Oh! So Bush II tried to impose tariffs after NAFTA was in place, with other countries already siphoning off steel production market share? One could not come up with a better way to hurt US Steel producers if they tried.
The WTO can get bent. Yes, I'm willing to pay a little more for American-made products if more Americans have jobs.
I was looking at an old flyer yesterday: 23" color TV-$375
I'm willing to pay a little more for American-made products if more Americans have jobs.
I would pay for American made products as long as Unions aren't involved. I wont pay for shit that cant be excellent, but has to be made by contract, no more, no less than what is called for, mediocracy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...12c4e0-b749-11e6-959c-172c82123976_story.html
On Wednesday, his first anniversary on the job,
Mr. Wiedefeld unveiled what he called a
“Back2Good” agenda for his second year on the job. Work will continue on rails and other subway infrastructure — SafeTrack is only two-thirds complete — but the focus will shift to accelerating the replacement of Metro’s antiquated fleet of rail cars, the cause of 60 percent of delays.
Anyone notice how fucked up this transit system is, that it cant be Back2Excellent? Until Unions are busted up , I wont buy an American Car..
I wont pay for shit that cant be excellent, but has to be made by contract, no more, no less than what is called for, mediocracy.
While I have to take your word for what you will and won't pay for -- that is to say, your word about what is your own
price elasticity of demand (a simple way for laymen to think of that concept is the notion of "worth it") -- I can assure you that comparatively few consumers are willing (or able) to pay for the "excellent" grade of pretty much anything. "Good enough" is what most consumers are willing to pay for because "excellent" is almost always very expensive, even after removing
the intangible component of such goods' selling prices. It doesn't matter what be the product under consideration:
- Cotton or things made from various grades and types of cotton
- Steel or things made from various grades and types of steel
- Beef or foods made from various grades and types of beef
For just about every use one might have for a given product, there is a version of that product that is ideal for (excellent) the use and there are other versions that good enough. Even for something as simple as making an apple pie or baked apples, some consumers will opt to use, say, Red Delicious apples because they're less expensive than are Granny Smith apples, even though the latter is a better choice for the texture of the finished product. (I don't know if RD apples are or are not less pricey than are GS apples. I'm just illustrating a point.)
The intangible component of goods pricing is hard to credibly quantify on an item-by-item basis because the public isn't privy to firms' production costs. It's even harder to do for B2B goods (raw materials and intermediate goods) because people aren't generally familiar with such products, let alone their pricing.
That said, I can readily think of
one consumer goods producer that happens to offer its wares both to final consumers and to garment manufacturers. For the types of products they offer, there is no competing product that is better, though I suspect there are comparable (comparably excellent) ones. I cannot say for sure, but I'd wager that there are at most ten folks on the whole of this forum who've ever bought their products or bought goods made using their textiles. The reason is very simple: their wares -- cashmere -- are very expensive. Most people are quite content to buy lambswool products because it's "good enough" and costs a hell of a lot less than do cashmere goat products, and even "basic" cashmere costs a lot less than the very densely woven cashmere textiles Loro Piana produces.
So while you, I and others may be willing and able to pay for "excellent" goods, many folks aren't and they certainly shouldn't be forced to do so by dint of having their options limited by a tariff.
It's also worth nothing that at the "excellent" end of the marketplace, American producers suffer not from competition from foreign producers. It's at the low cost, "good enough" segment of the market that U.S. producers have been at a pricing disadvantage. That disadvantage derived from the labor cost differential, and to some extent the land and facilities cost differentials, between the U.S. and foreign locales. Those differentials, particularly the labor one, is being effectively eliminated -- both direct manufacturing labor costs and indirect and overhead labor costs -- with process automation. Manufacturing gizmos that fabricate things cost about the same regardless of where they're purchased, and the reason for that is that they're sold in an essentially global marketplace. In other words, production costs around the world are converging to create a situation in which production cost itself is less and less a differentiating factor in buying decisions for comparable quality products, be that quality "excellent," "good," "so-so," "lame," or something else.