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Originally Posted by chato de shamrock
How about stopping outsourcing?
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That's called Protectionism. Go look that up and tell me how well you think it works. I'll wait, I've got all day.
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Originally Posted by chato de shamrock
How about incentives to those companies or small mom & pop businesses that have stuck around with us through this, offering us
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President Obama Signs Small Business Jobs Act - Learn What's In It | The White House
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Originally Posted by chato de shamrock
How about the government spending some money to promote (perhaps through TV or radio) the support of US made goods and products.
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You have a post railing against taxation but then you have a spending proposal? Where do you think spending comes from?
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Originally Posted by chato de shamrock
How about strict restrictions and hefty $$$ penalties on those companies like Microsoft and DirectTV who close down buildings here, bail on us for Mexico or China and to add insult to injury lie to us telling us they are doing this to offer us cheaper, affordable services.
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You either trust the free markets or you don't, and if you don't you may as well nationalize everyone's shit and set up breadlines.
The reason why US "goods and products" are, at times, not competitive is either because they are inferior or because they are more expensive. Consumers are, on average, rational creatures and they are unlikely to buy a more expensive or inferior product simply because a taxpayer-funded ad tells them to.
The only way to get people to artificially buy domestic products when they would otherwise buy foreign is to slap huge taxes and tariffs on the foreign products so that they are no longer price competitive. Thus, more taxes.
You're not for or against anything in particular, you're just miffed people aren't more altruistic when it comes to their purchasing choices. That isn't a policy platform.
EDIT:
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Originally Posted by TheWolf
As blue collar jobs have disappeared, this has been found to not be true. Factory employee's are not retrained with a high degree of success into a white collar positions. Also economies can not survive just on service. They must have a product to make. Something to export. The biggest change from 1998-2008 was the conversion from manufacturing to jobs like banking and insurance. They do not create any value though which is something an economy must do.
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This transformation to a service economy will end up being multi-generational, and it is unfortunately true that if certain workers cannot be re-trained, their only option is to either relocate to nations where their skills are still in use or they can be, er, fucked. I get no Darwinian pleasure in stating this truth, but truth it is. While it is unlikely that a factory worker is going to be someone's CFO next week, going from a factory to a call center (i.e. goods blue collar to service blue collar) isn't much of a leap, and it happens all the time.
Banking and insurance actually *does* create value, as the stability of a financial system will go a long way towards ensuring that the entities that operate within it will prosper more evenly and more free of tumult that they would if said system was unstable (this is one of many, many examples). The value added by services is less tangible and harder to understand than the value added by someone building a car or a refrigerator, but there is value nonetheless.
More than 60% of our GDP is currently made up of services.