Perhaps it’s just something in my eye but I see an abnormally large number of what I might call flights of fancy in the opinion pages today. Here’s Tony Blankley:
President Obama’s post-Labor Day “jobs†speech will be his last chance to launch an economic policy with any chance of manifesting its effect – both economic and political – before the November 2012 elections. He has three options. In order of descending likelihood, they are: a timid hodgepodge of previous proposals, a bold left-of-center initiative or a turn to a free-market “nuclear option.â€
It’s that nuclear option that is the most fascinating (and most unlikely). He could decide to embrace all the major Republican, Tea Party free-market ideas – marginal business and personal tax-rate cuts (leading to a net tax cut); big discretionary spending cuts to be implemented before the 2012 election; genuine long-term reductions in Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security costs written into law now; major deregulation, including Environmental Protection Agency rules, Dodd-Frank financial burdens and nanny-state consumer regulations; unlimited oil- and gas-drilling and shale-fracking authorization; permanent extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts; repeal of the double tax on American corporations’ foreign profits; limits on unemployment insurance extensions; and withdrawal of his big union initiatives, such as the National Labor Relations Board’s opposition to the Boeing Co. building a factory in South Carolina.
Least likely, indeed! I can’t think of any steps more likely to produce the things that could put -30- to the president’s term of office than that strategy. It would all but certainly produce a primary challenge and, possibly, third party candidacy. It’s a fantasy.
Then from Harold Meyerson:
Apple’s American employees are well paid. Stateside, Apple employs designers of hardware, software and packaging; marketers, managers, supply-chain gurus and financial whizzes — a very talented crew. But not a very large one: In its most recent annual filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple said it directly employs 47,000 people worldwide — perhaps 30,000 of whom work in the United States. It employs no U.S.-based production workers.
Which is why Jobs’s elevation to our national pantheon is premature.
Bringing some of those production jobs home while holding down the price of his products probably would require devising factories so automated that they wouldn’t employ all that many workers. Then again, Apple is sitting on $76 billion in cash, and Jobs is still Apple’s chairman. Devoting a few billion to reshape and restart American manufacturing, even if it employs fewer people than in Henry Ford’s time and narrows Apple’s profit margins, could work wonders for exports and, just possibly, lead to Jobs’s most amazing invention of all: a newly vibrant American working-class.
That’s a fantasy as elaborate as any Harry Potter novel. It is about as likely as it would be for Dick Cheney to become the new Mother Teresa, ministering to the poor and sick. Process design is not the same as product design and Apple’s resurgence over the last fifteen or so years is based on its ability to use its fanbase and the cachet derived from its success in niche markets to propel it into the commodity marketplace with the iPod, then iPhone, and now iPad. That progress is tied indissolubly to Foxconn’s soul-killing Chengdu plant which already has reached the point that it can’t bring in the iPad at its price point and still pay the tiny wages the million workers who toil there receive.
Mr. Jobs has rebuilt Apple with vision and an attention to detail. That vision has nothing whatever to do with employing American workers in manufacturing.
