Mel, as much as I dislike Obama, this has been going on looooong before he took office. I remember working for Brown Shoe Co., in the late 80's / early 90's and they closed their last domestic manufacturing plant. Many of you will recall the old shoe factories that dotted the map across Missouri. There are hundreds more examples we all know about.
It's hard to blame GE or Brown Shoe or any of them. If you were running those companies, you would do it to. If you didn't, the company would fold and there would be no stock value or dividend payments. There would be no jobs for anyone, including you. The blame goes mostly to the "leaders" of the past 50 years, that have allowed imbalanced trade regulations to cripple us. The blame goes to everyone that has walked into a WAL-MART (or a hundred other big box retailers) and bought a pair of shoes or an article of clothing, becasue is was 25% or 50% less, as a result of being manufactured in China or Indonesia... Heck, look at your hunting gear. I'll bet there is a significant amount that has been manufactured outside of the USA.
The fix is not so simple. We could change the rules of the trade game to benefit American workers but that would cause a fairly serious rise in prices. And we all want our inexpensive products. It would also have serious geo-political implications. You think we have troulbe with China now. Wait until their economy starts tanking becasue we eliminated a large percentage of their exports. Talk about an ugly problem...
I wish I knew the answer... A good start would be to base tariffs on imports, on the wage they pay their workers. If you make it less worthwhile to manufacture overseas, most won't...
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"Hunts are best measured by the endurance of the memories they produce..."
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