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.
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.
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.
Not a bad idea if the campaign is VOLUNTARY.
But not if it is forced through legislation.
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?
How about
Buy American the job you save may be your own
Buy American disappoint our enemies
Buy American or Bye America
The caveat should also be that American citizens are the workers not made in America (by an illegal).