Would you buy a $22 American made shovel when an $8 China made one is available?

[quakerboy]

162. Although theres more to it than that

Its the demand for profit that has created this issue

If you offer the higher quality item, you might as well source it from the US, because its going to cost more anyway, and people still want to pay a "reasonable" price. But we have gotten entirely away from reasonable price and reasonable profit.

But you start with the higher quality item, and then step down quality while maintaining price, to up your profits, and they switch to a nonunion factory to meet costs, because those workers are paid less and dont care about their product as much.

And then a few years later you do it again, and now you have to source it to Mexico because its a bit cheaper

Then you drop quality again, and you raise your price a little because of inflation, and now only China can make it cheep enough to increase your profit, because they don't care about environmental byproducts of the manufacturing process, and they don't care about the workers that may die in unsafe situations, and they are even willing to have the government subsidize the production cost just to keep their workers busy.

Then you end up here, paying premium prices for crap, with a severe lack of jobs in the background.