These guys could have stopped it with a phone call. They could have done the same with the tidal wave of illegal immigration.
I don't know the specifics, but being 63 years old, I can recount a few memories.
Before I joined the Army in '65, I could work almost anywhere an inexperienced teenaged kid could work.
After Army in '67, I got my first job walking into a cellophane wrap factory (NOone remembers collecting cig wrappers and turning them in for donated prosthetics ?? .. I do).
When could I start?
Tomorrow
Be here at 7AM
It was that easy.
Then came hippiedom and drugs and sex and rock and roll and I was hooked.
I sort'a woke up around '80/'81 and realized a lot had changed, not the least of which seemed to be a lot of talk about taxes sending companies overseas.
Japan had ceased to be an econamic threat (we ran through the transister stage in about 2 or 3 years) and I just had a conversation with someone that claimed it was the VCR that killed America.
Whatever ... IMO, the simple answer to "What conditions .. " seems to be the desire to make cheaper the products we invrnted and higher taxes followed to make up for lost revenue when a local factory went to Japan or China.
The snowball rolled and we're in the middle of the belly of the snowman.
U.S. manufacturing has not been destroyed. Yes, some manufacturing sectors have declined in output (notably steel), but we are still the largest manufacturer in the world, but we don’t need that many people to work in manufacturing because of automation. We also need fewer people in farming to produce the same, or more, agricultural output. The same would be true of construction if it weren’t for trade-unions preventing a lot of the economies that would result from pre-manufacturing large building components. The market will naturally seek efficiencies, and cutting labor costs is one of the quickest ways to cut costs in any enterprise.
Naturally, the government, which seems to have the opposite incentive structure, absorbs more and more labor.
Now there are some manufacturing sectors that for strategic reasons should not have been allowed to decline — steel and semiconductor devices come readily to mind — but to preserve them would have meant (and to revive them would mean) modernizing them and thereby making them less labor-intensive (i.e. fewer jobs).
Start with none other than William Jefferson Clinton, who along with Algore started cutting deals with the Chinese, although it was also Nixon who helped pave the way.
Both Clinton and GW Bush also tore down almost every trade barrier you can think of...NAFTA, WTO, etc which almost guaranteed American manufacturing's move to Mexico, China, India, and the like.
“What conditions fostered the departure of the U.S. Manufacturing Base to third world countries, and who were the parties responsible for the destruction of U.S. Manufacturing?”
The answers to that question are pretty simple, but not ones that many people, especially in the Big Media want to hear:
Over-Taxation
Over-Unionization
Over-Regulation
Suffocating Enviro Laws
UNLIMITED CIVIL LIABILITY (This is a biggy, folks)
and,
the Standardized Shipping Container.
YOU’LL NOTE THAT WAGES ARE NOT ON THIS LIST.....
Four of these five can be laid SQUARELY at the feet of the Democratic Party (with some Republican help over the years).
The fifth allows you to get around the other four, because goods no longer have to be handled numerous times at diffent points in the logistics chain. We can now produce goods in central China, and have them on the shelves of your local Walmart in 4 weeks, sometimes less, with the goods never touched by a human from factory to store.
Wages are not on the list because, as the CEO’s of Intel and Emerson Electric have told us, automation has made wages a non-issue, especially when compared to the costs of regulatory compliance alone.
We now live in an economic world where it is CHEAPER to ship American Wheat to a port, load it on a ship, send it to China to be processed in to Wheat Glutten, loaded on another ship and sent back to America to be used in Dog Food, than it is to process it here.
We screwed ourselves, folks. Now the butcher’s bill for 40+ years of Democrat-vote buying is due, in full.
Folks want to blame corporations for it a fair amount of the time, but every time I get into the dialog, and burrow down to the bedrock, I find the same two culprits: corporate taxation and government regulation.
EVERY time.
As much as there are people out there — and it always kinda seems to be the SAME people, oddly — who try to blame "greedy evil corporations," the actual facts always point back to Uncle Sam and his satellite cronies in the 50 states.
When Japan eliminates their corporate tax, which they were already talking about doing BEFORE they got hit with the big earthquake and tsunami, the United States will have the most overbearing corporate tax and regulation environment in the known universe; ALL of that — ever single letter — imposed by government; local, state, and federal.
With that as background, I think the more intelligent question is not "Who's responsible for the destruction of U. S. Manufacturing," it's "How have American companies managed to keep any manufacturing jobs here in this country?"
What conditions fostered the departure of the U.S. Manufacturing Base to third world countries, and who were the parties responsible for the destruction of U.S. Manufacturing?
Both Parties were incentivized by Wall St and multi-national business to write trade pacts that allowed products to be imported from Asia, etc at will. The same Congress permitted these same trade partners to have import restrictions on our products. They hobbled US industry.
The real goal was to create worldwide market demand for Wall St and international corporations from those billions of people in other nations. They needed to give them our industry to do that. Wall St and these corporations don’t represent USA interests. They are behind amnesty, open borders and trade agreements that nullify our Constitution. Sovereignty is a dirty word to them.
I just heard where China (the country that the USA Congress made number one) is soon going to be using more oil than the USA. Not only do they have our jobs and dollars, they’ll now out compete us on resources. Free trade was a sell out of the USA to international business.
My interests are USA first. Steve Moore’s interests are his bankster owners that do not put USA interests first. They want to keep us squabbling about politics while the USA is sucked dry.
These guys could have stopped it with a phone call. They could have done the same with the tidal wave of illegal immigration.