Shopsmith Forums

beeg wrote:Many people here bash "Made in China.". If ya boycott "Made in China." products, you'll knot be buying very much.

Yes, but(my turn to bash!) if ya do not boycott "Made in China", often you will be buying 'not much'.

Many of us, probably more than any of us can imagine, are using items that were manufactured in China and we don't even know it. Furthermore, many of these items are actually pretty good and of reasonable quality.

Face it, we worked our way right out of the "Made in the USA" era by demanding high wages while insisting on competive prices. We can't have it both ways. Manufacturing has gone off shore and is not likely to return.

This trend became apparent to me while I was working for a defense contractor. When I first went to work in the civilian world, buy American was a requirement of all who sold to the US Government. By the time I retired, that requirement was abolished and we were manufacturing defense and weapons systems with parts from off shore.

dusty wrote:Many of us, probably more than any of us can imagine, are using items that were manufactured in China and we don't even know it. Furthermore, many of these items are actually pretty good and of reasonable quality.

Face it, we worked our way right out of the "Made in the USA" era by demanding high wages while insisting on competive prices. We can't have it both ways. Manufacturing has gone off shore and is not likely to return.

This trend became apparent to me while I was working for a defense contractor. When I first went to work in the civilian world, buy American was a requirement of all who sold to the US Government. By the time I retired, that requirement was abolished and we were manufacturing defense and weapons systems with parts from off shore.

Dusty
You are probably right the "manufacturing has gone off shore and is not likely to be return."

However there is a school of thought that is getting more and more attention and that is when the US economy collapses, wages will be so depressed that any manufacture looking for cheap labor will come to the US.

In other words we will become as Japan was after the war or as Korea was before manufacturing moved there and as China is now.

Many economist say we will be working for $1.50 an hour and bread will cost $0.05 a loaf again.

Think about it if we had been smart enough to realize we would have kept labor costs what they were in 1940 prices as they were 1940 and the rest of world would be coming to us to buy American. When electronics came in the increased production would have enabled us all to produce 10 times what a worker did in 1940 and since we would have the whole world as a market we would all be filthy rich.