EPA CAFE Clean Water Act OSHA Health and pension mandates Unions Taxes, permits, lawsuits by tree huggers, on and on and on. And now the threat of carbon emission taxes.
You didn't list the biggest cost difference. Shipping costs.
Posted on 11/04/2009 7:04:51 AM PST by opentalk
To appreciate the extent to which the Environmental Protection Agency under President Obama is a regulator reborn, consider this: EPA officials have begun to cut air pollution by invoking the Clean Water Act.
Long quiescent under President George W. Bush, the agency is churning out initiatives and regulations at a pace that pleases its friends in the environmental movement and frightens many in the business community.
In the past eight months, the EPA has proposed eight major new regulations for air pollutants that would strengthen the nation's clean air laws almost overnight. In contrast, in the first eight months of the Bush administration, the agency proposed one small regulation that affected a limited number of polluters.
"The Obama EPA is issuing more significant rule-makings at a much quicker rate than the EPA did in eight years of the Bush administration," said Roger Martella, who served as the agency's general counsel under Mr. Bush.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtontimes.com ...
Labor pay in China was much cheaper 50, 60, 80 years ago.
So what is different?
EPA
CAFE
Clean Water Act
OSHA
Health and pension mandates
Unions
Taxes, permits, lawsuits by tree huggers, on and on and on.
And now the threat of carbon emission taxes.
Those are the things that drive costs out of reason.
We must get rid of the EPA and start over with a new organization that must report to the congress and be responsible to the congress.
I spend a lot of time outdoors and I am for clean air and clean water, but there is a reasonable limit which the EPA does not recognize.
Protect your privacy. Replace Google with IXQUICK at www.ixquick.com.
If we do not wish to lose our freedom, we must learn to tolerate our
neighbor's right to freedom even though he might express that freedom
in a manner we consider to be eccentric.
The EPA seems to have too much power. I remember reading they hid a scientist’s report that contradicted their agenda. If cap and trade fails, I would bet they will try to use EPA as a backup .
You didn't list the biggest cost difference. Shipping costs.
You are absolutely correct.
Containerized freight and the modern port facilities.
Beats the old days when everything had to be boxed for export and handled the old way.
The box could exceed the value of the product.
Plus inter-modal transport. Those containers come off the ship and right on to trains and trucks and go direct to their destination anywhere in the country.
It's a hell of an efficient system.
Even beyond that, lower air freight costs have allowed high-value, low volume goods to be sourced anywhere in the world virtually overnight.
In other words, the constantly improving shipping methods are most likely a result of the move rather than the root cause.
Of course, that is admittedly a chicken and the egg argument.
Events like the closing of the aluminum plant in Montana because of their inability to purchase sufficient electrical power, the many stories similar to the Spotted Owl, Ivory Billed Woodpecker, Polar Bear, the smelt and the farmers in CA, on and on and on.....in my opinion drove manufacturing out and they would have gone even if shipping advances had stopped at the invention of the container.....regardless of the many improvements in handling containers.
But that is just my opinion after being a major vendor to one of the industries that has been ruined by the US government.
It's been tough on a number of sectors for sure. Growing up in Pittsburgh, I watched the steel mills die 30 years ago because they simply were no longer competitive. That represented many thousands of good paying jobs.
But another way to look at it is this. Without access to foreign sources, (either by high shipping costs or high barriers to trade) the regs and bureaucratic costs we have layered on the US manufacturing sector would have driven the ultimate cost to the consumer of those goods to very high levels that could well have driven the entire economy down many years ago. That would including the loss of other industries that would have found themselves uncompetitive in global markets.
That is kind of the Adam Smith (or Milton Freedman) view that says we should always look for the most efficient sources and allow the chips to fall where they may (creative destruction) and redirect that capital to areas where we are most competitive.
Then again, I work for an American company that is very competitive on the world market, which we would not be if we were forced to rely only on US made sub components (many of which are not even made in the US today.) Having access to lower cost foreign sources has allowed us to stay competitive and actually increase our employment (very well paid BTW), but we may be an exception. But I know for sure that without those foreign sources, the company I work for would not be in business today.
But that is exactly my point.
It is the government that has ruined manufacturing. It is the government that drove manufacturing out of this country.
Had the government not laid onerous rules, regulations, taxes, permits for everything, industry would have staid here and would have been cost efficient.
It is the government that has ruined manufacturing.
It is the government that ruined banking (CRA, Barney Frank, etc.)
It is the government that ruined housing (overlapping with the bank problem).
It is the government that now plans to ruin medicine.
When will we wake up and stop it?
The steel industry is an example that we can't blame entirely on the breaucrats and tree huggers. They added some weight to the wagon, but that industry itself packed on most of the unnecessary costs. In the decades after WWII when most of their international competitors were piles of rubble, they were fat and happy and could name their own price.
They didn't do much in the way of reinvestment or modernization, and they were pretty much ok with agreeing to any demand made by the UAW as long it could be passed on to consumers. But by the mid 70s, Europe was back, Japan was back, and places that Andy Carnegie would have never associated with steel like Korea and Brazil were producing high quality, low cost steel that the US industry simply could not compete with.
Regs were part of the problem, but the industry's own failures were a bigger factor, IMHO. They got fat, happy and lazy, and then got their butts kicked.
Very much the same story with the auto industry.
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