China Offers To Sell Jobs To The U.S.
Will Loan Us The Money To Buy Them
Can Americans make their own iPads?
Richieville News Service – BEIJING
Faced with a growing labor shortage that has left employers struggling to fill positions, the Chinese Ministry of Finance today announced plans to sell some of the country’s extra jobs to the United States.
“We feel kind of dumb,” said Zhu XiaoMin, an analyst for the Bank of China. “It turns out we took too many jobs from the U.S. But it’s hard to keep track when your economy is growing at over 10 percent a year. Anyway, we thought maybe you guys would like some of them back, with your economy in the toilet and all. That way you Americans can make your own stuff again, like you used to. We’ll start you off on something simple, like plastic toys, and you can work up to harder things like photo voltaic solar panels and bullet trains.”
Mr. Zhu admitted that the new Chinese jobs would only pay about a dollar an hour and so would probably be taken by illegal immigrants from Latin America. “That’s why you sent the jobs to us in the first place,” he commented. “You decided you’d rather have cheap tube socks than a high standard of living. Not that I’m criticizing or anything.” He said Chinese economists were still searching for a way around this problem.
“It seems to us that you guys would be better off if you had some sort of national industrial policy and your economy was based on, you know, creating wealth, rather than just thinking up new ways to push money around,” Mr. Zhu explained. “But, hey, what do we know? At least your hedge fund managers are doing really well.”
Chinese analysts said that the jobs would be sold under very reasonable terms and that the U.S. government could finance the purchase of the jobs by issuing new bonds which would, in turn, be bought by the Chinese government, an arrangement Mr. Zhu described as a “win-win.”
Many of the details of the plan remain to be worked out, but the Chinese seemed confident that it would be a success. “And if for some reason it doesn’t work out,” Mr. Zhu concluded, “no worries – you can just send the jobs back to us. We know what to do with them.”
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