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YOU SAID..."You can bark at "us guys" all you want ... spell out an alternative that works in today's world."

We have..till we are blue in the face...its called making AMERICA more competitive by doing stuff to help ALL business HERE in the US.

Stuff like TAX REFORM....REAL TAX REFORM...WHERE IS IT?

REGULATION REFORM...WHERE IS IT?

LIMITING GOVERNMENT SPENDING...WHERE IS IT?

TORT AND LIABLILITY REFORM...we have started on a first step...NOW FINISH THE JOB.

No...guys like Bill Thomas...a huge disappointment, are spending their energies doing cronyism trade agreements to help selected major contributors....whether in China or in our southern borders.

BOTH PARTIES have been part of the problem up till now. Create a problem...then offer a crony type of solution for it.

No...as evidenced by the last Omnibus pork spending bill...and the recent Kelo vs New London SCOTUS decision...we are going the wrong way over here.

YOU SAID..."You can bark at "us guys" all you want ... spell out an alternative that works in today's world."

Yeah, I sad that, right after I said:

Seems to me that someone manufacturing a commodity in North Carolina is S.O.L. if that same commodity can be made somewher else, shipped here and still be sold for less because his total labor/regulatory/medical/legal/etc. cost renders him non-competitive.

Tax Reform will make Mr. North Carolina move competitive
Regulation Reform will make Mr. North Carolina move competitive
Tort Reform and Liability Reform will make Mr. North Carolina move competitive

He still has problems with wage and benefits costs that are quite a bit more substatial than his overseas competitors.

Yes, significant reforms need to take place, and, if and when they does, some of the problems disappear.

No amount of reform will remedy the fact that assembly type manufacturing jobs are going away and the ones that are left don't pay $25-$30 per hour with full medical and a great pension. Because of robotics and cheaper labor elsewhere, those days are gone.

IT jobs that don't require onsite presence will be going overseas ... unless and until American workers are willing to do them for a lot less than they used to pay ... there are no viable alternatives to this reality w/o gov't intervention and I, for one, am against that solution.

"Stuff like TAX REFORM....REAL TAX REFORM...REGULATION REFORM...TORT AND LIABLILITY REFORM...WHERE IS IT?"

I think you really hit-it-on-the-head with areas where there is substantial opportunity to create a better environment for everybody. The hairball of a tax code that we operate under has experienced 50 years of evolution under conditions where the U.S. has been the nearly undisputed king of the economic mountain. Now the rest of the world is catching up....fast in some cases.

What are we going to do about it? Based on the reactions of the feather-bedding inside-the-beltway crowd, the answer seems to be "Do as little as I can get-away-with to squeak-by in the next election".

One unfortunate aspect of the psychology of large crowds is that in many cases they have to experience a "sputnik-like" event before they get the message. Some large organizations have managed to survive these events and prosper (Harley Davidson), many have not (Soviet Union, Eastern Airlines), and some continue on as mere shadows of their former selves (Spain, Hewlett-Packard (HP), AT&T).