Big Business (good for Americans?)

[Rave]

Per Charley Reese,columnist.
Last year America's trade deficet with China was $162 billion. This years it is expected to reach $210 billion.China used that money to strengthen it's military.
The politicians who sell phoney free trade used to say 1 billion in exports creates 20,000 US jobs.They stopped useing that when people pointed out that $1 billion in imports eliminates 20,000 jobs.
Since Janruary 2001 we have lost 2.8 million munufacturing jobs,and we are still loosing them.In August alone,14.000 American manufacturing jobs disappeared forever.
Even those deceant Americanbusiness owners who heroically try to preserve American jobs are forced out of business by their lousy,unpatriotic,greed-obsessed competitors who ship jobs to China and take advantage of cheap labor and a 40% discount caused by manulipulation of the yuan.
Yup,that's just good business some say,I say those bastids are the ruination of this country and they can't say anything that will convince me that they are not lower than a snake in a wagon wheel rut.
That's my opinion.

Made in the USA products are usually alot more expensive than their imported competitors..for instance look at the difference between the Rock Island Armory .45 versus the Kimber..less than half as expensive typically

[Father Time]

Back when this all started, I thought that even if big business didn't have any patriotism, they at least would realize that when everyone is working and getting good wages, they buy more products. I was wrong.

[CleanCut]

I get totally enraged when I think of all the cr@p we import. And we have inflation. And we are losing jobs. And the price of fuel. And I hate WalMart. And, and, and ,and, and!

[Father Time]

Originally Posted by CleanCut

I get totally enraged when I think of all the cr@p we import. And we have inflation. And we are losing jobs. And the price of fuel. And I hate WalMart. And, and, and ,and, and!

CleanCut

We could probably start the longest thread in the history of this forum if we posed the question "What really burns your !!!?"

[7mmag6]

The chinese are upgrading thier armed forced with mig 27s and tupolev fighters, they have a new version of small arms in 5.8 caliber. they continue to upgrade thier armed forces with high tech equipment. In 5 years they will be a very tough force to deal with. then taiwan will be next. We have no idea about the size of thier nuclear options, or the size of thier arsenal.while we sit on our hands and let the like of the los alamos study group, the citizens for nuclear policy,et atal, govern and cry foul about the use and building a new nuclear aresenal the chinese are on the ball. We have shut down hanford and rocky flats so no new plutonium is made in this country. what we have is what we have. I remind you Karl marx wrote to defeat capatalism, we must use thier own means of production to destroy thier sytem
www.lasg.org edited I will try to find the qoute by marx, its in Das kapital, see if I can dig it out of my old university texts

[7mmag6]

mao---Imperialism and All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers U.S. imperialism, and European and domestic reactionary forces, represent real dangers, and in this respect are like real tigers. However, because the goal of Chinese communism is just, and reactionary interests are self-centered and unjust, after struggle, they will be revealed to be much less dangerous than they were earlier perceived to be.

[BattleRifleG3]

Free Trade is part of the destruction of national sovereignty.

In the original Constitution, income tax was ILLEGAL. Where did tax money come from? Import tariffs! It was when Britain taxed presumably British Americans to import tea from British East India, we got the picture that they didn't consider us to have the rights of British citizens.

Tariffs are intended to uphold national sovereignty, to counteract things like exchange rates and effectively slave labor that make another country's goods cost less to us. (Note though that while many organizations claim the US is so rich and others so poor, saying others make like 50 cents an hour, I'm sure they mean USD equivalent. If they make 0.50 USD an hour while a gallon of milk costs 0.25 USD and a loaf of bread costs 0.10, that's not slave labor - it's an exchange rate.)

But back to the point, free trade = unfree nation. Up with the tariffs, down with the taxes. Then we'll actually keep our money in the economy.

Originally Posted by BattleRifleG3

Up with the tariffs, down with the taxes. Then we'll actually keep our money in the economy.

that's not going to happen G3 nobody's going to buy a domestically produced t shirt for $10 when they can buy an imported identical quality t shirt for $6

[CleanCut]

Originally Posted by Father Time

CleanCut

We could probably start the longest thread in the history of this forum if we posed the question "What really burns your !!!?"

You're right. I just don't understand how our elected government has allowed so many jobs to leave our borders. Not everyone in our great country has the intelligence to take a white collar job and the service sector will not support the rest of America. Both the democrats and republicans are to blame (Pretty much all Americans save a few who no one listens to). I am not a globalist and I feel like America needs to close it's own "iron curtains".

[Rufus Rhastus J]

Originally Posted by Bulletproof

Made in the USA products are usually alot more expensive than their imported competitors..for instance look at the difference between the Rock Island Armory .45 versus the Kimber..less than half as expensive typically

But, the idea that we save with imports has been so !!!!!!!ized that Americans are being sold down the river by big business. For example, while I was in China, about two years ago, I saw what things cost over there. I imagines how the prices I saw were actually what we here call retail. then, i imagined what those same items would cost in quanity...added aproximate shipping (big brown prices) and came to an aproximate price for each. guess what, i was very high considering prices as i compare to the invoices I see for the hospital i work at. the conclusion I came to was that retailers, like walmart don't pass that saveings along! Oh heck no...they price it at just below the prices others charge for the same object. the result? Well, we pay more for the product that was imported than we would have had the factories still been here to produce! the lure of cheaper labour (read lower cost/higher profit margin) has the greedy business folks all a flutter with rpeing us. But, as pointed out by other posters, we lose more than once! For example, we lost the jobs, and the taxes that would have been generated, we lost the comunities which would have still been home towns, we lost the factories, we lost the potential to manufacture infact, we are just a bunch of losers! The only people who have won are the greedy business folks. How short minded they are. Not only do they toss our countrie's future to the wind but, they have shot themselves in the foot. As the cost of liveing rises, soon we will be forced to choose between what we want and what we simply cannot do without. seriously, look at your own wallet....how far do you think that situation is down the road? With many more Americans on a fixed budget and retirement funds falling by the way side, looks like the elite are the only ones who will be in fair shape. The rest of us.....? :nod:

[Rave]

My exact thoughts. :insane: :nod:
It can be summed up in one word...GREED! :nod:

imports are more affordable..forces management to make the hard decisions

[BattleRifleG3]

They shouldn't be more affordable. Tarriffs should level the playing field. What we don't pay in tarriffs we pay in taxes.

Originally Posted by BattleRifleG3

They shouldn't be more affordable

but they are..most even after tariffs

Both Hindustan Motors of India and Toyota of Japan began production around the same time, and faced similar challenges as they sought to grow as companies.

While Toyota has competed on the global market, Hindustan Motors spent much of its corporate history sheltered from competition.

At the Hindustan Motors plant near Calcutta, over 11,000 workers make 18,000 Ambassadors a year. At the Toyota City Lexus factory outside Tokyo, 66 workers helped by robots produce over 100,000 cars a year.

Hindustan Motors
Year Began; 1937
Number of Models in '02; 2
Maximum Horsepower; 55 hp @ 4,500 rpm (Ambassador)
Design changes since inception; None worth mentioning
Total cars made in past year; 95,000
Financial Results for latest year; Losses of over $25 million

Toyota
Year Began; 1937
Number of Models in '02; 18
Maximum Horsepower; 240 hp @ 4,800 rpm (Sequoia)
Design changes since inception; Too many to list
Total cars made in past year; 5.98 million
Financial Results for latest year; $3.9 billion in profits

'Protectionism' means Indian citizens were forced to pay excessively and for inferior products. Limiting competition limits incentive to improve quality and productivity. Low productivity (of wealth) results, such as 11,000 workers creating only 18,000 cars per year. Meanwhile those workers are not available to produce other goods. Protecting "infant industries" resulted in poverty.

Indian protectionism meant lower living standards for millions of ordinary people. Too poor to pay income taxes, they were hit hard by indirect taxes passed along in the form of high prices charged by domestic suppliers. During the 1960s, Gujarat University's B. R. Shenoy compared the prices of domestically produced goods with banned imports. He found that border restrictions added substantially to prices of consumer goods -- for in-stance, 250 percent more for refrigerators and 328 percent more for sugar. Import barriers made life more difficult for peasants, who had to pay 153 percent more for fertilizer, 204 percent more for pumps, and 222 percent more for pesticides. Furthermore, restrictions were a threat to public health. Domestically produced penicillin, for instance, cost 1,250 percent more than what could be obtained easily on the world market.

Thanks to protectionism, Indians in need of a car were stuck with two domestically produced models: a Padmini, which was a knockoff of a 1960s Fiat, or an Ambassador, a knockoff of a 1950s Morris Oxford. With a captive market, producers had little reason to invest in research and development that could improve those unreliable, uncomfortable, gas-guzzling cars. Consumers could wait as long as seven years for delivery of a car they ordered. And adding insult to injury, taxes accounted for half of the high sticker price.

Another example, this time from Argentina:

In the name of protecting "strategically important" domestic industries, the Argentine government prevented its citizens from gaining access to state-of-the-art electronics available from suppliers abroad. Manuel J. Tanoira, Secretary of Growth Promotion during the 1980s, reported:

The local electronics industry is protected by surcharges on all imported equipment. As a result of this regulation, local users must pay 3 to 4 times the international price for foreign- made computers, video cassette recorders, and other modern electronic equipment. The alleged purpose of these surcharges is to protect a $100 million industry (built mostly with tax money), which manufactures obsolete equipment in limited production runs. Only the very rich could buy a $1,200 video cassette recorder or pay $400 for a computer which sold for less than $100 in New York City.

[Rufus Rhastus J]

I'm sorry....i fail to see your point. As BFRG3 pointed out, since the lower cost of the import is not truely passed on to the consumer, and, tarriffs are not used to level the playing field, then it seems the greed of big business is free to screw the consumer, and enrich itself, at our expense...as usual. Some may say the shareholder gets his/her piece of the pie...but, is that really true? Sadly, as long as the greedy business folks are let free to rape us at will, we are screwed. Gasoline being a good point to use since we most need fuel.

[BattleRifleG3]

Yes we have tarriffs, but not enough if we're still paying income tax (which I hold is ultimately unlawful.)

Originally Posted by Rufus Rhastus J

I'm sorry....i fail to see your point

protectionism can cause more problems than it solves :spaceship

[Rufus Rhastus J]

Originally Posted by Bulletproof

protectionism can cause more problems than it solves :spaceship

but, I can honestly say that in my short life (50+years), I've seen America go from a world leader and almost self supporting to almost a third world nation, with a service based economy, importing nearly everything we use...even supplies for the war machine and little hope for the future generations who will be comeing down the pike. Why? Greed! Greed from the big business bastids who, along with the self serving slime we continue to elect, have sold this great country down the road for a few pieces of silver. I think it's a darn shame. And, unless we re-think our trade laws, we will sink further, possibly beyond any hope of repair. I'd like to see us survive on a totally service based economy......er, no, I'd not like to see that. but, that's where we are going, to !!!! in a hand basket. :insane: I wish someone, who is loyal to America, and agrees "America first!" Pluck the rest!, would somehow rise from the republican party and shove it to big business like they have shoved it to us, and America! but, sadly, I suspect, all we can expect is more of the same. A new bunch of self servers who will greedily accept favors to continue the downward slide of America's economy until there is nothing left to bleed dry. Do you know how a spider eats? Yup, it sucks the life blood (and other goodies) from it's prey and tosses the empty, dryed out hulk aside.
Well dude, our economy and manufacturing plants were the food for the greedy business spider. When he's done with us, guess what will happen. Yup, we'll be tosses aside too! :joker: