Brent P wrote:
In article om, wrote:
Of course there is another aspect of this that you completely overlook.
And that is the great benefit of people being able to buy that car for
$7000. All the folks who complain about jobs lost to lower cost
labor completely ignore the fact that everyone is also receiving a huge
positive benefit from this. This is especially true of lower income
families. If they had to pay 2X for everything they buy at Walmart and
everywhere else, it's not clear that they would be any better off.
Lower income people in the USA cannot compete with near slave wages. It
cuts them out of the job market. It's doing them no favors what-so-ever.
Unemployment is near historic lows, GDP is growing at 3.5%, inflation
and interest rates are both low, real estate is at record highs, and
more Americans own homes today than ever before. No reasonable person
and certainly no economist, would call that a collapsing economy.
As for low cost products doing low income people no good, that is
absolutely false. Look at who shops at Kmart, Walmart, etc. Those
products would cost much more if it were not for foreign low cost labor
producing them. These low cost products are of tremendous benefit to
everyone, including the low income. As someone earlier pointed out,
China is planning a $7000 entry level car. Do you think that is of no
benefit to low income families here in the USA? You're so biased only
looking for negatives that you can't see the forest for the trees.
Meanwhile, if manufacturing were kept in the USA and illegals weren't
undercutting the wages by flooding the job market with bodies, the demand
for labor would allow these people to find work at a decent wage and
afford to buy the products they are building as well or better than the
products from china etc.
So, now they make twice as much. Now they get pushed into higher tax
brackets, which the liberals think is a good thing. So, they pay
higher taxes. Then they pay 2X for a hammer, shirt, TV, etc. It's
not at all clear to me that they are much better off. Plus, if you
look at the countries that have tried to protect themselves from the
real world economy, they are doing far worse than those that encourage
free trade. What kind of cars do you think you would be getting from
Detroit today, if we had cut off car imports the last 25 years?
You'd be getting a real piece of crap, because it was world competition
that forced them to start building a much better product.