"
Actually, the actions you criticized [laying off workers and exporting jobs}enabled the companies to continueYep, the companies will continue, revenues will go down, more cutting labor costs, more revenues go down -- repeat - until companies go out of business and socialism happens.
That's pretty pathetic economic analysis. For more than 200 years, American companies have become more efficient by employing more machines and fewer laborers, whether it was the textile mills of New England that moved from hand to steam looms, to Eli Whitney and Sam Colt's gun-making machines that eliminated unskilled workers, to robotics. The fact is, America's advantage has ALWAYS been that we have had higher-skilled, higher-paying jobs than Europe or Asia, but the difference has been that in the past (pre-unions) those higher-skilled workers produced more efficiency per person than anywhere else in the world regardless of cost.
Thank you protectionism and thank you unions for making the super-efficient, highly paid American worker obsolete. At some point, we can and will regain this, but only if we get rid of the notions that you "export jobs." The U.S. has ALWAYS "exported jobs," esp. if you consider that the largest U.S. plant in the WORLD in the mid 1800s was the Singer Sewing Machine plant . . . in IRELAND!