Anyone else confused with all the recent China bashing going on due to trade?

[NNN0LHI]

I am old enough to recall watching all of out big industries being off shored to other countries during my lifetime. But those jobs didn't go to China. Steel, cars, airplanes, clothing, electronics, everything. It wasn't China who took that stuff. And no one was complaining while that was going on either. Now that China is moving in and taking the last few remaining trinkets we have left that no one else wanted, all of a sudden, they are the bad guys who are taking our jobs.

I think the China bashing going now is all bullshit.

If someone wanted to say something about shipping our jobs overseas they should have said it 30 years ago when it might have done some good.

Don

[Rex]

1. It is all bullshit, Communist China owns the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Any chestbeating that goes on over Communist China, is bad acting. China supports Repuke candidates and props up our economy by buying our outrageous debt.

[dmallind]

4. The less than 7% of it they buy, that is.... nt

[Possumpoint]

2. Believe It Or Not

Ross Perot tried to tell us that in the early days of his campaign for the Presidency. That is before he blew up and proved himself to be a nut job. That was in the 90's if I remember right. NAFTA went a long ways to creating the the giant sucking sound that was jobs going out of this country.

[NNN0LHI]

3. My job was off shored about 10 years before NAFTA so Perot was too late

[lib2DaBone]

5. NAFTA also created the immigration problem...

..because it put Mexican farmers out of business and forced them to come to the U.S. looking for work.

Our CONgress always does more harm than good. They pass terrible trade laws, ship jobs offshore, and then wonder why the economy is so bad?

Today in the news is a prime example.. 3 more Bush trade bills are set to pass.. and OBAMA will sign everyone of them without comment.

[NNN0LHI]

6. Doesn't help that we divert the Colorado river to water golf courses before it reaches Mexico either

Bet they could use that water down there.

Don

[Old and In the Way]

7. I was an industrial buyer for a company manufacturing machine tools in the mid-80s.

We made industrial drill presses, surface grinders and gear hobbers for the automotive industry. I'd buy 20-30HP electric motors from GE with typical 4-6 week leadtimes. Suddenly, they started quoting 16-20 weeks. Big problem for my company. When I asked why these leadtimes were going out, they advised that their motor manufacturing was bing sent to Mexico. First time I had become aware of this and I remember wondering how this was a good longterm strategy for GE. But GE stockholders demanded quarterly stock performance and GE had cost reduction targets to accomplish - this is how they started to address it. Turns out that might be a good short-term business strategy for GE and every other individual corporation, but not very smart for the long-term economic macro interests of this country.

[XemaSab]

8. The Chinese government is odious

yet WE (you and me) pay for pollution, execution of political prisoners, working conditions that would make Dickens weep, and worse.

The US supposedly stands for freedom, so why do we allow so much money to go towards propping up a bunch of despots?

[NNN0LHI]

10. Remember a couple of decades ago no US president would say the word China without adding ...

... that China should release all the Catholic priests they had in jail?

Then it must have gotten to the point where the US has more Catholic priests in prison than China did because all of a sudden they stopped saying it?

I think our government feeds us a lot of anti-China propaganda.

The US has no qualms about being friends with countries that are just as odious if not more when we think it is in our best interest to do so.

Don

[Better Believe It]

9. China bashing is a good diversion away from Wall Street and corporate America

We're suppose to get real upset with Chinese capitalists who are being unfair to good old American capitalists!

[Ganja Ninja]

11. People did say something about it 30 years ago.

People have been complaining about jobs being off-shored since the early 70's. Nobody was paying attention then either.

[FarCenter]

12. First Japan, then the "Asian Tigers", then China -- it is time to move on

There was plenty of complaining about Japan in the '80s.

Japan had been the source of low cost off-shoring from the '50s on. It was our unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific in the Cold War with USSR and China. So there was a policy of sending work to Japan to restart and grow their economy.

By the '80s there were lots of scare stories about Japan and how they were going overtake the US. Besides, they were getting too expensive.

So the US shifted its sourcing to the Asin Tiger economies like Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. Practically all the notebook computers came from Taiwan, and most of the PC motherboards. Disk drives all came from Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand. However, they got too competitive, so we switched again to China.

Now China is the problem. Undoubtedly US manufacturers are looking elsewhere, like India, Central America, Africa, where they can find labor cheaper than the Chinese.