Reply to post: Re: Meh

Re: Meh

Codejunky -

The direct cost of the employees' wages/salaries aren't the only costs of labor...

In the US, there's also the cost Social Security which the employer must match, which adds about 8% to his/her salary... and then there is the additional cost of medical/health insurance... and other benefits such as 401k, and so on.

THEN there are other costs... such as regulatory compliance.

I was directly in involved in the PCB industry back in the 90's... and remember that chips are useless without PCB's... and I watched as Bill Clinton's EPA destroyed almost the entire US PCB industry... with a new regulation which required what were (at the time, and allegedly) impossible to meet levels of allowable emission of copper in their waste-water.

At the time, a number of very large makers of PCB"s were in the process of building entirely NEW plants, and they and others were also expanding EXISTING plants. When the EPA went through their final required review procedures (which *appeared* to have only been done *because* those reviews were required by law, as part of their economic impact review), those companies abandoned not only the new plants, but the plans to upgrade existing plants... and built them in China instead.

The only difference was the NEW regulation.

This is how a bureaucrat destroys an entire industry, costs the nation many millions of dollars in tax revenue, more in unemployment insurance paid out, destroys critical national defense infrastructure, and yet more in income taxes paid by the FORMER employees... all while a "Rhodes Scholar" sits in a somewhat round office and diddles an intern with a cigar.

It also didn't just put the US PCB manufacturers out of business, or drive them offshore... it also put their suppliers out of business or offshore.