Corporations leave the west at an amazing pace. Atleast there hiring does...

[chequita guevara]

It does not change the fact that the savings realized by moving production overseas have not been passed along to the consumers. Profits (we're talking percentages here, not absolute numbers) are up quite a bit in the last twenty years, which would not have happened if savings were passed along to the consumers.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Source please? I'm a little skeptical.

[Sava]

Savings are never passed on to the consumer. It's the nature of capitalism. Maximize your profits, charge as much for your products/services as people are willing to pay. If demand is negated (in the case of health care, energy, and telecommunications), charge as much as you want but low enough so the government won't intervene.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Exactly Sava. Maximize your profits is exactly what they will do. And if the cost of producing something goes down (because of, for exampled, decreased labor costs) they have an advantage over the competition. To maximize this advantage, they will decrease the price of their goods which will take market share away from the competitors and will increase their sales.
Therefore, by decreasing their costs, they have increased the supply (more bang for the buck) which will result in a decreased price.

[Sava]

Most businesses don't go below market value like that. They usually translate the savings into pure profits or expansion costs. Ideally, Lawrence, you're right, but it doesn't usually translate into the real world like that

[Lawrence of Arabia]

But they do, because corporations are going to keep on expanding and trying to make more until the additional for producing one more unit of good is exceded by the price of that good.
You say that they will expand. They expand, the supply of the market increases, and the price dips. All because their costs have decreased.
You said it yourself, they want to maximize profits, and this is how they do it.

[Sava]

costs very rarely magically decrease... but we each have our own ideas on this subject, so... booyaa!

[DuncanK]

Originally posted by DanS
Real wages are going down most years and staying level on other years.

DuncanK: Don't you check any of the information you spout? Real wages have had robust growth since about '95, tracking good productivity gains.

You call 2 bits robust growth Anyway, those are years that you picked. That is puny growth. Why don't you look back at them from before 95'. After all corporations started shipping jobs overseas way before that.

[DanS]

OK, when did they start shipping jobs overseas?

[Lawrence of Arabia]

Sava - Costs magically decrease when companies hire workers from another country at 1/4 the price

[DuncanK]

Originally posted by DanS
OK, when did they start shipping jobs overseas?

Had to have started in the 80s

[DuncanK]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
But they do, because corporations are going to keep on expanding and trying to make more until the additional for producing one more unit of good is exceded by the price of that good.
You say that they will expand. They expand, the supply of the market increases, and the price dips. All because their costs have decreased.
You said it yourself, they want to maximize profits, and this is how they do it.

LoA,

You're assuming perfect competition. None of the companies we are talking about have this kind of competition. They will never lower their price one dime because comsumers will think their products are cheap and they wont buy them. Look at Nike. They are more expensive than ever and they are moving all of their factories overseas.

[Lawrence of Arabia]

The prices of Nike shoes have not decreased significantly because of the cost of advertising. As the years go by, they need to advertise more and more to stay alive in the oligopoly. Image if they still employed US workers. THey would be out of buisness. Foreign workes have slowed the increase in the price of the good.

[DanS]

Had to have started in the 80s

Here you are, in real $...

A good 10% increase.

[DuncanK]

Originally posted by Lawrence of Arabia
The prices of Nike shoes have not decreased significantly because of the cost of advertising. As the years go by, they need to advertise more and more to stay alive in the oligopoly. Image if they still employed US workers. THey would be out of buisness. Foreign workes have slowed the increase in the price of the good.

They may have done that, but Nike has not helped the economy at all by doing this. Our labor here has become less productive as people have moved into advertizing and sales and the nations where the shoe factories have lost out on badly needed domestic production.

That's exactly what I'm talking about when I say how inefficient all this is.