1) The U.S. government has crippled American companies with its taxes and regulations, particularly with all the ridiculous reporting requirements and crazy environmental and ADA mandates.
2) The U.S. is not playing on a level field---the jobs are going to places like Communist China, lawless Mexico, and Southeast Asia, where slave-like labor is common place, especially with children.
3) The unions and lawyers have driven costs of production through the roof.
I don't see any hope for this country---the factories will never return, and the U.S. will be service industry only in the future, if that.
As of 2010, the US census reported there were 336,000 factories operating in the USA.
12.5 million Americans work in manufacuring, and they produced over $1.8 trillion worth of goods in 2010.
Manufacturing productivity has skyrocketed over the past 10 years thanks to technology. We are able to produce more goods with less workers.
I disagree. They are inconvenient and so are the first things people complain about, but they are not crippling. And you could do away with all taxes and regulations and not compete with countries employing communist slave labor.
2) The U.S. is not playing on a level field---the jobs are going to places like Communist China, lawless Mexico, and Southeast Asia, where slave-like labor is common place, especially with children.
THIS is the key point. But this is easily rectified, just raise import tarriffs until our unemployment goes down. And then selective lower them, allowing high value processes to remain in the U.S. while highly competitive low value processes can be outsourced to take advantage of cheap labor.
"3) The unions and lawyers have driven costs of production through the roof."
Again, remove the unions and we still are not going to compete with slave labor from communist china. Unless our own labor markets fall that low. I don't think unions made that much impact to the labor markets, but if they did, I'd take my hat off to the unions. In fairness, the unions did warn us against lowering the tariffs. Ignoring them was all fine and good, until nobody had jobs.
I don't see any hope for this country---the factories will never return, and the U.S. will be service industry only in the future, if that.
I do, we can easily turn this around, if we raised import tarriffs. Manufacturing would come back real quick and the government would have increased revenues to pay down the debt until it did. (That's a con until we have responsible legislators, but let hope this election will change that.)
Reagan's tactic of forcing foreign manufacturers to produce here, also worked. At least the labor component of the goods and the knowledge are retained in the country even if profits are not.