Posted on 08/23/2004 9:48:35 AM PDT by Willie Green
ping
I will do whatever I can to make sure I buy American made. Period and end of statement.
> ... campaign to convince consumers to buy
> American-made products ...
Several problems:
1. A great many products are simply not made in USA at all.
Just considering my PC, which I built from parts, perhaps
the only parts actually made in USA are the RAM (Idaho),
and the CPU (Texas, but might have been Germany). But
almost ALL the software, it's worth noting, is US.
All the other hardware was made in China, Ireland, Japan,
Korea, Mexico or Taiwan - and there are in most case NO
US factories making these items, even though they are
US-branded.
2. Those that appear to be US-made often aren't.
My Voyager van was made in Canada. No way to know that
until after delivery.
These sorts of campaigns are bound to fail. The only
thing that will make any real difference is changing
the underlying conditions that make the US uncompetitive
in factory manufacturing - taxes, regulations.
those wacky randriods always up to something. :)
If it's a choice between buying a bad American-made product and a good foreign-made product, yes, I would buy the foreign-made product. But I think it's patriotic to shop for American-made products when there's a reasonable choice.
When I see bumper stickers of American flags, "God Bless the U.S.A", etc. on cars, I now look to see if the car is foreign or American made.
I'm surprised to see how many of the cars are, indeed, foreign-made. One must appreciate the irony.
Of course the more businessmen that have this attitude will lead to an America that will be quite unamerican. It will lead to a European style social democracy with the social problems of Brazil when the votes of the workers that are displaced are added up with the votes of poor immigrants.
As I said before, if these trends are not stopped, businessmen like this one will be quite unhappy that they pay over 40% of their income to the FEDs, close to 15% of their taxes to to state and local agencies and they have that nasty "Health Security" payroll tax that would have been put in place in 2009. Can someone tell these guys that Social Darwinism has never worked?
see www.samnow.org
I've been a member for 2 years.
Somehow or other, the Wisconsin Senator from Planet X (Feingold) managed to catch the wave on this issue--which was roundly ignored by all the Pubbies.
Then about 6 months ago, some of the Pubbies began to come around--Jim Sensenbrenner visited Red China in January and came out shaking his head. He'll help a bit.
But as long as GWB has decided that giving PRC a free pass on its shenanigans is "in the national interest(???)", nothing will change.
And, by the way, Kerry's in exactly the same spot as Bush. Neither of them give a fart.
About 25-40% of ANY "US-made" car is made in PRChina--the sub-assemblies for most of the hydraulic systems, the brake pads, good hunks of the a/c and plastic parts...
The Big Three have forced that, explicitly, telling Tier 1 and Tier 2 vendors that they WILL have offshore plants, or there's no purchase agreement.
At long last, a few people begin to see and understand that we are destroying America with outsourcing! It is a sad commentary when there are only three members - it shows how far along the path of national suicide we have gone.
If you want on or off my offshoring ping list, please FReepmail me!
Not a bad idea if the campaign is VOLUNTARY.
But not if it is forced through legislation.
The annoying thing is that there are few if any political figures at any level, in any venue, that care about this issue. I sense a divide between the governed and those who govern that is broad and deep - perhaps every bit as great as the gulf between the French nobility and the commoners during the reign of Louis XVI.
Marie Antoinette, when informed that the people had no bread, responded "Then let them eat cake." Our present "leadership" are less intellectual than the Queen of France - they just scratch themselves in some inappropriate spot while mumbling "lower prices for consumers." They then pick their nose with the same hand.
Buying American is akin to Marxism? Please . . .
Free trade is anything but. Investigate the tarrifs levied against us by our "free trade" partners in Europe and Asia sometime. When you get bored with the repetition of that, look into the sourcing practices of the Japanese companies stateside.
Where do you draw the line should 90% and is that fair to us? of what is on the shelves be foreign made? I feel 10% only should be imported as a strong economy is based on from the earth up manufacturing.
How about outsourcing all politicians who impose tax and regulation costs on American made products but not on foreign made products.
The root cause of the desire most people have for extreme cost reduction is the following vicious cycle. During the period from the end of WW2 until the 1990s, expectations regarding "normal" material possessions, home decor and other things which generally cost a lot of money increased dramatically. In order to deal with this, people increasingly allowed themselves to sink deeper and deeper into debt. As this obviously self destructive death spiral hit a point where it threatened the global economy in 1997, the Fed embarked on its current insane policy of lowering the prime to a point where negative appreciation of assets is not out of the question. And in a remarkable and ironic twist of Communist strategy, the PRC used the obvious demand for low cost manufacturing sites, set forth by material goods sellers who needed to further appeal to debt ridden material addicts via drastic cost reductions, to seize both the means of production as well as the means of debt financing. So now, we, the Capitalist West, have lost the two things we always had (and which Lenin set forth his bile to castigate) and they are being turned against us by the Communists. The Communists are now buying what is really bad debt, since the assets of those currently "repairing" their credit via refis will never be able to cover the principle, let alone the total loan costs, within the debtors' lifetimes. Is this like a game of Go or something?
....and that's the GOOD news.
KerryBush have the same story on H1B's, L1's and illegals.
So if the job is not exported to PRChina, you'll lose it to cheaper foreign imported labor.
What a Country!!
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