Posted on 08/15/2013 11:12:03 AM PDT by DannyTN
A country that produces nothing produces no wealth. The companies within a country are that countrys wealth producers. We allow our companies to be snatched up by foreign competitors on the open stock market. Over 16,000 of our best wealth producing companies have been auctioned off, and the U.S. has no authoritative government agency prohibiting the Great American Sell-off.
Of course there is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), but it merely serves as a rubber stamp with no actual authority. CFIUS was created as an interagency committee to oversee national security implications of foreign investments into the U.S. economy, but it has only stopped one acquisition since its creation.
We are selling out and no longer own or control our own country. We are forced now to live on imports while incurring massive debts that can only be repaid through the sale of our wealth producing companies and assets. Very soon we will not even be able to protect or support ourselves.
Virtually all of our industries are available for sale to the highest bidder, even if that bidder resides in a country like China with a long history of cheating us in commercial competition. We have made almost no effort to restrain other countries from purchasing or bankrupting our industries.
RCA is now a French company, Zenith is a Korean company. Frigidaire is a Swedish company. IBMs Personal Computer Divisionwith its 500 patentsis now a Chinese company. Westinghouse Nuclear Energys major shareholder is Toshibaa Japanese Company. Lucent Technologies, a former research division of AT&T, along with all the patents acquired from the beginning of the phone system, is now a French company. In 2008, Brazilian-Belgian brewing company InBev purchased the iconic American brewer Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser. AMC is now Chinese. With the sale of these manufacturing companies, the future profit and technologies all belong to foreign entities.
As we have become unable to produce enough for ourselves in America, we have outsourced our manufacturing to China, Japan and others. This realization that we are no longer competitive in the world and can no longer be a productive manufacturing nation feels like giving up. To add another nail to our manufacturing coffin, we send our political leaders to foreign countries to beg foreign manufacturers to produce in America (insource) so we can have labor jobs while they supply us with their technical expertise in their new factories that we help them build with subsides, tax abatements and other incentivesall at the expense of domestic manufacturers.
America must wake up to the facts: we are losing our nation, our wealth and our jobs to foreign competition. If these trends are not reversed, our way of life may be lost forever.
He was nutty as a fruitcake when be was 63.
It is called capitalism....... we are not the antibusiness nation you so strongly desire.
You omit the reverse. You fail, that is fail, to research the foreign companies absorbed by merger into American companies.
Doesn't surprise me a bit.
Our market is huge. And there is plenty of room for capitalistic competition within our market.
We don't have to let communist countries like China that are intent on undermining our industries have free access to our market to call our selves capitalist.
There are Chicoms, but there are an increasing body of strongly emergent Chicaps. They are actively engaged in capitalist endeavors.
That's a fair point. And that analysis needs to be done.
I'm pretty sure what the outcome for China will be since they don't allow foreign companies to have majority ownership.
There is an exception. China will allow foreign majority ownership if and only if the company intends to export all of their products. So if a company just wants to employ Chinese and not sell anything in China, that's okay with them.
And I'm not interested in your attention.
The overall picture is still communist. Doesn't matter. Even if they were completely capitalist. If their products were flooding our market and our own people were unemployed. I'd raise import tariffs.
We can always lower individual\Corporate income taxes by an equal amount to make it revenue neutral.
The overall picture is still communist. Doesn't matter. Even if they were completely capitalist. If their products were flooding our market and our own people were unemployed. I'd raise import tariffs.
We can always lower individual\Corporate income taxes by an equal amount to make it revenue neutral.
The penalty is to American shareholders who voted themselves a government whose policies encourage companies to sell out to foreign capital and citizens to renounce their citizenship in record numbers.
Do you know how much tax a Japanese company pays to Japan for profits earned in the US?
Or we could lower taxes and regulations now, so that companies want to hire, manufacture and sell here.
You know, make our goods competitive by making them cheaper, instead of making our goods less uncompetitive by making foreign goods more expensive.
Do I care? Why should we model ourselves after the Japanese? Why should we model ourselves after the Chinese?
Letting European banks compete on U.S. soil, and then removing restrictions on our banks so they could compete on European terms is a large part of what led to the 2008 banking crisis.
We need to quit modeling ourselves after other countries and go back to what works for America. What worked for America for 190 years were tariffs. Heck that was the primary funding for the Federal government for the first 150 of those years.
You could eliminate all taxes and regulations and American goods are not going to be competitive with cheap third world labor.
Taking advantage of that labor is fine if we are at full employment. Using it when we are at 25% unemployment is Treason. This is proper role for government intervention.
The answer is 0%. Why should you care?
I thought you wanted American jobs for Americans in America?
Why do you want us to remain less competitive?
Letting European banks compete on U.S. soil, and then removing restrictions on our banks so they could compete on European terms is a large part of what led to the 2008 banking crisis.
Please tell me more.
We need to quit modeling ourselves after other countries and go back to what works for America.
Less government interference in markets, not more.
What worked for America for 190 years were tariffs.
As soon as you can shrink government spending by 90%, I'll get on board with higher tariffs.
You can't compete with some Chinese worker who didn't wear shoes until 3 years ago? That's sad.
As for the rest of us, Americans are the most productive workers in the world, if only the government would get off our backs.
That was uncalled for.
**********************
Exactly right.
imho the lousy thing is slightly different.
every big box store you see in every town in america also has big box stores in every country all around the world.
that means that all these big boys have global interests and not american interests.
which means the wealthy and powerful are generally not really on our side.
we’re just a province in their global empires.
“Ive explained this to you before, but you were too dense to understand: the Founding Fathers saw tariffs as a way to raise revenue for the federal government. Not to create or save jobs, as you are arguing on this very thread.”
It should also be noted that “free trade” to the founding fathers was not being able to import goods “free of tariffs” but merely the ability to ship goods to any nation that would buy them or import goods from any other nation. At the time of the founding European nations were constantly at war with each other. When England was at war with France or Spain the American English colonies would be prohibited from trading at all with the nation at war with England. To the colonists “free trade” meant the freedom to trade with any country no matter who it was allied with or at war with.
High tariffs and duties were used successfully to fund the federal government and to protect domestically produced products from foreign competition for more than 100 years. American merchants traded without government restrictions on which nation they traded with, but they paid high tariffs and duties when they brought goods into the country. The nation’s economy grew rapidly and the US became the strongest industrial power on the planet under this policy of free trade with all nations and high tariffs. Jobs and prosperity resulted from this economic growth.
Over the last 20 years we’ve done the opposite. Through trade agreements we’ve perverted the notion of “free trade” to “duty free trade”. We charge importers zero or minimal tariffs for the privilege of access to our markets. Other nations have overtly subsidized exports to the US in an overt attempt to undercut prices in the US market and steal market share from US domestic producers. As a result our domestic manufacturers have closed facilities and discarded workers. We have traded the economic prosperity and jobs that come from healthy tariffs and trading with all nations to the loss of industry and jobs that comes from eliminating tariffs and allowing subsidized foreign manufacturers to put domestic manufacturing out of business.
The deindustrialization of the US economy was a conscious policy supported by both political parties. The elites of this country chose to provide capital investment and jobs to foreign nations at the expense of the American people. This policy needs to be ended.
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