All this worrying over nothing. Most of what Trump wants to do will never pass during his term. Everything will get challenged in the courts and it will drag on for years, by which time Trump will no longer be president.
All this worrying over nothing. Most of what Trump wants to do will never pass during his term. Everything will get challenged in the courts and it will drag on for years, by which time Trump will no longer be president.
As someone said on CNBC. If he doesn't adjust well than he will be one term president.
Who is this writer? The article is simply stupid. iPhone needs hundreds of thousands of workers in China. Where do you find so many workers in US? In Wyoming? Give me a break.
2 points: 1st rip on him, 2nd agree with some of it.
Trumpo the clown has all his own cr@p, from his 'Made in America' hats to the steel he uses for his building made overseas.
He s a walking hypocrite.
Hiring this moron to fix our problems is like hiring a drug dealer to stop the drug war.
He said he would 'drain the swamp' meaning get rid of political insiders and he isn't even in office yet and his entire cabinet is nothing but political insiders.
You've been had people. It was another con and you fell for it again.
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In terms of Apple and everyone else getting their stuff made overseas. I think he has point and I agree we need some jobs back. I don't think most of these factors jobs will come back because no one here wants for work for $12 a day. But I do think we need to enforce much greater taxes on theses companies and don't give the the 35% BS which we all know exactly NO ONE actually pays. Apple, along with everyone else, doesn't need 100 Billion $ sitting in Ireland because they don't want to pay taxes. Change the laws and make it illegal to park your money overseas, and then use the money for Americans.
All this worrying over nothing. Most of what Trump wants to do will never pass during his term. Everything will get challenged in the courts and it will drag on for years, by which time Trump will no longer be president.
Possibly, but I bet we're gonna see the fbi go after Apple hard to get back-doors in iOS, and I bet this administration targets Tim Cook's policies. About the only good news Apple can look forward to is a tax holiday to bring their money back into the US, though they might be better off leaving it offshore at this point ... Unless of course they need it to pay fines, penalties and tariffs for failing to bring manufacturing back to the US ...
I wonder if Trump will be the end of Cook, if he pushes his social agenda and brings Trumps wrath on Apple. Will the board remove him?
The higher labor costs in the US could be partially offset by the lowering of the corporate tax and repatriating the capital back to the US. In the long run, the profit margins of around 40-45% that Apple has been showing would likely be in the mid-30% range, but this would also apply to Apple's competitors, and thus should not cause any long-term negative effect for shareholders. Apple has been accumulating mountains of cash due to its high profitability, and the stock has been moving sideways for the last 4 years. In fact, the AAPL stock price is now lower than it was in August of 2012, so it's been 3 1/2 years of lost time for long-term AAPL investors, whereas the amount of Apple's cash reserves probably doubled since then.
Apple has no clear vision about what to do with the mountains of cash that it's sitting on. If Apple could repatriate the cash reserves back to the US, it could at least increase the dividend and thus compensate the shareholders for a temporary effect that the lowering of profit margins may cause. In the long run, I believe everyone would win if the US government created favorable conditions for the US companies to bring manufacturing back to the US by a combination of increased tariffs on goods manufactures overseas, by instituting a lower corporate tax rate, and by other measures. We could also lift the US inner city population out of poverty if we brought production back to US cities, and thus the tax payers would benefit because of the reduced cost of social programs that would not have to be used to support tens of millions of poor Americans who are currently unemployed due to the lack of high-tech skills required to participate in the current US labor market, which is devoid of manufacturing jobs.
Except lowering taxes and repatriation of capital will do nothing for the average worker. Apple, just like every public and private company is not beholden to the republic / society in general. They're beholden to their shareholders / owners. In fact, they're legally bound to do what's best for shareholders. Assuming that any company would take tax breaks and use the money to build more plants domestically, or hire more people, is just not going to happen. Companies won't hire more domestic employees unless they have to in order to satisfy production and sales of whatever they make and sell, and that it makes good fiscal sense to do so. The thing Trump pitched, like bringing back steel and coal production isn't just some simple decision any company can make.
Companies would need to change from the top down, with a CEO and board making the decision to make less profit, share less profit with owners and shareholders, so that they could use that money to make product at higher costs due to higher domestic employee costs. And then you have to have their customers, those who buy the products they make, agree to pay the higher price for the product, be it a component or end product, which then drives costs up further on that company's finished products.
And that can all work, as long as there are enough workers earning enough dollars to pay for the ever-increasing costs of goods.
This election wasn't really any different than those in the past, with one side or the other making promises that are entirely impossible to fulfill, but it blows my mind to see just how many really ignorant people there are that buy into these promises (on both sides).
So production of iPhone is switched to America. And the raw materials, they come from which country? Minerals the USA doesn't have, but China has. Labor is one thing. Materials to build with is another.
The poor and lower middle class who have been left out of the economy for the past two decades due to globalist elites might still be worth supporting. (note: all wealth gain has gone to the top 1% in the US since the 1970s)
Because our current system (and that proposed by the dems) is that it is better to not have a job than have a job that you don't want (one reason the dems voicing support the US economy losing 2 million people in the workforce due to the affordable care act), it could be an improvement to actually raise costs and reduce taxes.
Consider: walmart pays their workers next to nothing because of the tacit agreement with the elite that their workers will be subsidized an additional $18 or so from our taxes in the form of earned income tax credits (for example).
tl;dr: We could raise costs and lower taxes and improve the quality of life for Americans.
Is it worth propping up the anti-human right Chinese govt. with our innovative technologies and growing their economy while our 99% suffer?
US unemployment is currently 4.9%
if we brought back all the US manufacturing lost to overseas in the past 35 years, we would need to open the borders wider to bring in more Mexican laborers. beyond the number of workers we would need, i have a feeling these jobs would be akin to the berry-picking field jobs. aka ones already employed US citizens don't want.
Manufacturing was forced out of the US by billionaires (and multi-millionaires) refusing to share profits with the middle class, and so the only way to break the unions was to move out of the country.
forcing companies to move back wont change the attitude of the rich. you will still have real estate moguls claiming bankruptcy before paying their subcontractors, manufacturers forcing down wages & the ultra rich refusing to share wealth in any way with the 50% of Americans who make less than US $50,000 a year.
It's not about labor costs, in the end they're negligible, that is a fact that has been proven accurate over and again. Besides, cheap labor is not the majority of the operation and the number of laborers is usually imposed by governments to increase their workforce. The real problem, as Tim and Jobs said in the past is INFRASTRUCTURE!
Agreed. So how much would it cost for Apple to create or import the necessary infrastructure back to the U.S.? $20 billion? And even after that, what kind of margins on each product shipped are we talking? If Apple's getting 30%-40% now, would it drop down to 20%-30% due to labor cost differences?
If Apple used repatriated tax dollar savings (proposed 10% instead of usual 35%) to build infrastructure, it could be written off in the long run. The only problem with all of this change is that robots will supplant most of the necessary labor by the time the politics catches up so maybe it's better to do nothing.
All this worrying over nothing. Most of what Trump wants to do will never pass during his term. Everything will get challenged in the courts and it will drag on for years, by which time Trump will no longer be president.
Everything Obama used an executive order to enact will be immediately reversed. And Congress will mothball "most of" Obamacare using reconciliation.
I admire Steve Jobs' candor in telling President Obama that the type of jobs related to making most iProduct thingies are never coming back to the USA. He wasn't blowing smoke, he was telling it like it is with brutal honesty. It's not even the labor rates, it's supply chain proximity, production scalability and elasticity, time to market, skills mix, and of course automation just to name a few non labor factors. The saving grace for the US, Germany, and other western countries today is the fact that the majority of automation machinery and system suppliers are still in high wage / high standard of living countries so they capture the high margin influence of automation. This could change. Manufacturing industry initiatives such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIot) and Industrie 4.0 are primarily geared towards keeping the high margin parts of the automation machinery design and manufacturing processes in the high wage / high standard of living countries while recognizing that lower cost suppliers will continue to drive machinery and component costs down.
Another factor in manufacturing that's weak and nearly missing in the US but more healthy in countries like Germany is the education and training programs in place for high-skill and hard-skill workers that don't have college degrees. The US has no shortage at all of highly credentialed and degreed graduates who basically have little or no hard skills that can be directly applied to job requirements in modern manufacturing. Just how many art history, communications, political science, and Celtic history graduates does a maker of packaging machines, robotics, or CNC milling machines need? About the only dedicated, large scale high-skills and hard-skills training programs in the US are the military enlisted training programs.
The impact of seeking low cost labor for low skills jobs has been going on for the past half century so it's not like the manufacturing companies suddenly got a whiff of cheap Chinese labor and packed up all of their factories on boats and shipped them to China just in the past 5 years. That's been going on for decades. All those jobs are 20-30 years removed from ever coming back to the US. Heck, those jobs aren't even in China anymore, they've moved to Viet Nam, Philippines, and Bangladesh. The more recent trend however is that in some places where the manufacturing migration passed through, and most evident starting in Japan, is that they actually invested in modern manufacturing and skills attainment that matches the requirements of the tasks at hand in the modern global economy. The key behavior here is investment. Other countries invested in building out a full-stack modern manufacturing capability and the US did not. The US just wants to skim the highest margins from the top of the food chain and not get its hands dirty in low level details. No investment = no payback.
The current state of manufacturing in the US is an equal opportunity problem with plenty of blame to go around. You can't simply pin it on politicians or businessmen. The will of the people is as big a factor as anything. Behaviors almost always follow rewards. We got what we have because this is what we wanted and voted for. We lost our sense of purpose and replaced it with endless blaming and finger pointing. A nation of participants got replaced by a nation of spectators. When's the last time you heard of a German, Singaporean, or Japanese college athletic coach earning two or three orders of magnitude higher salary than a tenured science or engineering professor at the same university? I guess this tells you what really matters to Americans.
How about if I am Apple than put/sheve ipad pro inside Mr. Trump' Hippocrates's A*. He wants to target Apple but how about Walmart and others including himself in his hotels/casino who is using China oe some other countries manufactured stuff.
How about you are respectful and keep the discussion professional ? Apple has the hugest profit ever of any US coporation in the last quarter and has a big social responsibilty to create jobs in the USA, and I am not talking about low paying ones. We want well paid jobs ! Donald Trump gives them and everybody else a great incentive with lowering the coporate taxes to 15%.
Lowering corporate taxes is not a recipe for more higher paying jobs. That's a fallacy. We had a society of significantly higher average wages back when corporate taxes were as high as 70%. In fact, the great middle class was born out of those times. When they started dropping, the middle class took the brunt of the loss, but it's been felt now equally across the vast majority of the population.
As a business owner myself, I'm not making job decisions based on lower taxes. I dont discount any tax savings we get when we do add positions, but we only add positions to address increased sales of our product.
Comments
As someone said on CNBC. If he doesn't adjust well than he will be one term president.
This piece needs to be preceded with "OPINION:"
Trumpo the clown has all his own cr@p, from his 'Made in America' hats to the steel he uses for his building made overseas.
He s a walking hypocrite.
Hiring this moron to fix our problems is like hiring a drug dealer to stop the drug war.
He said he would 'drain the swamp' meaning get rid of political insiders and he isn't even in office yet and his entire cabinet is nothing but political insiders.
You've been had people. It was another con and you fell for it again.
-------------------
In terms of Apple and everyone else getting their stuff made overseas. I think he has point and I agree we need some jobs back. I don't think most of these factors jobs will come back because no one here wants for work for $12 a day. But I do think we need to enforce much greater taxes on theses companies and don't give the the 35% BS which we all know exactly NO ONE actually pays. Apple, along with everyone else, doesn't need 100 Billion $ sitting in Ireland because they don't want to pay taxes. Change the laws and make it illegal to park your money overseas, and then use the money for Americans.
I wonder if Trump will be the end of Cook, if he pushes his social agenda and brings Trumps wrath on Apple. Will the board remove him?
Companies would need to change from the top down, with a CEO and board making the decision to make less profit, share less profit with owners and shareholders, so that they could use that money to make product at higher costs due to higher domestic employee costs. And then you have to have their customers, those who buy the products they make, agree to pay the higher price for the product, be it a component or end product, which then drives costs up further on that company's finished products.
And that can all work, as long as there are enough workers earning enough dollars to pay for the ever-increasing costs of goods.
This election wasn't really any different than those in the past, with one side or the other making promises that are entirely impossible to fulfill, but it blows my mind to see just how many really ignorant people there are that buy into these promises (on both sides).
if we brought back all the US manufacturing lost to overseas in the past 35 years, we would need to open the borders wider to bring in more Mexican laborers.
beyond the number of workers we would need, i have a feeling these jobs would be akin to the berry-picking field jobs. aka ones already employed US citizens don't want.
Manufacturing was forced out of the US by billionaires (and multi-millionaires) refusing to share profits with the middle class, and so the only way to break the unions was to move out of the country.
forcing companies to move back wont change the attitude of the rich.
you will still have real estate moguls claiming bankruptcy before paying their subcontractors,
manufacturers forcing down wages
& the ultra rich refusing to share wealth in any way with the 50% of Americans who make less than US $50,000 a year.
If Apple used repatriated tax dollar savings (proposed 10% instead of usual 35%) to build infrastructure, it could be written off in the long run. The only problem with all of this change is that robots will supplant most of the necessary labor by the time the politics catches up so maybe it's better to do nothing.
There is a lot more entertainment and fun to come soon, and I'm going to enjoy every minute of it.
Another factor in manufacturing that's weak and nearly missing in the US but more healthy in countries like Germany is the education and training programs in place for high-skill and hard-skill workers that don't have college degrees. The US has no shortage at all of highly credentialed and degreed graduates who basically have little or no hard skills that can be directly applied to job requirements in modern manufacturing. Just how many art history, communications, political science, and Celtic history graduates does a maker of packaging machines, robotics, or CNC milling machines need? About the only dedicated, large scale high-skills and hard-skills training programs in the US are the military enlisted training programs.
The impact of seeking low cost labor for low skills jobs has been going on for the past half century so it's not like the manufacturing companies suddenly got a whiff of cheap Chinese labor and packed up all of their factories on boats and shipped them to China just in the past 5 years. That's been going on for decades. All those jobs are 20-30 years removed from ever coming back to the US. Heck, those jobs aren't even in China anymore, they've moved to Viet Nam, Philippines, and Bangladesh. The more recent trend however is that in some places where the manufacturing migration passed through, and most evident starting in Japan, is that they actually invested in modern manufacturing and skills attainment that matches the requirements of the tasks at hand in the modern global economy. The key behavior here is investment. Other countries invested in building out a full-stack modern manufacturing capability and the US did not. The US just wants to skim the highest margins from the top of the food chain and not get its hands dirty in low level details. No investment = no payback.
The current state of manufacturing in the US is an equal opportunity problem with plenty of blame to go around. You can't simply pin it on politicians or businessmen. The will of the people is as big a factor as anything. Behaviors almost always follow rewards. We got what we have because this is what we wanted and voted for. We lost our sense of purpose and replaced it with endless blaming and finger pointing. A nation of participants got replaced by a nation of spectators. When's the last time you heard of a German, Singaporean, or Japanese college athletic coach earning two or three orders of magnitude higher salary than a tenured science or engineering professor at the same university? I guess this tells you what really matters to Americans.
As a business owner myself, I'm not making job decisions based on lower taxes. I dont discount any tax savings we get when we do add positions, but we only add positions to address increased sales of our product.