Standard of living? You looked around lately?
Countless have and are losing their jobs, homes, retirements, saving, investments..
You can't send send hundreds of thousands of our jobs and industries overseas to China and India, and then allow into the U.S. tens of millions of low wage illegal workers.
This is national suicide.
Don't believe me? Look around.
But, Ohio is a net exporting state. Manufacturing is alive and well in Ohio. However it is not the the type that uneducated and unskilled people can work at. The high-paying-sit-on-your-butt-all-day-and-do-nothing job is gone. The Chicoms took all those jobs because they have more uneducated and unskilled workers than we do. What we do have are jobs for educated and skilled workers.
If all of you anti-free trade advocates want to compete for the bottom of the barrel manufacturing jobs that bring little value because it requires no skill or education..have at it. Just don't require me to pay $10 for a pair of socks.
I owned a manufacturing company in Ohio. I had workers vastly overpaid at minimum wage and I had some I could barely keep at $25/hr.
You tell me. How much should an illiterate pot smoking unexperienced unskilled 18 year old make? Does he have an American birthright to make more than his Chinese counterpart? Should I be forced to buy the goods he produces?
My company created 8 good paying jobs when we purchased a cheap Chinese made machine tool to use in our tool making shop. We could not afford the union made American made one at 4x times the cost. My workers threatened to quit if we bought the machine but relented when they saw we added jobs because of it. Do you seek to destroy that type of flexibility and creativity? I have lived it and I have seen, experienced, and heard the stories of US manufacturing. Some of you know what I am talking about. The feather bedding, the stealing, the laziness, the union workers he could not be fired no matter what they did. Free trade is the onlything that keeps that type of behavior in check.