True Grit Farms":3as5kko1 said:
The US of A is the largest consumer in the world, 3 times more than China or Japan. We need to push our weight around, and our government needs to make fair deals for us.
We are strapped by unfair rules especially environmental issues and tariffs. The jerks in DC have no idea how to run a business or make a fair deal for it's citizens.
Not going to happen. The world we knew in the past is gone forever, and unless we find a way to more efficiently compete on the current global market, we are destined to lose ground to those nations that can do it.
Take rent out of the USA household final consumption expenditures (the measure of actual consumerism/consumption) and the US is not nearly as far ahead of developing countries as it seems now.
Tariffs and evironmental regs aren't the only big problem in the US---an unrealistic and unsustainable standard of living is. We adopted our current standard of living in the 2 decades right after ww2, when we were the only industrialized country with any appreciable manufacturing capability left standing from the war. That standard of living and the economic powerhouse we were was not sustainable once the rest of the world rebuilt, and even more so once China decided embark on private ownership of it's own industrial corporations following the student protests in the late 90s.
And no, high import tariffs will not work well--they never have. They make a dent, but not much of one. It is impossible to force a nation's consumers to buy any given nation's exports, when they can buy their own goods cheaper. Heck, we can't even get our own consumers to buy our goods instead of foreign goods, and that, is the real problem. We love saving $$$ and all one has to do to see this is go to
viewforum.php?f=10 and see all the accolades laid upon Kubota and Mahindra. Our "Buy American" is really just lip serrvice for most people--it sounds good, but in practice, well, we don't really practice it.
Things will get much worse, once India and the African sub-continent come on line as major manufacturers of durable goods. India, DOES have a very real "Buy Indian First" mindset, and we will be seeing their heavy industry show up on our shores very soon, followed in a few decades by durable goods from African nations.
In today's news, China will probably make a deal this week to buy Syngenta, which will put that nation's chem industry on a close par with Dow/Dupont in the pesticide/herbicide sector, and much closer to Monsanto in the seed sector.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ ... 43-billion
