Drama of the Day: CPA Learns That ‘Americans Are Lazy’ Is an Unpopular Opinion

Posted on by Adrienne Gonzalez
guy angrily pointing at laptop. Also a sparkly poop emoji.

Thanks to the Xitterian who alerted me to this tweet and its responses because boy is it some scrumptious drama.

Let’s start with the original xeet:

Who needs H-1B visas when you can just hire an army of people overseas for pennies on the dollar? A CPA in South Florida had this to say in response:

Screenshot for internet preservation purposes:

Who could have possibly foreseen this opinion being controversial? The user he responded to proceeded to threaten a 1-star review on the guy’s Yelp page:

People still use Yelp? I thought we were all using Google these days.

The other replies quickly devolved into mentions of using the streets as a toilet (note: according to Wikipedia, the number of people partaking in street shitting — or “open defecation” — in India has decreased by 62%, from 776 million (73%) in 2000 to 157 million (11%) in 2022. Further reading: World Toilet Day: 420 million people are defecating outdoors). I guess we’re just assuming he’s Indian.

@kleib323 is right, we don’t see any jobs listed on the guy’s site. It appears to be a one-man operation.

Some more:

This guy in the replies’ bio reads “Ran against [Senator John Cornyn] in the Senate because I could see he was doing zero for Texas workers and everything to see their jobs sent offshore/guest workers imported” and links this blog dedicated to the issue: Keep America at Work. He didn’t make it past the Republican primary in March 2020 and Cornyn was subsequently re-elected.

The chart:

One last batch of responses and we’re done:

Related to this topic, Investment Monitor did an interesting story about what happened to the once powerful but now neutered US manufacturing industry. Any of this sound familiar?

The fracture and internationalisation of US manufacturing rapidly accelerated with the global financial crash of the 1980s. In the first part of that decade, President Ronald Reagan oversaw a period of deep recession in which industrial sectors were hit particularly hard. The US factory had begun to hollow out.

“Financial markets put enormous pressure on large companies to get rid of their [US] workers and plants and move away from being vertically integrated companies in which everything took place within the company itself.”

As a different financial system and type of lending emerged out of the recession and continued throughout the 1980s, investment into vertically integrated models started to diminish.

“Financial markets wanted to be able to invest in a particular part of an interest rate, and not invest in the vertically integrated model,” says Berger. “That put pressure on companies such as DuPont to break up these enterprises and to subcontract, outsource or offshore every part of the company that didn’t actually fall into the company’s core competence. This led to an extraordinary break-up, starting in the 1980s, of the large and competent American industrial manufacturers.”

“[Before the decline], if you were making semiconductor wafers, the engineer who had drawn the circuits had to be next to the technician who actually was cutting out the circles that were going to be produced, and etched onto the wafers, the two men had to work together,” says Berger.

As technology adapted, it allowed for the engineer and technician to be stationed further apart. “Once you were able just to send a digital file from California to Taiwan, once you were able to break up the activities that previously had had to be conducted in proximity, you could basically execute that transformation that financial markets were demanding,” adds Susan Berger, a political scientist at MIT and author of ‘Making in America’.

This move away from being a one-stop US manufacturing shop arguably tipped a domino over in the chain of industrial decline, and next to fall was innovation through manufacturing.

The IM article was published in 2021, right about the time firms started sending huge amounts of work overseas that now, three years later, seem miniscule by comparison. They mention accounting not realizing that that field too would soon start slipping out of the hands of the aspiring middle class:

Another deeply rooted issue for US manufacturing has been the growing stigma and prejudice about its value. The result: a gaping skills gap.

Berger highlights the correlation between the shift towards global financial markets and the shift towards ‘expert’ opinion.

“The belief spread among economists and policymakers that manufacturing really wasn’t important,” she says. “[They believed] it was going to be just like agriculture – in the 1900s, we had needed to have 40% of the population on the farm in order to feed the rest of us. Today, we feed less than 2% of the population. So the belief was that manufacturing was going to be just like agriculture, we just didn’t need that much of it.”

Alongside this came a shift in career aspirations. “Why would a parent want their children to work in a factory where jobs were being lost all the time?” asks Bonvillian.

Meanwhile, the white-collar college dream only grew stronger, with the preference largely being for young people to go into what was considered to be the more academic fields of medicine, law, accounting and services.

Yeah, about that. All this time we thought the robots would be the ones to take accounting jobs, not an unlimited supply of foreign workers themselves displaced by said robots.

Weigh in on this topic in the comments if you care to.

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3 thoughts on “Drama of the Day: CPA Learns That ‘Americans Are Lazy’ Is an Unpopular Opinion”

  1. The ironic part of this is that the supply of CPAs and CPA candidates in the US is being driven down by cheap foreign labor. Staff accountants in the US are competing more and more directly with people overseas at $9/hour, which is depressing their pay. It is indeed hard to find a good employee even at “top wages” (although I’d be interested to hear Mr. Malik’s definition of that), but its not work ethic, its what economists refer to as rational behavior.

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  2. Mr. Malik is commenting about the quality of accountants he is seeing. For small firms, the pool of industrious accountants is just poor. Why the invective against him, and critiques of India?

    Besides, government workers at all levels, are not reknowned for their thrift and industriousness, are they. And THOSE workers represent likely 20% of the work force.

    Everyone needs to chill and put a lid on the “racism”

  3. If you think Malik is wrong, prove him wrong. We have kids who graduate from college who don’t know jack shit, and when you tell them to do some research, they try and get another senior level CPA to assist. Many Americans are beyond lazy except bitching about everything. Some will bitch about the CPA profession because they could not pass the CPA exam simply because they are too lazy to study. We have way too many people who will always be the victim.

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