Low prices are not worth destroying our nation’s infrastructure and economy over.
When we destroy our economy, it won’t matter if things are cheap.
Nobody will have money to buy any of it.
So what if prices rise. Bring back American manufacturing.
Now.
“We sell iPhones in over a hundred countries,” a current Apple executive said. “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible.”
For technology companies, the cost of labor is minimal compared with the expense of buying parts and managing supply chains that bring together components and services from hundreds of companies.
For Mr. Cook, the focus on Asia “came down to two things,” said one former high-ranking Apple executive. Factories in Asia “can scale up and down faster” and “Asian supply chains have surpassed what’s in the U.S.” The result is that “we can’t compete at this point,” the executive said.
Low prices = high standard of living. So, just to be clear, you believe that the US needs to lower its standard of living (in many cases, dramatically) to become competitive with third-world economies? And this increases our security and economy?
Now that you have finally admitted that (a portion of) prices will rise, you should move to discussing the trade-off between the jobs your proposal loses and the jobs your proposal gains. But at that point, you’d actually be discussing economics, something you have proven that you do not understand.
China's numbers will run about $2.1 trillion as well, with their data more heavily weighted towards goods. And China's manufacturing workforce, is likely in the 100 million range whereas the US manufacturing workforce, under 15 million.
I'm going to advocate for you this time around :)
The danger of doing trade with China, isn't that so much manufacturing is done in China. America has a history of doing trade with poor low cost countries since the 1800's.
Where it becomes a problem to America, and other existing established Western developed countries, is that nowhere in the rules of trade, do we prevent a developing country from moving up the value chain. Luckily, for most of the established developed nations, most developing countries are either too corrupt or too inept to make such a transition up the value chain.
But since WWII, a series of Asian countries have found ways within the rules based system to move up the value chain. And this ain't so bad, since largest, i.e., Japan, with her population of 125 million, is less than half the size of the US. South Korea, along with the other "Four Tigers" of Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, represented even less and totaled less than 100 million people.
Along comes China with her 1.35 billion people, mostly poor, and still so. But she is doggedly determined to move up the value chain and into those very $1.5 trillion in US exports I mentioned earlier. And the reality is, as she moves up this value chain, you will actually get some of your wish of moving manufacturing back to the US. It is already happening right now. And will continue to happen in the coming years.
What will happen instead, is that other manufacturing sectors will begin to lose out to China. In the long run, America isn't going to lose out to China jobs wise. Factories throughout China are shutting down already creating political uncertainties for the current leadership.
But new factories are cropping up as well, much like what happened in Japan and South Korea in the past. Except on a grand scale.
The danger (if I could call it that, but again, I am advocating your argument...sort of), is not that China will continue to siphon jobs away from America, but that China will move up the value chain. China is slowly pricing herself out of alot of work. And again, some of the work is coming back to America.
The "danger" in doing trade with determined countries like China, is that it causes a shift in economic balance of power.
We already saw that with Japan. Before WWII, if someone would have said Japan will someday be larger economically than Britain, France let alone Germany, people would have laughed. Well, today, its true and as a world, we are used to that fact. Yet, Germany today has never been more prosperous. The difference today, of course, is Japan is no longer an economic minion compared to her European counter parts.
So, too, will America be more prosperous in say, 2050 than today. Providing a greater standard of living for 450 million people than the standard of living we have today for 310 million. The difference, of course, is the economic balance of power will have been altered significantly by then.
I suppose, one could make a case for the developed Western nations to come together, re-write the trade rules, to ban the trade of high value goods to and from existing developing countries, and to set up a committee to monitor such activities. Its an unlikely scenario, but I'm sure there are plenty of people who would be willing to try.