Emerson Electric Co. Chief Executive Officer David Farr said the U.S. government is hurting manufacturers with regulation and taxes and his company will continue to focus on growth overseas.
“Washington is doing everything in their manpower, capability, to destroy U.S. manufacturing,” Farr said today in Chicago at a Baird Industrial Outlook conference. “Cap and trade, medical reform, labor rules.”
Emerson, the maker of electrical equipment and InSinkErator garbage disposals with $20.9 billion in sales for the year ended September, will keep expanding in emerging markets, which represented 32 percent of revenue in 2009. About 36 percent of manufacturing is now in “best-cost countries” up from 21 percent in 2003, according to slides accompanying his speech.
Companies will create jobs in India and China, “places where people want the products and where the governments welcome you to actually do something,” Farr said.
Now, don’t let the corporate bosses off the hook, either. Farr does seem like a fairly smart guy, but a very large percentage of the corporate bosses are weak-minded cretins who’s only goal is to make the quarterly balance sheet look better…and thus shoving manufacturing out of high-cost US to low-cost China works out well for them. What we have here is the perfect storm of corporate and government idiots who are – unintentionally or not – conspiring to completely eliminate manufacturing in the United States. We’re being told that we’ll just have to get used to less American manufacturing (and farming…and mining) but that, don’t worry, we’ll still make plenty of money sitting in cubicles answering customer service phone calls and emails (until all of that is outsourced, too).
When I’m talking of “Make/Mine/Grow” I am asserting that if we lower the cost of making, mining and growing things in the United States, we’ll get more of same done here – which will create more wealth – which will mean more jobs – etc. We’re being quite insane, right now – outsourcing our manufacturing to China which then uses its profits from selling things to us to buy our bonds so that we can borrow more money to bail out more financial institutions. Does anyone think this can be sustained? Or that making windmills will replace all the other things we used to make, mine and grow here in the United States?
My good people, we should be coddling our manufacturers – doing everything we can to soften the blows of this down economy and doing everything we can to encourage people to start up farms, mines and factories. We don’t have to buy stuff from China – really, we don’t. We can make stuff – we’re clever enough. We don’t have to be thumb-sucking leeches doomed to default – but we will need a change in government to get the ball rolling.
UPDATE: And as I was saying about China…
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