It needs to be said, listened to, and acted upon by our government:
BUY AMERICAN.
We have been selling out America (both parties) for the entire last generation.
I agree. Put simply, we gutted our middle class.
Buying American is good until the American company pulls a GM and starts producing awful garbage. What then?
A side effect of capitalism is that we believe being able to buy the cheapest product is a result of reasonable market forces driving down prices.
...except it is not - but the fault isn’t with capitalism, it’s with an uneven playing field. Our economy could accelerate to “light speed” if we all spent a few bucks more on an item if it were built here.
It’s a concept that is very hard to deliver to poor people, “spend more and you’ll be better off”. If you pay more for a coffee mug that is made here vs. in China, it’s just a buck...but it means a great deal to the economics of where it is made, it encourages making it here. Once there’s more jobs, too many in fact, wages will rise.
Too many politicians have been too willing to sell out the American people, making deals that benefit only the corporations, when we could have an environment that can benefit everyone. Deals that just make products cheaper (via cheap foreign labor) are short term corporate gains that don’t help the working class. It may help the stock market in the short term but hurts it long term due to the inability of the American people to purchase products.
Buy American. It isn’t just a slogan, it’s an economic principle with deep ramifications...especially for the low income folks. I can afford it, as can many more as jobs are brought back here - it’s a fly wheel, the more you buy American the more American’s can buy American.
The systemiccextractuon of wealth from the us. Viatrade policies, tax policies etc is not an accident. It’s by design. The uniparty is owned by people who fill their pockets doing the extracting.
The American steel industry died because it was no longer competitive. Some chalk it up to unions, but all the various factors in the price equation contributed to a price that was to expensive for buyers.
Buy American for commodities is isolationist.