Dude, this is a thread about cars, so we are talking cars as in:
3)If you chose foreign (CARS) you are saying “I’m ok with unfair trade practices and companies that steal American jobs (in the Auto industry) and wealth”
You are correct that we have let industry after industry slip away and good jobs went with them. Are you suggesting that is a good route to continue on?
The reason the Auto industry is such a hot-button topic is that its different.
We still have (until recently I guess) a competitive auto industry that employed bookoo Americans in well paying jobs.
You can go onto a car lot and compare a made in America, by Americans car that is on par in price, reliability and efficiency with any country on the globe.
It was our manufacturing last stand. You could make a choice to support your country and not give up anything really. Or you could just as easily decide to send that $20k you earned in this country to Korea to circulate to the benefit of Korea and support Korean jobs.
Of course you can’t do that with computers and TVs anymore, maybe thats why you don’t see people debating the virtues of buying American made computers?
If we threw up trade sanctions that merely made everything FAIR to our automakers then that Accord of yours would have cost $4k more than it did. I’m guessing that would have got you to think about other makes.
This also answers Flu’s Q, which is to say that if we ourselves decided to buy American or the Gov. decided to level the playing field, and the cars sold in the US that are foriegn made suddenly became a lot less attractive (driving consumers to support their own makers) then even in a down market we could drive up GM’s sales saving many, many jobs.
I bet cutting out Korean, Japanese and German built cars would fix our industry pronto.
Call it trade survival. And when we have a healthy industry again and climb out of this hole we can go back to more open trade (hopefully slanted more fairly to the US).
