Posted on 07/03/2010 9:43:35 PM PDT by Cringing Negativism Network
OK so America is agog. Agog I say! At the amazing new American technological marvel, the Apple iPhone 4.
Except, is the phone entirely manufactured... in Asia?
Burdensome regulations, confiscatory taxes, bad policies regarding ‘free’ trade that seem to benefit everyone else but us. Take your pick.
No biggie...Apple doesn’t make any POS’s, so you wouldn’t be out one of their wonderful computers.
Happy Independence Day!
Ed
Hahahaha...thanks for the laugh...Happy 4Th.
Heh heh, you too, Jess...I hope you had a wonderful Independence Day!
Ed
“Burdensome regulations, confiscatory taxes, bad policies regarding ‘free’ trade that seem to benefit everyone else but us. Take your pick.”
We sure have those and more.
Yet Mercedes, BMW and VW Group along with all of the Japanese companies make cars and SUVs in the USA.
VW Group is building a plant near Chattanooga Tennessee now.
They don’t MAKE anything in the US. They ASSEMBLE them in the US, because our import rules and tariffs for cars make it much cheaper to do so. The actual components are made elsewhere.
In many other sectors, it’s even rare to find things that are assembled here. Visio televisions are a rare exception that are actually assembled here. However, they are again assembled from foreign-made components.
The state of manufacturing in the US is completely unacceptable, due solely to decades of counterproductive government policies. So, I don’t blame companies for outsourcing and having components built elsewhere, because it is our central planners who made it attractive to make things that way, not the companies themselves.
So the BMW, Daimler and VW Group plants count for nothing?
VW will open a new plant near Chattanooga Tenn. soon, to build a cost competitive new sedan.
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2010/jun/10/vw-plant-builds-test-cars/?volkswagen
Toyota and Tesla will reopen the NUMMI plant in Freemont CA.
http://www.mercurynews.com/alameda-county/ci_15127946?nclick_check=1
A new car company called Fisker is based in Irvine, CA. Some key people with Fisker came from BMWs operations based in the Ventura area, near their Point Hueneme Vehicle Processing Center.
http://live.fiskerautomotive.com/#!/home
Almost all the major car companies in the world have design studios in California. Toyota has been in Newport Beach since the 1970s.
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/12/08/feat-of-clay-we-take-a-peek-inside-toyotas-calty-design-center/
Continuing with cars, did you know the Fiat 500 is built in Poland, because the Italian car company goes to lower cost labor for manufacturing?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_Nuova_500
All car companies do that.
http://www.autoblog.com/2009/12/08/feat-of-clay-we-take-a-peek-inside-toyotas-calty-design-center/
You mentioned Visio, an Irvine, CA based company. Additional facilities and jobs in South Dakota.
http://www.vizio.com/news/cat/careers/
Manufacturing often goes to low cost places, whether the company is American, German, Japanese or Italian.
Unfortunately, IN my experience, Mexican Quality Control is less advanced than Foxconn’s in Taiwan/China
Not any more - they closed down their US desktop plant in 2009. Austin, TX still has the server assembly pant (though the components are 100% imported).
Oh, yeah, everything is just fine, truth_seeker. No sir, nothing wrong with the state of US manufacturing. Nothing to see here...
“Oh, yeah, everything is just fine, truth_seeker. No sir, nothing wrong with the state of US manufacturing. Nothing to see here...”
Manufacturing will go to low cost locations, where wages will be low, too. Is that the future you see for your America?
There are plenty of other functionss in the process of bring a product and/or service to the customer. Many of those are based on higher wages.
It comes down to competing with Indonesia and China for manufacturing jobs, or with Switzerland and Japan, for other management, service and administrative functions of company activity.
Ideally we could compete for all of the functions, but I don’t see that either.
For example in Europe many people speak two or more languages, not just one....upon which it is a point of pride for many Americans to not have to speak anything but English.
Math and science are not popular with many American students. The kids and parents, not the government, have agreed to ill prepare the person for a high paying career.
Americans have grown fat and happy with the status quo, complete with tatoos and rap music.
Our poor people are overweight and have cell phones, but no marketable job skills.
Unfortunately, the fake economy we created based on credit-based consumption is completely unsustainable. So whether you and I want it or not, things are going to have to change somewhere. The only viable change I see is starting to actually make things here again. And yes, that means that your friendly local barista selling sh*tty coffee for $5 a pop will need to do some manual labor. And yes, wages are going to go down. And yes, we need to stop sending every retard and his cousin Charlie into college debt-slavery to ‘find himself’. You may want to blame it on me, but I didn’t cause it. Decades of reckless government behavior did.
In the end, sure parents and individuals are responsible, but the government central planners have been pushing people towards educational apathy for generations. Seizing increasingly large portions of family incomes doesn’t help parents to have more time to spend with their kids either, so they’ve left education to the government schools, who have filled children with propaganda for years. With that propaganda comes the nanny state, which is now so pervasive that parents are afraid to let their kids out of their sight. Now, is it any wonder that we’re fat, ignorant, and lazy minded? At the root of every bit of it is the government.
There is no easy way out of this mess. Citing that a bunch of automobiles which in the very near future Americans won’t even be affordable for most Americans, are being made here, isn’t exactly earthshattering news about the state of our destroyed manufacturing base.
I remember Dell closed a desktop plant in NC a while back, but I didn't know it was the last one. They sure screwed the local government on that one. They got massive tax breaks and incentives to move in, then they turned around and closed it right down. I wonder if they had to pay any of that back.
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