Romney on green cards

But what will it do to corporate profits?

That's zero-sum thinking. If you bring in some really good ones, they may create more jobs than they displace. Not to mention brain-draining foreign competition.

In so many words, Romney doesn't think American tech workers are cutting the mustard. He repeated that theme several times during the debate referring to unfilled high skill positions.

mustard. He repeated that theme several times during the debate referring to unfilled high skill positions.

Not just Romney thinks that, but Microsoft is pushing for that, too. As long as American kids prefer to go for easy liberal arts degrees, instead of hard science degrees, US companies are forced to seek out foreign engineers.

Sadly, the really good ones aren't likely to want to work in the US for any length of time - the cost of living in an area where your kids can get a good education can be prohibitive, and settling in a country that's no longer on the cutting edge is also a career-damaging move.

The Romney-Ryan initiative is much more aimed at cutting the already low remuneration of the median skilled worker by squeezing some of the US candidates for jobs in favour of people drawn from the over- production in India and Russia's higher education systems.

Depressed wages means profits will go up. More bonuses for top level execs. Food stamps for engineers. What a plan.

Who is going to leave a country with real socialized medicine, months of vacation, and job security to work in the US?

Here is the deal. As you bring in the foreign labor, it depresses wages. That in turn encourages students to study other disciplines that pay better. Law for instance.

If we just cut off H1B to zero, then the corporations would be clamoring for more students to study engineering. By granting H1B status, it is a self fulfilling prophecy. The supply of H1B employees creates the need for more H1B employees since it discourages Americans from studying engineering.

You want a job plan. How about large corporations take employees that are qualified to teach and put them in universities. Let them double dip, i.e. get paid by the university and employer. Give the employer tax credits for loaning out the employee to a university. The deal is given tenure, universities tend to pay everyone the same, even if you are worth less on the outside. College profs in engineering usually consult to boost their pay.

The deal is that you have bigoted ideas. There is NO ONE discouraging US born students from studying engineering. Till about three years ago, I was a graduate student at USA's 5th ranked Electrical and Computer Engineering department. During a part of the time, I was a TA and I personally know that all my students were native born US citizens. Yhe first four courses in the ECE lower sequence courses were plain weeding out courses. Each Fall, about three hundred odd students joined as freshmen, and at the end of four years about 30 odd students graduated with ECE undergraduate degrees. But that is how it should be, because otherwise there will be glut of engineers with low skill levels. The companies are out to make a profit, and keep Wall Street happy. So the rush to foriegn shores. I do not know of any major US company that does not have operations in Bangalore for example. This has nothing to do with H1-B visas.

Thanks. Nice post.

No one goes off shore just for the fun of it--it's a huge pain. Obama totally dodged the point that Apple builds stuff overseas not to avoid taxes, but to pay them elsewhere, someplace friendlier. Ditto regulation.

miso's said U.S. labor would add just 10% to an iPad (IIRC). U.S. tax rates add a great deal more than that. So, if miso's right it's little to do with the cost of labor. That had to have been misdirection, or just plain ignorance.

The ultimate rebuttal of all of Obama's b.s. is the empirical evidence: He said all this stuff four years ago, and it's not working. It isn't working now, and it's not going to work. Everything he purported to improve is worse.

You can't borrow your way out of debt. You can't spend your way to prosperity. Slicing the loaf thinner doesn't make more, and robbing Pater to pay Paul improves neither. Yet, Obama successfully sells all these ploys to low-information types.

Obama's "investments" aren't. Top-down central control of everything is, was, and always will be inferior. When the top-down controller never had a real job, and wasn't able to balance his personal finances--that just makes it worse.

Obama's got the country nose-down, and that's how it'll stay as long as he does (and perhaps for decades beyond, as he has his way).

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Actually, Apple like - everybody else - builds stuff overeas (outside of the US) because labour is cheaper over there. Chinese officials may also be easier and cheaper to bribe than their US equivalents, but that's probably a minor issue even if it happens to be true.

James Arthur carries on about taxes and regulations and ignores the cost of labour issue because he's a right wing nitwit with an axe to grind, not because he's got any evidence that Apple finds it important.

But only after Apple had spent and arm and leg automating the process of assembling the iPad - they'd have to invest a lot of captial, and significant amount of time (as in time to market) to make the process only 10% more expensive than assembly in China.

But they add it to the price of the device is sold for in the US. Retail mark-up is high - about half what you'll pay for an iPad goes to the US retailer and the US distributor, and the taxes on that stay in the US.

Twaddle. You've misunderstood what miso said, and misinterpreted it to suit your own demented point of view.

The ignorance/misdirection is all yours.

He purported to be improving the GDP and it's gone up. Due to the Tea Party influence, pretty much all that improvement has been creamed off by the top 1% of the income distributuion, but that's scarcely Obama 's fault.

Obviously not, and you are wasting bandwidth with a self-contradictory claim.

What Kenyes claimed - perfectly correctly - was that you could borrow your way out of a recession. Obama hasn't be able to diredt the borrowed stimulus money into the pockets of the poor, who can be releid on to spend all of it, but has had to settle for directing it into the pockets of the top 1% who are still spending enough of it to keep your economy growing and hiring more people, if at nowhere near the rate that you'd get if the money was being given to people who would spend more of ti.

Perhaps not. But you can spend your way out of a drepression or a recession, and failing to stimulate the economy can certainly be a false economy, as Hoover demonstrrated from 1929 to 1932.

Perfectly correct and totally irrelevant, since Obama is doing neither.

An outright lie, that you are trying to sell to people you hope to be suffiiciently unsophisticated to fall for it. The stimulus money is being borrowed, not stolen, from people who are too scared to invest it themselves. This isn't theft, and it isn't slicing any loaf any which way.

What's he been "top-down controlling"? Do tell - I could do with a good laugh.

He spent more than he earned one year when he was positioning himself to run for the nomination - that's not being "unable to balance his personal finances", that's investing in career development. Pre- election lies are to be expected, but making them that blatant does damage any credulity you might have left.

It's the Mad Hatters Tea party that's delaying the US economic recovery, entirely for party politcal reasons, and they deserve to go down in flames for their irresponsible and destructive antics.

Not the French or Greeks. They'll stay home and riot.

Like foreign engineers are so stupid not to check what a job should pay? I wouldn't be surprised foreign engineers get paid more because they get the job done.

The French people who are rioting wouldn't be candidates for skilled work in the US or anywhere else.

The Greeks aren't likely to want to swap one government who didn't collect enough taxes for another one with the same weakness - admittedly, the Greek governments have been weak at collecting personal taxation, while the US government is weak at collecting corporate tax, but running out of money isn't a good look whoever's been bribing you to look the other way.

mustard. He repeated that theme several times during the debate referring to unfilled high skill positions.

How can the US have enough skilled workers when they can not afford the education needed ?

Wasn't that in the context of illegal immigration? Or did I have that wrong?

I remember when they started the H1B visa scheme and companies found they could bring in foreign workers and get around the "protections". My cousin trained his lower salary replacement. I can't believe that they haven't ended that scheme now that unemployment is so high.

How is Romney's idea different from the H1B visa plan?

Rick

What the hell are you talking about when stating that "the US government is weak at collecting corporate tax?" US has one of the highest corporate tax rates in the industrialized world which is a major incentive for US companies to shift as much of their ops abroad as is economically feasible.

Miso didn't say anything that was bigoted. He said that by bringing in H1B visa holders wages are depressed which discourages new students in the field.

This is not idle speculation. My cousin was employed at a company where they brought in an H1B worker at a lower wage who HE trained. When that done my cousin was laid off. The H1B law is supposed to prevent that, there are "restrictions", but the companies distort the facts and lie about what the jobs are. So the law has no enforcement teeth.

There are out of work engineers at this time. How can anyone justify the continuing of the H1B program?

Rick

Sounds like that school was engaging in fraudulent selection practices, probably for state/federal subsidization purposes. I could see an attrition of 30%, but