$4 billion more than that last year purchasing back their own stock from the market. just to inflate which is something that s great for investors. great for executive comp. compensation. that money could have gone back to the workers with all the productivity gains. there s a parallel there between as we face a fiscal cliff, how we think about what our citizens. i love this, is labor a cost to be minimized or the workers that we maximize. it s the same sort of questions. do we invest in health care, education because our citizens are our great american resource or do we think let s spend as little as possible and leave people as out there as they can. whoever realizes and whoever gets this. and realizes this and the bad press and people can go with wallets or say i choose to shop someplace else. somebody says i m going to treat my people great, they re part of the advertising campaign. this is a great moment.
i love local bookstores, i spend as much time as i can in them. i also buy from amazon because they can get books to my house, and walmart prices are not just lower, they re 25% to 40% lower. and those prices, not just sort of well, this is good because prices are lower. this is a huge boon to the lowest fifth of the american consumer. to the people who are the least well off in the country. yes. also look at the costs of those prices, though. the cost of those prices is that you end up with walmart workers on welfare rolls. you look at towns and communities end up net poorer when the walmart is there because it s an extractive force rather than what she s got. this isn t quite true. no, no, no there s been pretty good research that has shown that walmart-style big-box retailing is responsible for about 50% of the u.s. productivity gains between 1995 and 2005. roughly. right. in that decade.
sector job growth. that s great. there s still 23 million people who do not have a job. you re talking about a movement. how about you move them back to work. why don t you move them back to work? that s the reality here. this president is moving people back to work. when? let me ask you a couple questions. the stock market, you ve got money in a 401(k). you re happy now. you were scared to death three years ago. we ve got a stock market booming. why is it booming at the same time the business is invested. i keep hearing businesses sitting on $2 trillion. why? because the business community has made great productivity gains. they re more efficient today and therefore they re going to have a better return on capital. you look at the average hour work week. it s gone from 32.5 to 33.5 in three session levels. the first thing people do is fill that efficiency gain. that s what they ve done. now they re hiring.
period. that i believe. but the point is that, there is a case that this is, that it s rational and, indeed, beneficial to move these kind of jobs out of this country. just a few more things. 85%, prior to 2000, 85% of the manufacturing jobs lost were lost at domestic productivity gains. two-thirds were lost, so, there s a lot of offshoring that might have occurred. i was the head of the manufacturing practice at bain. there were lousy investments if you take stuff over to china. the value is gone and it s a lousy commodity product and you re making it in high volume. that s not where successful u.s. business is going in the future. where are they going? they re going to much more complicated and local services for starters and much more complicated intellectual property. that has relative to europe and
energized, more jazzed, more into what they are doing, so, in that sense it is good for the company anyway, right? guest: absolutely. so what we have seen and observed it takes three days to actually disconnect the you go through withdrawals for three days, and after that, it is just amazing we had a few guys come back from a big trip and they were like, unbelievable and i can see the productivity gains. neil: you are a nice guy, a nice boss, and everyone in this studio now is sending you a resume. thank you. have a good one. guest: have a great weekend. imus: the obama administration says going green is the key to more jobs but something tells me this guy did not get the memo. wait until you hear. no problem. you want to save money on rv insurance? no problem.