Saturday, November 4, 2017

Bill Crawford: Put spotlight on big business to create more jobs.

President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress should add one small thing to the tax reform bill to truly help make American great again.
In case you haven’t noticed, corporate earnings are driving the stock market to record highs. Across the board, earnings are up; earnings are strong.
 
When the corporate tax cut House Republican leaders revealed last week hits and knocks rates from 35% to 20% or so, earnings will go up even more. (Many think the market is up in anticipation of this earnings bump.)
 
Of course, one of the ways big business has maximized earnings, and thereby stock valuations, has been through employee layoffs and offshoring jobs to foreign countries. 
 
Major companies with big layoffs in 2017 included Microsoft, Wal-Mart, Nike, Lowe's, Union Pacific, Caterpillar, Hershey, Kellogg, State Farm, Oracle, Macy's, J.C. Penney, and more.
 
Major companies that rely on offshoring jobs include Apple, Wal-Mart, Nike, IBM, and Cisco.
 
Now, big business is licking its chops over a new way to dump jobs and pump up earnings.
 
"Wall Street’s robot revolution has begun," Bloomberg Businessweek reported in September. "JPMorgan Chase & Co. is rolling out a program called LOXM that executes equities trades so well, it’s replacing the humans who used to do that." The article added that Management consultant Opimas LLC predicts "90,000 people in asset management will be replaced by machines by 2025."
 
“The forces that trump all others are human capital and technology, man and machine, and we’re at an inflection point with them, in the midst of a structural change that will impact the labor market globally,” Vanguard’s chief economist Joe Davis said at Morningstar’s annual ETF conference last month. “The trend that will define our lives is how work changes for all of us. I can’t think of a more seminal issue that will face the economy in the years ahead.”
 
In reporting Davis’ comments, MarketWatch noted that the impact of automation and artificial intelligence (AI) could be massive, particularly as new technologies—such as driverless cars and “bot” programs that can mimic human speech patterns—mature and disrupt ever-larger segments of the economy. The article cited recent research claiming that every industrial robot takes up to six jobs, with some six million jobs at risk of being lost to automation over the coming decade.
 
"Tech is always moving faster and getting smarter,” said Davis. “Work has always been an arms race between education and technology, but the pace of change, and the scale of the change, are different this time.”
 
In October CBS Money Watch reported as many as 10 million U.S. jobs could disappear "as companies deploy machines that can learn and perform tasks." Jobs at risk included cooks, cleaners, movers, truckers, nurses, and retail sales.
 
Disappearing jobs, layoffs, and offshoring will not make America great again. More and better jobs will.
 
So, the simple thing President Trump and Republican leaders in Congress should add to the tax cut bill is this – require public corporations to announce their U.S. based job totals at the same time they announce earnings each quarter.
 
Put the spotlight on big business so Americans can easily see if the tax cut really does grow U.S. jobs, not just earnings. 
 
 
 
Crawford is syndicated columnist from Meridian (crawfolk@gmail.com)

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

After the smoke clears Bill knows that the proposed tax cuts will not create new jobs. It will not stop AI and Roboctis from replacing you. The current stock increases are a result of the anticipation of tax reform but in the end economic and job growth for the average Joe isn't in the cards. It's not going to be sitting president's fault either, it's always interesting when fault or credit is given to them. Economic issues are more complex and bigger than that.

Prove Me Wrong... said...

THIS JUST IN: Nobody, no company, other than government bureaucracy, is interested in 'growing jobs'. No company exists or is sustained by increasing the payroll numbers.

Anonymous said...

Amen 11:47 & 11:51

Anonymous said...

Then we shouldn't let Trump and other politicians lie that the tax cuts are about growth and jobs. Same goes for Tater.

Anonymous said...

Mississippi is due to get a taste of it real soon. Let's see how many jobs the tire plant actually brings in.

Anonymous said...

Every startup, including returning ex-patriot industries, will naturally 'create' or 'bring in' jobs. But, it takes a real fool to assume that increasing business profits will necessarily increase the payroll footprint of a business. Unless there are plans for expansion, new product lines, doubling production, etc, your 'job creation' bullshit is a pipe-dream. How could anybody think otherwise?

The real key to a growing economy, and Trump's leadership, is consistency in industrial output, no layoffs, no shutdowns, no downsizing, no reduction in hours (thus benefits disappearing), a return to 'things made in America' and regular paychecks for every family in this country. When those things are in the mix, all the dominoes will stand back up. And the way to make that happen, today, is in the reduction and elimination of government controls and constraints on businesses, particularly in the manufacturing segment of our economy. Government is such a large, cancerous octopus that the only way for industry to survive is to leave this country.

Pittpanther said...

How does reducing or eliminating the mortgage interest deduction help me?

Anonymous said...

Technology will eliminate an enormous number of jobs in the future including many high paying white collar jobs. Eliminating state and federal taxes will not slow down the speeding train that is coming.

Anonymous said...

Hey 4:42 this "tax reform" isn't intended to help you. Most folks will get a reduction because of the $300 per person tax credit. When that is phased out in 5 years you will probably be no better off than you are today and you will be paying more taxes.

Anonymous said...

Government is a cancerous growth? You turds, living off tax credits, farm subsidies, carried interest, state tax breaks, and reaping government benefits, such as SS, Medicare, etc, make a Christian want to vomit. Actual cancer patients and their families, families of Alzheimer patients, families of kids with chronic disease, are set to lose their medical expense deduction to pay for more corporate welfare. It's sick. It's the most unChristian thing one could plan. And you greedy, self serving turds who have delusions that the "GubMint" did not provide the very basis (stability, a justice system, economic sanity, fair trade, etc) for your subsidized "private sector" company slither out to pretend your pretty boy self was "self made." I'd punch you in the face if you said something so asinine in public. Leave the country to better people than you if you think it's so bad. Good luck making it on your own overseas. Sure they'd be impressed with your credentials and love your greed and delusions of grandeur.

Anonymous said...

I'd punch you in the face if you said something so asinine in public.

BRING IT.

Anonymous said...

6:00 - If you don't realize government is a cancerous animal growing out of control, you're either demented or a liberal. Sorry for that redundancy. The role of government is to create a national environment where people/companies can exist and prosper, gain wealth or go bust....without every single facet of the operation being crippled by government controls. You don't get that.

And your reference to Social Security being a 'government benefit' pretty much sums up your mentality.

Anonymous said...

Raising small business taxes to 35% and cutting corporate taxes to 20% won't create more jobs or keep jobs here or raise the wages overseas . The latter is why corporations leave.
We need laws to make moving jobs overseas painful like punitive personal income taxes on American corporate executives who live in this country. We need to make the failure to protect our technological secrets treasonous. These billionaires don't want to live in China or India.
If an American corporation's executives and boards as well as stockholders who own more than 25% has more overseas jobs than American jobs, it'd be fine with me for those individuals to lose their citizenship.

This is not the first time in economic history that the greed of a few has corrupted a country and had it result in crisis. It's not the first time monopolies have taken over a country. It's not the first time a few honorable men thought they could make a difference or didn't know what they didn't know, only what they wanted to believe. It's just the first time an entire population had the truth at their fingertips and chose to trust those who they should have known didn't have their best interests in mind.

Anonymous said...

"This is not the first time in economic history that the greed of a few has corrupted a country and had it result in crisis. It's not the first time monopolies have taken over a country. It's not the first time a few honorable men thought they could make a difference or didn't know what they didn't know, only what they wanted to believe."

Oh? Please enlighten us as to when the other times were.

Anonymous said...

Bill needs to check the records, Trump isn't even hiring American workers. You think anyone else is going to do it?

Anonymous said...

Trump's not 'hiring' anybody, 10:32. He's busy attempting to drain the swamp.



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