Obvious statements such as this make me wonder how the protectionists can defend their lame arguments in the face of such flagrant and negative unintended consequences caused by government interference.
The company I work for is a big player in the value added shrimp business. We have watched helplessly as our customers stopped buying our products and reduced their payrolls because all the value added work was forced to move overseas. The tariffs don't apply to value added products so all that work has been outsourced along with the jobs.
To compete, we've moved much of these operations from the U.S. to China, Thailand and South America. We've managed to gain back some of the business we lost however, we had to significantly reduce operations at home, costing lots of jobs and effectively killing what was a flourishing business unit for us prior to this stupid ruling. The fact that other American's had to lose their jobs to protect a shrimp industry that is unable to compete is completely lost on those who are clueless about how free markets work. These same people troll these threads happily lecturing us about traitorous businesses outsourcing their labor - completely ignorant as to why these things happen in the first place - all the while demanding more government intervention to correct the problems created by government in the first place. Just stupid.
--and the average guy not being taxed extra to support fat union cats every time he buys groceries. Then again, talk like this usually gets freeloaders screaming at us that if we don't support them then we don't love the flag as much as they do.
For crying out loud.