I already pointed out Arcteryx used to make their clothing in either the USA or Canada, and now its made overseas. They still charge the same amount.
Otte Gear is competitive in price, and made in the USA.
Lots of companies have switched to overseas manufacture and still charge the same price or more as when they used to make them in the USA.
Comparing the price of the item from one year to another, citing the only change as their move overseas is somewhat myopic. We have the price of the fleece made in Canada (from your other post) in 2007 compared to the same fleece made in Bangladesh in 2010. What if the rising costs of doing business would have caused the “Made in Canada” fleece cost $50 more than the 2007 price? In the US we have health care that costs more and more per year. In Texas we recently got a lovely new “margin tax” applied to all businesses that instantly raised the cost of doing business. Those are only a few of the costs that are completely out of the hands of your average business but affect their balance sheets greatly.
Arcter’yx may have also had significant capital expenditures involved in moving manufacturing overseas. The costs of their product may not have changed a whole lot from 2007 to 2010, having made the move, but they may go down significantly over time as those initial capital expenditures are amortized over the years.
So in 2-3 years I can expect a big price drop? I seriously doubt it…
Hate to destroy the narrative but manufacturing in this country, with the exception of the occasional recession continues to grow and has only increased.
You’re also conflating a decline in textiles and other labor intensive, low-tech items with high-end capital intensive manufacturing of which America continues to enjoy a significant comparative advantage.
Manufacturing output of those items is at its highest levels on record.
Much of the same current complaints about manufacturing were made back in the 18th century when we were shifting from an agricultural economy. Pretending that modernization of industry means that we can employ the same numbers of people as technology improves is absurd. What used to take 10 workers to produce now takes one.
While manufacturing jobs have declined but that doesn’t mean that America is no longer a manufacturing super power. That doesn’t mean economies don’t shift.
Times change, economies shift. Life goes on. Adapt or die.
Eliminate all domestic federal taxes, shift the burden to those selling imported goods. Dumborats can go harass someone other than me and my brave crew for money. Imports are your new pie, go optimize your pie revenue fo duh po folks and our boys in green, you degenerate chickenfucking congresscraps.
If importers can survive, they must be gods own chosen people.
A more moderate approach would be to tax importers for the wages, taxes (yes, taxes) and materials they didn’t buy here. Basically you’d make a foreign lightbulb wholesale for the same price as a US lightbulb. If another country can make better crap for the same price point as our American goods, god bless them, because we’re screwing up royally at that point.
Foreigners don’t like it? Fuck them. Want to tax our goods? Great! We don’t give a crap whether you buy our shiny junk or not. Nobody asks for makarovs by name, they want a badass Colt .45.
American companies should be able to bribe and graft as much as they want to overseas. Other countries let their sharks in suits do it. Once you leave our country, you’re out of our jurisdiction, we don’t care what you do over there, that’s the job of foreign countries.
If we study the Constitution & it’s supporting documents we’d find our answer. Several have touched upon it.
Anecdotal Evidence
(A) The US at one time had the highest standard of living, wages and the cheapests goods. True
(B) The Revolutionary War was NOT about “taxation without representation” but about the colonialist controlling:
(1) their own currency
(2) their own manufacturing (Gt. Britain req’d heavy mfg goods be mfg in the UK and shipped to the US even if the raw materials CAME from the US…)
Solution
(B) Get rid of CAU, NAFTA, GATT, WTO, CAFTA, FTAA, etc.
(C) Federal INCOME Taxes, AS IMPLEMENTED, are unconstitutional. TARIFFS were intended to PAY FOR FEDERAL GOV’T. Neat, eh? So inact TARIFFS to pay for the Fed operating expenses whose budget MUST BE APPROVED BY THE STATES. THE STATES THEN TAX THEIR RESIDENTS BASED UPON THE STATES’ PERCENTAGE OF TOTAL POPULATION OF THE NATION.
There are other issues - declining dollar and rumors, threats, plans to drop it as a Global Reserve Currency. That’s another matter, however, and is outside the scope of this thread.
Who said they would be? Who said they should be?
I would LOVE to spend the extra money on something actually MADE in the US that wasn’t a piece of shit. I’m just saying it won’t cost ten times as much, or more correctly it shouldn’t have to cost ten times as much.
Back in the 1950s we competed with third world labor, it was called Made In Japan. We managed to make a much better product at a fair price that the average American could afford because he had a job.
Great article!
It was a very different nation back then too. Example: During the booming 80’s, CEO’s made 42 times more than the average worker in the company.
Now CEO’s make in excess of 530 times more than the average worker. You don’t need to be a raging socialist, AFL-CIO member to grasp the correlation between a diminished middle class, outsourcing, and bloated executive compensation that would make Gordon Gekko blush.
Outsourcing is a killer of American jobs under the guise of free market and remaining competitive. That’s horse shit. And I simply do not buy the problem is Americans are lazy, and outsourcing is for our own good.
I was a PM for a site built in Iowa a couple of years ago, and we had people lined around the block for low skill jobs that paid $7-8hr tops. Middle America is dying for jobs, and yet here we are shipping as much as we can to the Chinese and Indians
I really can’t wait for the day that this comes back around and starts biting outsourcing advocates in the ass. Outsourcing is a pig and CEO’s are greedy asses. Wont be long till a chunk middle management, Tech and Engineering jobs start going overseas too. I can hire a network admin in India for almost nothing and have him manage IT operations from Bangalore for a fraction of what it costs to pay an American.
Company Officers are at worst no better than their shareholders allow them to be. Their pay is peanuts on the pie. You could confiscate every dime of individual income made above the magic “250k” mark and it wouldn’t fund much of anything, that’s why they ass rape the working class in taxes too.
The truly wealthy pay practically no taxes, because they own things. You can shuffle the deck chairs on the titanic all you want, they’re never going to pay more per percentage than a janitor. They got rich by doing that. The ketchup queen knows where it is financially more beneficial to buy and dock John’s boat. We destroyed our domestic small craft industry trying to flip the monopoly man the middle finger. Taxes have been high enough for long enough that the rich don’t dare earn any “income”. Their corporations pay for everything, ultimate sugar daddy god mode.
they say
you tax those things you want to discourage
you don’t tax those things you want to encourage
we don’t tax imports so we encourage them
we heavily tax US corporations so I guess we want to discourage them
(US corporate tax rate is one of the highest in the world)
This is not true. There are a billion and one small factories in China, privately owned, that make this knock-off crap and they all compete with one another for business. Lots of these factories are actually working outside the law in China as well but the Chinese authorities don’t usually care.
There are small companies in China to which you can send an original item and within 6 weeks get a container of a knock-off product being shipped to you.
I will admit that the articles I read were talking about shoes, specifically sports shoes, and not purses, but I doubt the purse market is any different.
Cheap Target look-alike purse may not even be made by the same company year to year as they go out of business, or Target finds someone willing to make it for less.
There is a difference in quality amongst the various Chinese goods. It comes down to how much the customer wants to pay. You can get items that are equal in quality (but also similar in cost) and items that are much cheaper but also made more cheaply.
(Unfortunately) things like you iPhone and Android phones, MacBooks and most other netbooks and laptops, etc are all made in China. At least for the Apple products, they are very high quality manufacture. China CAN make high quality stuff if the customer wants it. But there are also countless examples of not high quality stuff that comes from China, and that is because the customer demands a certain price point.
China’s ‘green economy’ will have to wait - latimes.com
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus-china-green-20100923,0,1133668.column
Interestingly, many of Obama’s “Green” jobs are going to China as it is cheaper I guess to build the wind turbines and other stuff in China. Probably too many permits and environmental impact statements to generate here in the US to build factories to make that sort of stuff here.
This thread is depressing…
The things that are said about China now were said about Japan 20 years ago.
Any notion that you can step back in time by protectionism is deluded at best. Doing so would only increase China’s power as the rest of the world will continue to buy from China and you’ll only prop up moribund manufacturing here at home.
Chinese competition is good for our economy if we learn from it and it forces us to be more competitive. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a recipe for disaster.
The only solution is to find new markets/goods where you enjoy a comparative advantage. People are focusing on low-end consumer goods, you’re ignoring high-end equipment, high-grade steel and other capital intensive manufacturing. Who gives a shit if China can manufacture a cheaper jacket or purse? They can’t build a Caterpillar or John Deere with anywhere near the same quality.
Basic macroeconomics and for that matter basic capitalism. Things change, get used to it. It’s not only inevitable, it’s invariably for our own good.
This of course does not mean everything is “hunky dorey” with China.
But getting rid of current, or refusing to negotiate future, trade agreements with other nations only plays to their hand.
We must address China’s protectionism, not fall into the trap ourselves.
Trade and business were founding principles of this country and engaging in quasi-socialist policies in a vain attempt to preserve American jobs in decaying industries only gangrenes a limb that should be cut off.
I disagree. The EU has tariffs on imports and limit, for example, Japanese cars. National Gov’ts have alterior motives; the people who vote for (and then don’t pay enough attention to them) do not. They wish to live prosperously. We had tariffs of 100% on foreign goods at the beginning of this nation. It assisted us to develop our own manufacturing base.
There is nothing good for me (cannot say the same for our bankers, corporate elite and domestic and foreign policy hacks) from China dumping low cost goods (regardless of quality) into the USA. Perhaps you obtain some benefit and if so it is short-lived.
There is no place to run and no place to hide. Rush Limbaugh speaks the same about this but where, oh where, is the next heavy manufacturing and R&D consumer product? You are aware that Russia and to some extent India has been buying up US steel manufacturers? Question: WHERE do we obtain the alloys to make the steel that we do? Obtaining the alloys, possessing a scanning electron microscope, knowledge on how to use it and a couple of PhDs in Metallurgy and if my power is “clean” and my control systems are up to par I, too, can manufacture extremely high quality steel. Your argument is “retreatist”.
Yes, you say they “can’t build a John Deere anywhere near the same quality” today, but as an engineer I recognize the ignorance of that statement. It doesn’t take long, my friend. It really doesn’t. You also haven’t been paying too close attention as the Big Three have been selling off huge amounts of infrastructure to the Chinese. They also demand the R&D associated with manufacturing the product which the greedy corporate elite hand over to take advantage of the low cost of manufacturing. I saw this firsthand while I was at Ford. Someone posted an article here stating the same thing within the past week or so.
Just had a meeting with some Chinese gov’t officials and they plan to initiate 100 nuclear powerplants within the next 5 yrs. Their biggest hurdle is ENERGY and the majority of their focus is in that arena. They still build and modify their own weapons systems and if you can manufacture competent weapons you can surely make a tractor - which is a very simple, yet robust, machine as machines go.
China is is playing “Dollar Diplomacy” admirably well which is why the US gov’t is having a cow with AFRICOM in October 2008 which came into being after China had a meeting with 49 African leaders in November 2006. China has been using “our” “dollars” and floating no interest loans for oil (and mineral) concessions. This is the grist behind the “Darfur thing”… oil pipeline being built in a troubled region of the Sudan.
So all of the cheap shit we hoard is going to explode in our sleeping faces. Sooner not later.
It’s a matter of National Security.
Interesting last challenge there. Accept my premise and prove me wrong. I find his list of facts anecdotes interesting, but hardly a comprehensive analysis of the US economy.
And before people start asking about my qualifications to comment on this, I’m writing this from a hotel in China while I attend a trade show. I work for an American specialty chemical company that sells a metric ass load of stuff to the Chinese and everyone else around the world. We take on all comers in our markets and we are globally kicking ass. It’s bed time now and I’m so jet lagged I feel like I’m going to fall off my chair, but you should hear the Chinese bitch about the Vietnamese!
You can bitch all you want about the Chinese, but someone back in the states is the one actually buying the goods. If people had just said “No!” to cheap imported goods and stuck with the Mom&Pop stores, Walmart wouldn’t be where it is today. Things are changing. Land and labor- and especially energy are getting expensive here, so it is only a matter of time before the tide reverses.
The real issue is that our education system produces over-schooled and under-educated masses of middle-class kids who spend four years drinking and partying rather than getting a meaningful education. We need more engineers, biologists, chemists, nurses, PTs and less recreational management, marketing and and any major with the word ‘studies’ in the title.
I understand the frustration that the author is talking about. One of my presentations in my MBA program was about “How you can’t eat an information sandwich.” You have to make things and not just twitter and trade stuff back and forth, but this fatalistic wailing with out a realistic vector as how to solve it is not the answer.
One major difference. Then it was US goods against the cheap manufactured goods. Now it is US goods made in China. There aren’t the US goods now to compete against anything.
Any notion that you can step back in time by protectionism is deluded at best. Doing so would only increase China’s power as the rest of the world will continue to buy from China and you’ll only prop up moribund manufacturing here at home.
Chinese competition is good for our economy if we learn from it and it forces us to be more competitive. Pretending it doesn’t exist is a recipe for disaster.
The only solution is to find new markets/goods where you enjoy a comparative advantage. People are focusing on low-end consumer goods, you’re ignoring high-end equipment, high-grade steel and other capital intensive manufacturing. Who gives a shit if China can manufacture a cheaper jacket or purse? They can’t build a Caterpillar or John Deere with anywhere near the same quality.
Basic macroeconomics and for that matter basic capitalism. Things change, get used to it. It’s not only inevitable, it’s invariably for our own good.
The problem is not competing against China. The problem is shooting ourselves in the head. We over-tax, over-regulate, and over-strike which makes us uncompetitive.
The only problem is that those decaying industries are not transforming into new industries. They are moving to China. As I mentioned, even Obama’s green jobs are in China. We have made ourselves too expensive to compete through taxation, regulation, and unions.