well said
The rise of the Chines export machine has given American manufactures essentially 4 options
1) Keep wages low to keep American made products from being priced out of the market.
2) Automate to reduce labor costs and improve productivity
3) Offshore manufacturing to a low cost country in Asia
4) Run your company for as long as possible without any reinvestment or maitance using low cost , unskilled labor until you go out of business.
For all practical purposes, numbers 3 and 4 are the most common. American small business was struggling but holding it's own under GWB but Obama has already killed or is in the process of killing much of America's small manufacturing business .
As Lee Iaccoca famously said about the 1990s trend of offshoring American Manufacturing and intentionally converting the US economy to a primarily services based economy , “Anyone who thinks than run an economy on services alone is smoking dope”.
Seems he knew what he was talking about