Making Europe’s Mexico

by digby

In case you were wondering why so many business elites are sitting on huge piles of cash while insisting on cutting government social spending, destroying unions, lowering living standards for the middle class and generally making average workers work harder for less, perhaps this will explain it:

Jokes about the U.S. becoming “Europe’s Mexico” are commonplace, but now high-priced consultants are pushing the notion in all seriousness.

They’re predicting that within five years certain Southern U.S. states will be among the cheapest manufacturing locations in the developed world — and competitive with China.

For years advisers like the Boston Consulting Group got paid big bucks to tell their clients to produce in China. Now, they say, rising wages there, fueled by worker unrest, and low wages in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina mean that soon it won’t be worth the hassle of locating overseas.

[…]

BCG bluntly praises Mississippi’s “flexible unions/workers, minimal wage growth, and high worker productivity,” estimating that in four years, workers in China’s fast-growing Yangtze River Delta will cost only 31 percent less than Mississippi workers.

Now it all makes sense, doesn’t it?

I have to wonder who’s going to buying all this crap we’re producing, though, if everyone’s living standards have fallen to the level of a second world country. I know what it is to live poor. And believe me, senselessly consuming a bunch of useless disposable crap at WalMart and Best Buy isn’t on the menu. So who?

h/t @bmaz

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