20 years out of date. Be careful not to play down China with faint praise.
