A Losing Battle?

With the current global recession I expect a raft of protectionist measures to appear in many 'developed' countries. Probably in the guise of quotas, trade 'agreements', taxes, compliance test/conditions.

Del

it may be more difficult for trade, with transportation costs, fortunatly fuel prices are less than half of what they were 3 months ago.

this won't last forever.

Our government in Australia has been going down the path of tariff removal etc for the past 20 years. If you dont want a manufacturing industry follow our example. Lobby your politicians and law makers keep the tarrifs, taxes etc in place. Keep the jobs in your own country. Politicians will talk about free enterprise and global economies etc but they do not take into account who is making the product, the pittance they are payed and the quality of the product compared to home grown.

This may sound like a bit of a rant but the end result is a loss of skills and a reliance on other countries. We now have a skills shortage of trades peoplpe due the the closure of many manufacturing plants in the last 20 years. Companies are actively importing guest welders etc from china etc as we do not have enough skilled workers to fill the jobs.

odd enough, all these products are all loweer benefilt. why do they hope to put more persons now into thse lines rather than promote your more higher tech products?

just think your computer, aeroplane, high speed train and lasers and arts, entertainments are all required many people to produce. and hve more higher benefits.

is it benefits that are sought or profits the prime concern?

'da ber

Cor, more people preaching the same gospel as me! Trade barriers and tarrifs are a way of levelling the playing field. Just becausse the cost of living is high in europe and the US doesn't mean that we should ship all of the production overseas. In the UK we have seen a steady decline in the textiles sector since the mid 1970's, it really had hard times from the mid 1990's onwards and is now almost non existant. The worrying thing is that there is now a skills shortage in retailers, where once you had technical people, now you have design graduates because no university is teaching technical parts in textile courses.

Yes this is another rant, but daily I am seeing retailers and consumers being lied to by suppliers in the far east who tell you that this level of quality cannot be reached etc. You can also trace most of the technical queries on international forums to people in the far east who have taken on work that they don't know how to process! Textiles has always been a bit of the black arts with people being taught more by the older generation who have no university degrees than by the professors at uni. Maybe thats why it went down the pan!

Don't forget the subsudies the governemtn give cotten farmers. In Africa they can not even sell their cotten because the U.S. Cotten is so cheap. The farmers there were trold raise cotten there is a market for it. Then the U.S. Congress in 2002 gave so much money to the cotten lobby that the price fell sharply. Many farmers will lose their farms because U.S. Farmers got taxpayers dollars.

Unless you can get to grow Hemp to replace cotten then you got problems. Hemp is better than cotten actually.

Not to try to get back to the topic, but I believe a government has a duty to care for its home grown businesses, the comments regarding the use of pesticides which may or may not have polluted the ground water is one for another discussion. There are or should be laws in place to protect the citizens of a country from unfair and over use of toxic chemicals by individuals or companies.

Other options are for the growing of hemp, as has been suggested for the cotton growers in Africa in a previous post, this is far more environmentally sound and would help stop the use of unnecessary pesticides.

Another option is to steam clean all of the top soil, a mammoth task but possible, and grow organic cotton. We keep seeing reports that this is the way that people wish to go, if you get on the band wagon early then you should be able to reap the profits before the market gets swamped.

Unfortunately these suggestions rely on a set of assumptions, mainly that the great and the good politicians will use the import levvies to try and transform the home grown business. There is also the assumption that you can cause some form of national pride to return to the US, and have people actively look for items from US brands and not just the cheapest. All of this is possible, the outdoor market actually achieves all of these and a lot of people look specifically for certain US branded merchandise, quite often manufactured at home!

Really and truly the main change will have to be for a working economy, you need to have an industry to back it up, if you look at what has been allowed to happen here in the UK, we now have a mainly service based economy and import the majority of what we need. This leaves us in the precarious position of being at the mercy of every other nation when it comes to raw materials, thus prices keep going up, its not good!

As long as the USA comsumes 30 % of the world production with only 5 % of the world population and run a National Debt of $11 Trillion Dollar , $290 Billion in a trade defict, and $230 Billion in budgets deficts we havbe little choice but to get along in the world.

Or we can make China really mad and they will dump the $10 Trillion plus in debts they hold on the USA and sell off all the U.S. Currency and drive the value of the Dollar into the toilet.

Read about Argentia with 900 % inflation that they endured for many years.

dadw5boys,

this week i took my first social security check and bought junk silver coins, without premiums. price was $8.50 per dollar of face value. i guess my actions are saying that i am betting on massive inflation. just seemed safer than putting the money in a bank. especially when i found out how much money
the FDIC and similar institutions have set aside to cover bank loses. realisticly the government guarantees about checking and savings, is just based on the full faith and integrity of the government. if the banks tank and lose everything the cost to the government could easily drive us into hyperinflation. i am much more worried that hyperinflation can be caused by something or someones outside of the US and outside the control of the US.

especially when i found out how much money
the FDIC and similar institutions have set aside to cover bank loses.

there was never enough money to cover, the US financial institutions is very sensitive to a point of being vulnerable.

that is what i had read. didn't use those words, just stated how much was out there. it was in an article entitled "there isn't enough money in the world".

also, i think financially, the United States is very sensitive to a point of being vulnerable.

No one has said a word about Quality. I know for a fact that the American consumer can't tell the difference in the quality of the products produced by each of the countries mentioned. Vietnam, Bangladesh-Pakistan-Malaysia, and Central America, in that order, all make a superior product to China. If all you shop is Wally World, or look at the price tag, how would know? I look for 'Made in Vietnam' as much as I look for 'Made in USA'. The Chinese junk is not just a boat.

To make tarrifs fair they should be based on quality, not just tonnage.