On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 18:56:34 -0700 (PDT), rangerssuck
wrote:

On Sep 10, 9:24*pm, J. D. Slocomb wrote:
On Thu, 09 Sep 2010 19:23:57 -0700, Larry Jaques





wrote:
On 09 Sep 2010 16:57:52 GMT, steamer wrote:

* * * *--It's not millions; it's billions. The problem is global and
toppling the current administration is not the fix. The problem is buying
crap from the Harbor Freight-type stores that was made by people earning
ten cents a day in China or some other cheap-labor country. We've got to
knuckle down and buy American or British or French; it may hurt the wallet
a little at first but you'll be glad you did so down the road when the things
you bought haven't fallen apart. Quality has a quality all its own, so to
speak..

Sorry, Ed, but America no longer even _produces_ many of the tools one
can purchase from HF.

We have to free ourselves of the speaking weasels (and people who use
them) which have caused this mess in our legal, medical, educational,
penal, and unionized industrial systems. *This will likely take more
than ten minutes.

A bit of a problem. You can buy an automobile made in the USA for
35,000 dollars or one made in India for 7,000. Are you really, really
going to buy the US product?

By the way, blaming it all on the lower pay scales in foreign
countries is not really the answer. Try looking, for example, on why
the identical medicine is cheaper in Canada then in the US, and maybe
you will realize that the high costs of doing business in the U.S is
what is causing the problem.

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb
(jdslocombatgmail)- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

A simple solution to that, which would probably cause plety of other
problems (I don't pretend to know - I'm not an economist), would be to
place exorbitant import duties on items that are or *could be*
produced in the US. Several years ago, I was working with an engineer
in Brazil, and we had a hell of a time sending parts to him because of
their import policies. Years before that, I had designed a device that
was being manufactured (to my dismay)in Korea. The product contained a
Seiko printer mechanism which was made in Japan. It was actually
cheaper to ship the printer to New York and then to Korea than to ship
it direct from Japan to Korea.

Again, I don't pretend to know whether these protectionist policies
are good or bad (I expect that it's some of each), but these are two
of my experiences.

On the other hand, we lost a pretty large graphics production job
because our client found a person in the Philipines who does Photoshop
work for $4.00 per hour.

Level playing field, my ass.

You make a mistake talking about salaries and referencing US salaries
as a reference. You need to compare foreign salaries to foreign cost
of living. In a country where food costs might be $2.00 a day, $4.00
an hour is pretty good wages.

Closing the US to foreign imports (your suggestion of hefty import
duties) isn't workable. If you were to do that then China wouldn't be
selling all that stuff to the US and wouldn't have enough money to buy
US Government Bonds. Bonds sales, i.e., borrowing, stops and the US
government doesn't have sufficient money to keep running. Now what?

Not to get all involved in economics but punitive tariffs have been
tried in the past. They don't work well as effected nations simply
apply the same tactic and then nothing moves in international trade.
The thought that the US doesn't need those foreigners is hardly
correct - where does the bulk of the oil used in the US come from, for
example?

Cheers,

John D. Slocomb
(jdslocombatgmail)