American Manufacturing

I normally try to stay away from political blogging, but this is just ridiculous.  The Obama administration and the Democrats are now (finally) putting job creation on their radar.  The problem is that they’re still following the trickle-down Reaganomic BS that got us in this mess.  Talk of child-care tax credits and other voodoo “faith-based” economic principles.  So what?  They’re trying, right?

If they are actually sincere in their motives, they’re probably some of the dumbest people around.  The #1 reason why the United States is experiencing a real unemployment rate of 20% and above (not to mention that wage earners now earn less per year than they did in 2000 before Bush took office) is this:

OUTSOURCING

The corporatists will tell you it costs too much to make stuff in the United States.  In some ways they are correct; when you can make it in China for 20 cents, why make it in the U.S.?  What we need to address, however, is the reason it costs so much less in China.  China is run by an authoritarian government that subsidizes their massive manufacturing machine.  We’re run by a democracy that’s been taken over by corporate interests (please see the recent Supreme Court ruling negating funding limits for corporate sponsored political ads).  We have gems like NAFTA and other bogus free trade agreements that allow our jobs to be sent overseas while creating zero benefit for the United States.

Simply put, we import far more than we export.  We have an economy based on shuffling money around rather than actually producing something.  What few manufacturing jobs are left are increasingly pissed into the wind by companies outsourcing to countries that have nationalized healthcare, or no labor standards (cough–China–cough).

So I propose this:  isolate our economy.  If it costs 20 cents to build a baby bottle in China, and one dollar in the U.S., charge an 80 cent import tariff on the company that outsourced.  We need to put ourselves on equal footing with the rest of the world economically, because most countries have far stricter import/export laws than we do.  Free trade only works if everyone is playing the game, and we’re the only idiots who haven’t figure that out yet.  And how about we make it illegal for an American company to move its headquarters overseas to dodge tax laws while we’re at it.

Let’s bring manufacturing back to the United States and prove that Americans make better products than the rest of the world.  The alternative is too frightening to ignore.  I’m tired of us Americans giving greedy corporations a free pass in the name of “liberty”.  All we’re doing is handing our liberty over to them for pennies on the dollar.