You are not paying attention. US corporations exploiting cheap overseas labors to enhance their profits at the expense of US jobs are redistributing wealth from the US middle class workers to corporate fat cats and idle rich investors.
So if Company A hires America workers to make cell phones in factories in the USA and sells them for $800 while Company B outsources the manufacturing of cell phones to China and sells them for $400 which company is going to sell more phones and stay in business?
Both are important and neither are mutually exclusive. Equilibrium has to be found. America success has always been based on a large and prosperous middle class. The shift to an tiny ultra-rich elite and a huge poor working class is a model that has failed repeatedly throughout history.
Some are. Many aren't. There are many valid reasons to have production outside the US. Jobs have flowed both ways. Likewise the job loss due to NAFTA is a myth. A Congressional Research in 2004 found NO NET LOSS of US jobs after 10 years of NAFTA. Other studies show wages went up as well. Cost to consumers can't be ignored. How many smartphones and TVs and Nike MJs would be sold if made in the US. Even if in non union shops they would cost significantly more. With fewer cell phones and the reduced use cell service would be lower. Would it slow down the pace of innovation? There is a good argument to be made it would. Likewise our workers improved productivity has brought work home from overseas when not limited by union shops. Ask those who work in Toyota, Kia, Mercades, Nissan, BMW, Hyundai plants in the south what they think of things now. When oil prices were in the $100/bbl range, chemical plants were being dismantled in South America and brought here. The cost of transportation was also driving manufacturing back to the US. This from personal experience. Much of the anti free trade meme is a myth. As I said earlier we have structural issues with our tax structure both personal and corporate. I would like to see taxes reduced and exemption and subsidies (corporate) reduced or eliminated. There is nothing in Bernies campaign that leads me to believe has has a clue or cares.
The whole income inequality meme is a myth. There have always been a few people a lot richer than everybody else and there always will be. If you taxed all the billionaires 90% how much of that would I get? Not a damn cent.
That's not what free trade creates. If I start a small bicycle shop, custom bikes by Martin, I am gonna need the frames made in China, before I add my fancy parts and branding. So I am gonna invest a bunch of money into filling one whole shipping container of frames and have them shipped over. Then I build up the bikes and sell em to hipsters with my logo on em. This is how small business works. I can't run this business with American made frames, it isn't possible. That sort of labor costs a shit load here, especially now that employers have obamacare to worry about. The Dominican who owns the dollar store down my street sells almost excluvely Chinese made screwdrivers and spatulas, he can't survive without Chinese made goods. And the poor people who shop there benefit as well, just like upper middle class red benefits from cheap Chinese labor in his computer and tv and phone. This trans pacific thing that is happening now would make Vietnam better able to export lovely wool pea coats for us to wear in the winter, or cheaper tires for our trucks. It doesn't just benefit mitt Romney when he buys foreign goods. Free trade benefits everyone. You should never protect people from a free marketplace with subsidies and price controls and tariffs, even if the person you claim you are protecting is the American worker. It hurts people when you protect them from the market. It's also nationalistic, which is stupid. Chinese poeple need jobs too, and they need them worse.
Exactly. Poor people are poor because they are alcoholics or morons. Not hat there is anything wrong with being either of those things. There is an experiment we can do to prove this, except we don't need to do it because it already exists and is called the lottery. When poor people win the lottery they nearly always end up poor again. That is the ultimate form of redistribution, just give a poor guy millions. He will be poor again in no time, almost always. That is why he was poor to begin with, he thought it was smart to buy lottery tickets. The issue is never income inequality, it's how low the floor is. If the poor are doing ok, it doesn't matter how rich others are, except that the rich people are good to have around as they buy things and hire folks. Republicans are religious gun toting hillbilly assholes, but they have it right when they call the rich "job creators".
Why dont you let the Chinese people decide if they are being exploited, as they line up by the thousands to take these jobs.
I think a decent argument could be made that the morally better, more humanitarian move is to hire the Mexican, as he almost surely needs the work more. I love Mexicans and I wish them the best. Hardworking little bastards.
I'm not defending Bernie Sanders, I don't like him much. I'm saying that there is a balanced to be achieved between national and individual/corporate success and it is not being achieved with an every-man-for-himself ideology. Sanders is trying to address this, not to dismantle free enterprise and move to communism.
