American workers not cosseted, overpaid. They are getting SCREWED.

It's true the unions are not without faults but if you look at the WHOLE picture the American worker has had a camshaft rammed up his rear with no assembly lube!

Manufacturing employees in the United States are underpaid and overworked compared to European labor. That's a fact. Manufaturing jobs are vanishing and being replaced with poor paying stinky customer service and retail ones.

We should harmonize safety and emissions with the EU and Japan and then tax each imported vehicle according to the difference between US and the source country's pay, worker safety and manufacturing emisssion cost rules. Fuck the consumer, he will pay more. I'm so tired of hearing about the consumer. We are all consumers but we have to be producers first and foremost too.

Reply to
Bret Ludwig
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Tariffs do 2 good things, they help remove price pressure on domestic producers, and they help stunt the growth of foreign producers by keeping a lot of our consumers from sending money to the foreign producers.

Unfortunately, the problem with them is that they only work if your country is the only country in the world that does tariffs. In reality, if you tariff, then the other countries also tariff, and pretty soon every country is running tariffs, and now our manufacturers here lose all the overseas market. What you end up with is a world where no country sells anything to any other country, and all countries governments get a huge amount of money for doing essentially nothing, and the tariffs are now not effective. This is a breeding ground for world wars, since no government really has anything to lose by attacking it's neighbors.

Ted

Reply to
tedm

I can think of a few other good things Tariffs and other overt trade restrictions do. I bet you can, too, if you think about it.

History does not support this assertion.

...so? Not many American cars are sold outside North America.

That is an immense leap of logic.

Reply to
Daniel J. Stern

Did you ever stop to think about the large number of Japanese cars sold both here AND in Japan? While as you say not many American cars are sold outside North America? And you call this "so what"? Did you perhaps think this might possibly be related to why companies like Ford aren't doing so well? Naaahhhh!!!

Clearly, if American companies are being blocked from overseas markets we need to retaliate against those markets by closing our markets to those countries. Tariffs are certainly one of the tools used to do this. But it is very important to hold tariffs in reserve as punative actions, not to instigate them.

For countries that don't close their markets to the US, it is stupid and foolish to tariff their products, or they are going to retaliate against us in kind. And for countries that are willing to open their markets in exchange for us opening our markets, once again, it's stupid to tariff against them.

Unfortunately what I see too much of is efforts by the US government to give favored trading status to countries like China which have a history of not only not purchasing our manufacturers products, but outright stealing them by making forgeries of them. In short, the US government tariffs countries that it shouldn't, and doesen't tariff products from countries that really are not in any way friendly to us.

Ted

Reply to
tedm

You're living in the past. You don't know what an import is.

American vehicles are not being killed by low priced imports, but by foreign manufacturers building superior vehicles in NAFDA (that includes the USA) using USA workers. Not just Japanese either, but the likes of BMW, also Mercedes who are owned by the same German company as Chrysler.

Reply to
Spam Hater

Very naive. Companies who believe wind up going under.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

Reply to
Dori A Schmetterling

And there are plenty of 'American' cars outside the US. It's just that they are usually not made in USA. Plus cars like the Mercedes M-Class.

DAS

For direct contact replace nospam with schmetterling

Reply to
Dori A Schmetterling

Uhhh.......

Reply to
longlivetheZ

Superior vehicles according to whom?

Rags like Consumer Reports and Car and Driver focus on ownership costs during the first 5 years or so, to them any vehicle older than 10 years old is used up and worthless. But there are lots of people who buy cars and run them for

10-15 years, and there's lots of 3rd generation owners buying used vehicles out there that are 7-8 year old vehicles. The Ragazines don't pay attention to those people since they aren'y buying the Rag's advertisers products.

So, if your in that market which would you buy, a 9 year old Japanese car with 125Kmiles on an engine that will bend all the valves when the timing belt breaks, or a 9 year old domestic non-interference engine with 125k? Remember - you just have enough money for the car, not for dumping $300 into a timing belt change right after you buy it.

Now maybe your attitude is f*ck all the poor 3rd generation owners, we don't give a shit about them, but what about the owners who buy new cars and don't feel like being indebted to a car payment for the rest of their natural lives by continual "trading in" every 5 years?

We all know which is more expensive to buy replacement parts for when they get long in the tooth and start needing things.

Ted

Reply to
Ted Mittelstaedt

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