Working » Visible Country Comments

America making things

American Life, Economy, Made in USA, Working Comments Off

Apr 292012

About two years ago I decided to build a web site that featured 100 companies that make things in the USA. By “things” I mean consumer goods since that’s what American seem to complain about most (…everything for sale in big box stores is made in China, India, etc.). Since I had never built a web site before, I also had to teach myself HTML. Also, in the middle of all this I decided to start this blog. My attention span isn’t all that great and I wandered off to do other things from time to time, but the good news is I’m almost done. See Visible Country

That said, what I’ll start doing now is revising the website and do everything the way it should have been done if I’d known what I was doing in the first place.

A great benefit of the time spent is that I now understand and have opinions on several things that I didn’t know about two years ago.

What I have learned about companies making consumer goods in the USA.

1. Some of these companies are hard to find.

You just can’t Google “made in USA” and expect to come up with a respectable list of manufacturers. First you’ll get pages and pages of directories of websites with lists of things made in the USA. Not what I wanted. I wanted to discover companies that might not be on the usual “buy American” lists. So you have to do some harder work, like searching the internet by state and manufacturing groups, and then back checking and verifying.

2. We make more things than you think.

Those people who say “we don’t make things anymore” are wrong. For example, home audio and watches. I thought we stopped making that stuff years ago. Turns our I was wrong. We make lots of high end audio components. We just about did stop making watches, but that’s begun to change. Stylish clothing, expertly made home furnishings, sports and outdoors equipment, we make it all.

3. We don’t make some things that we should make.

Computer electronics for example. You can’t buy any wireless routers made in the USA…I know, I tried. It’s also very hard to find any computers even assembled in the USA. It seems to me we may be losing the ability to build factories to make electronic components. This is something we need to work on.

Another thing is sailplanes (gliders). OK, not something everyone wants in their garage, but I have a category on the site called “flying”, and I planned to add a company making sailplanes. Imagine my surprise, you would think at least one company would build sailplanes here.

4. Some things will be made elsewhere.

China and India have 2.5 billion people between them. The US has about 310 million. It seems reasonable that other countries in the world are going to get good at making certain things. Factories are becoming more automated. This started a long time ago and is more responsible for the fall off in manufacturing jobs in the US, than all the off-shoring combined. Other countries have become way more capable at making textiles that we are here. Making towels and carpets and t-shirts is no longer in our wheelhouse. That’s just going to happen. Americans need to concentrate on their strengths.

5. Even if we don’t make it here we often own the company.

American companies are often criticized for making products elsewhere. Goods that American companies make for sale in other places frequently cannot be manufactured competitively in the United States. American global companies both make and sell their products internationally. If they didn’t make the products overseas, they would not even be in the marketplace. As a result, the company prospers, its shareholders (often Americans) prosper and eventually when earned profits are repatriated to the states, the international American corporations pay their taxes on it.

6. We need to re-think the “made in USA” trope.

When Americans (especially politicians) talk about the manufacturing jobs that have been lost, they are frequently referred to as: “good high paying manufacturing jobs”. The media asks the politicians about how they would create “good high paying manufacturing jobs” and the politicians respond with various schemes, as if they could wave a magic wand and make it happen. The reality is that many of those “good high paying manufacturing jobs” were hard, dirty, tedious and sometimes dangerous jobs that have been replaced by foreign manufacturers and by automation. Many of those jobs aren’t coming back.

When you go through the 100 companies at Visible Country most of what you’ll see is how Americans are creating jobs by starting their own companies to make things. This together with taking advantage of the educational opportunities that are available to all American is how “made in the USA” will make a comeback.

SRBAC

Visit Visible Country for products made in the USA

Measuring the wealth of the American 1% – not just income.

Consumers, Economy, Working Comments Off

Nov 022011

There’s no question that we have lots of wealthy people in the USA. But all this talk about how much of the country’s wealth the top 1% and the top 15% are worth is pretty shaky, because no one actually knows. Remember there are about 312 million people in this country, so to get an accurate total of the wealth of the top 3, 120,000 people (that’s 1 %) or the top 46,000,000 people (15%) you would have to know each persons wealth figure and then add them up. Then to figure out what percent this is you would have to divide that number by the total wealth of the whole country…do you know what that is? No? Well welcome to the club, because no one else knows either. The only other way to find out is to estimate (more on that below).

Doesn’t sound so easy now does it?

Don’t confuse wealth with income. Not the same thing at all. Income is the money we have coming in each year from a variety of sources. That’s pretty easy to track because we have to file income tax forms every year. Income is not wealth. If you make $50,000 in a year, but also spend $50,000, you have no wealth unless you have acquired assets. So if you spent part of the $50,000 to buy a car, now your wealth is the value of the car. If you spent part of the $50,000 to go on vacation, all you have is pleasant memories. Vacations don’t accumulate wealth.

You figure out your wealth by adding up the value all your assets (house, car, investments, jewelry, pots and pans, etc.) and than subtracting the value of all your debts (mortgage, other loans, taxes, etc.). What you are left with is your wealth. Over time, saving, investing, starting a business, buying property, etc., are things that can help you accumulate wealth. Generally wealth doesn’t happen fast unless your a rock star or a professional athlete. Families who are very wealthy have, in many cases, accumulated their wealth over several generations.

The President often talks about higher taxes on the “wealthy”, but that’s not what he means. He means higher taxes for people who have income tax returns over a certain figure ($200,000 or $250,000). He might want to tax “millionaires and billionaires”, but he’s really going to tax a bunch of people who don’t have anything like that kind of money. Also, some people might make the cut ($200,000) one year, but miss it by a large number the next year. Are they still rich?

Estimating

Every three years the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System does a survey of the financial demographics of American families. Currently this survey called “Survey of Consumer Finances” can choose from a little over 100 million families in the US. Almost everything we read which quotes wealth numbers about the top 1%, 19% 15% and the bottom 50% and 90% originates from these surveys. What’s frightening about this is that only 4,449 families (of all wealth levels) were interviewed for this survey. The SCF statistics, by all accounts, are well regarded…still how comfortable do you feel about a .004449 sampling?

VISIT VISIBLE COUNTRY FOR AMERICAN MADE PRODUCTS

China building American bridges

Economy, Made in USA, Working 1 Response »

Jun 272011

A report in the New York Times today, said that a Chinese company is building much of the new San Francisco – Oakland Bay Bridge. This is probably old news to many since the project has been several years in process already, but it was the first I heard about it.

It always seemed to me there is something distinctly American about building big things. Highways, railroads, skyscrapers, dams, shopping malls and most of all, bridges. Bridges have names and purposes. Bridges identify cities and excite travelers (“We crossed the GW at night and we could see all the city lights”). Bridges are our gateways and part of our heritage and pride.

Pittsburgh bridge

Between 1849 and 1964 twelve new bridges in the United States extended the world record lengths for suspension bridges from 1,010 ft to 4,259 ft. Americans built all of them. Starting with the Wheeling, WV bridge finished in 1849 and measuring 1,010 ft. and ending with the Verrazano-Narrows bridge, which was the longest suspension bridge until 1981. It measured 4,259 ft. Some of these iconic twelve bridges include the Brooklyn Bridge over Manhattan’s East River, the Ben Franklin connecting Philadelphia and New Jersey over the Delaware River. the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco and the George Washington Bridge spanning the Hudson.

Imagine that! For 132 years, without interruption, we built the longest most beautiful bridges in the world. But since then…not so much. The Bay Bridge is not kid stuff. The costs are over 7 billion dollars, its really two bridges a viaduct and a tunnel. It’s big, it’s complicated and it’s here. Why aren’t Americans building all of it?

Well from what I’ve read of the history of the Bay Bridge project there’s a host of reasons. The estimated costs were always too low and a constant moving target. The design spec got input from everyone and everywhere and became a beauty contest, and the politics, as you might expect were the usual snake pit. The one thing that did not seem to be on anyone’s mind was employing American workers to build it. The two American companies who were the prime contractor dismissed the capacity of domestic steel industry to fabricate the bridge. This even though the Chinese company had yet to build a bridge or use the technology that was contemplated by the design.

Cost seemed to be the over riding issue for California. The NYT states that California decided not to apply for federal funds since they would then have had to purchase from US manufacturers. This is a muddy area since other accounts indicate that they could forego that requirement if the foreign bid were more than 25% cheaper than the domestic costs. The NYT also quoted a Chinese steel polisher working on a section of the bridge as saying he is paid $12 per day.

If we could build new bridges for 150 years, why did we stop? Did we forget how? The Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel was built in less than four years with no federal, state or local governmant money. It’s almost 20 miles long and includes bridges, tunnels and four man made islands. The first two lanes cost less than $200 million and were completed in 1964. Two additional lanes were open in 1999. They cost less than $250 million. No tax dollars were used.

By now we’re use to the fact that manufacturing costs are lower in most of the world. We’re use to buying t-shirts, electronics, kitchen items, shoes, tires, just about any consumer goods from anywhere in the world. But bridges?

I’m not a protectionist. I’ve always been for free trade and against tariffs. They just don’t make sense. But bridges…OUR BRIDGES. And one of the guys building it makes 12 dollars a DAY!

I might have to re-think some of this.

SRBAC

VISIT VISIBLE COUNTRY FOR AMERICAN MADE PRODUCTS

The government doesn’t create jobs…even when the politicians take credit for them.

Economy, Made in USA, Working Comments Off

Jun 142011

The June 14th headline on the business page on the USA Today said “Obama presses to create 1M jobs.” Sometime ago the President was taking credit for his administration creating or saving 4 million jobs. I still don’t know how you measure “saved jobs”, but that’s another topic. A lot of politicians of both parties like to take credit for creating jobs. Of course they do no such thing. Except for providing GM, AIG and Chrysler with bail out money the Unites States is not in the business of running corporations. The government doesn’t hire and fire in the private sector.

That’s why the President and the Congress need to get out of the habit of promising to address the unemployment problem by creating jobs. They can’t do it, it’s simply not the business of government to create jobs in the private sector. Why not? Because government doesn’t make things, sell things, fix things, grow things, service things….or in any way engage in commerce.

Likewise American voters also need to understand that no matter what politicians say, they can’t create jobs unless they are public sector jobs, of which we already have enough. State and local governments may encourage busineses to locate within their borders, but they do not create private sector jobs because they are governments and are not engaged in private commerce

When I first read of the Presidents Job and Competitive Council, I thought the purpose was to bring business people together to focus on what business could do to to create jobs. From the White House website:

“The President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness (Jobs Council) was created to provide non-partisan advice to the President on continuing to strengthen the Nation’s economy and ensure the competitiveness of the United States and on ways to create jobs, opportunity, and prosperity for the American people.”

The response President Obama got back from his Job Council (Jeffrey Immelt, et al.) was pretty funny. All five recommendations by the council involve either the government spending more money or changing the way government does things. Hey guys…I don’t think that’s what he meant. What they offered is:

1. Training workers for new job skills. How many political speeches has that been part of? (maybe divert money from other government programs…good luck to that).
2. Eliminate bureaucracy that bogs down infrastructure projects. Not sure how that can happen since the environmental groups will just take it to court.
3. Streamline visa process so we get more tourists. Doesn’t it seem like The State Department has long resisted all attempts to drag it out of the 19th century?
4. Make the SBA work faster (huh?)
5. Use federal funding to employ laid off construction workers to do “green” projects on commercial buildings.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this stuff, there’s just nothing new. To paraphrase an old Red Smith baseball analogy, telling the government that it should eliminate bureaucracy, streamline processes and work faster is like telling an 8 year old about sex. No matter what you say, the response is “But why?”

SRBAC

VISIT VISIBLE COUNTRY FOR AMERICAN MADE PRODUCTS

Linkedin Value Missing?

Consumers, Made in USA, Working Comments Off

May 252011

According to the first day stock price, Linkedin is worth 9 billion dollars or about 600 times last years earnings (15 million dollars). Pretty good for a company that is at best hard to describe (job board? social site? self promotion engine for members?). Linkedin’s first day results outperformed the opening day numbers of the likes of Google and Amazon. The comparison is likely to end there.

With earnings of $15,000,000 last year and 8 million shares trading at over $120 per share, that makes the earnings per share less than two bucks. It also means that the P/E ratio is about 65.

Okay, I know this is a tech company and we’re talking about growth prospects, but that’s just the point. What are the growth prospects? Google and Amazon have some pretty well defined business’s and they weren’t mysteries when the companys went public. What exactly is Linkedin’s business and where does the revenue come from?

Take Google and Amazon for example: Google has about 19 billion dollars in revenue and more than 8 billion dollars in earnings. Basically they sell ads, while people like me give them free content everyday. Amazon has revenue of 34 billion dollars and is one of the largest retailers in the internet world, selling every kind of consumer goods.

Linkedin has about 100 million members and they sell ads, premium memberships (most are free) and something called hiring solutions.

Ads we know about and they can certainly make some money there. Premium memberships means some members get special treatment, and they have a lot on members, so this could mean some good revenue. Hiring solutions means they work out deals with corporate management and that’s a quality over quantity business.

So can they get the revenue up and the P/E down? If they can it’ll be a big bang for the social network segment.

100 million members and $100 stock price is pretty impressive.

SRBAC

VISIT VISIBLE COUNTRY FOR AMERICAN MADE PRODUCTS

Unconsious Headlines #3 – Unwarranted Joy About Jobs

Consumers, Economy, Unconscious headlines, Working Comments Off

May 092011

On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal has the headline “Job Engine Shifts to Higher Gear”. “Wow” I think. “Did I just fall asleep for a year and miss something big”. Nope, its just those pesky journalists trying to trick us again. What they do is make up a headline that has nothing to do with the story below it and little to do with reality overall. I don’t know why they do it or how they get away with it but the evidence is there every week.

In fact last week was not a particularly good one for jobs. First the ADP report came out showing that new jobs for April was way below expectations and also way below the March employment report. Then the Institute for Supply Management comes out and says the service sector results took a big drop in April. That’s bad because the service sector is the largest part of out economy and by far the biggest employer. Then on Friday, the labor department says that total unemplyment has jumped up to 9% from 8.8%.

So all of this looks pretty bad for the WSJ headline of Saturday. But wait, here comes the cavalry. The Labor department also says that the private sector added 244,000 jobs in April. That’s a tiny bit better than March (235,0000 revised), but should that be cause for a WSJ headline that touts that the job picture is in overdrive?

Well the numbers look less than great, but anecdotaly, later in the day I went to our local Lowe’s hardware and I could barely find a space to park. Obviously everyone who is not part of the unemployment statistics was there with me.

SRBAC

VISIT VISIBLE COUNTRY FOR AMERICAN MADE PRODUCTS

Public employee unions, the bargaining problem.

Economy, Working Comments Off

Mar 142011

A collective bargaining agreement is a contract between employees and employers. The former referred to as labor and the latter as management. Some of the first of these accords were hammered out between employees and employers in the 1920′s and 1930′s. These are important and hard won agreements, giving labor equality in negotiating with for-profit companies about wages, benefits and working conditions. Collective bargaining was an important step that led to American industrial leadership and prosperity for the rest of the twentieth century.

In private industry there is a clear cut distinction between labor and management. In public employment situations…not so much. For example:

Question: who is the employer?

Answer: Elected government officials – (federal, state and local), and indirectly, the people who voted for the elected government officials and of course the bureaucracy (composed of public union members) that manages the vast government landscape.

Question: Who is the employee?

FDR

Answer: Elected government officials – (federal, state or local), and the bureaucracy (composed of public union members) that administers the the various governments agencies.

Question: Who negotiates terms of the collective bargaining agreement?

Answer: The public union members who also vote to elect the government officials negotiate with the elected government officials or administrative representatives of the government officials.

So what we have here is public sector employees bargaining for wages, benefits and working conditions with…wait, wait for it…other public sector employees! Yes! What a deal!

Okay, last question: who said the following (don’t worry it’s a multiple choice question):

“All Government employees should realize that the process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service. It has its distinct and insurmountable limitations when applied to public personnel management. The very nature and purposes of Government make it impossible for administrative officials to represent fully or to bind the employer in mutual discussions with Government employee organizations. The employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress.”

a. Donald Duck

b. Genghis Khan

c. Scott Walker

d. Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Okay times up. Pencils down. If you don’t know who said that, look it up.

Visit Visible Country for American Products

Protests make you feel good

Working Comments Off

Feb 262011

It’s odd that every time anyone makes a proposal to reduce government spending on social programs the response never seems to have anything to do with the reasons the cuts are proposed. Instead we hear: “Children will starve”, “seniors will perish in tiny unheated tenement apartments”, “fearless firefighters will enter old age without a retirement plan”, etc, etc.

Those who oppose the cuts seem to have a unlimited well of emotional pleas that fit on placards they can wave.

Now I’m not saying the spending cutters are right, but they usually do have reasons why reducing the spending is necessary. The folks on the other end of the cuts (the cuttee’s ?), pretty much ignore the reasoning part and just turn up the volume a little more.

I wonder if there is a sign maker union, and if they have a contract.

More people seem to be protesting with phones these days.

It’s nice to see that in the rest of the world they also don’t use phones to talk anymore. I was afraid Americans were alone in this. Are these people playing “duck hunt”?

Okay…so the point of these emotional replies to budget tightening proposals is to make people feel:

(a) sympathy for the protesters,

(b) guilt (like your mother use to do),

(d) bored,

(e) transmogrified (for this you will need a potion).

Some appeals reject emotionality and are based on rational analytic thought.

Finally this is moving in the right direction. Now maybe we can find some level headed friends who can help us talk about the issues and calmly reach worthwhile decisions that work for everybody.

SRBAC

Visit Visible Country for American made products

Visible Country Comments

America making things

Measuring the wealth of the American 1% – not just income.

China building American bridges

The government doesn’t create jobs…even when the politicians take credit for them.

Unconsious Headlines #3 – Unwarranted Joy About Jobs

Public employee unions, the bargaining problem.

Protests make you feel good

Categories

Archives

Links

Meta