That’s what burns me about our nation’s energy policy. Even my beloved Sarah Palin was on-board with an “all-of-the-above” electrical generation mix. Unfortunately, that means investing BILLIONS of dollars in unreliable generation (wind and solar) that cost a lot more per unit output than coal and nuclear.

We are indeed wasting our investments in energy which in turn overburdens every other economic activity with electricity that cost more than it needs to.

We should give our automobile managements credit for giving what the customers want. The last few years buyers wanted big SUVs and Detroit was there to supply that needs. Tastes and buying habits change, sometimes suddenly, but lean years do follow fat years.

exercises only politically correct practices and work rules – Unsk

This has a baby-bathwater quality to it. Same for some of the environmental regulations governing disposal of toxic waste.

With the continuing escalation of health-care costs, and the likely advent of harsher environmental requirements for manufacturers, it’s going to get even MORE expensive for the Big 3 to make cars.

I don’t believe they can be saved.

“The reason manufacturing jobs are moving overseas are:

-unpredictable environmental regulations
-unpredictable legal liability system
-steadily increasing structural costs”

In too many parts of this country, manufacturing has effectively been criminalized. State and Local governments often expect a manufacturer to have an environmentally clean manufacturing workplace that produces no pollutants, dust, and noise, use only recycled materials, places no burden on the transportation network or the electrical grid, exercises only politically correct practices and work rules, employ only union members, gives out huge employee benefits and pay, and produces perfect products that no one ever misuses, never causes any harm to any living organism, and that work perfectly every time forever. Oh, and btw gives big payoffs annually to the local politicians to boot.

And so some of you complain that these manufacturing types are being
un-American by flocking to other countries to locate their businesses.
These manufacturers often feel they have no choice.

Politicians, including most Republicans, have been almost totally out to lunch on policies that affect business. They are all afraid of offending the fashionable left media and interest groups, and have not effectively put forth a narrative supporting laws that to help to develop our manufacturing base.

Or is Ben really Benj in rational guise?

I’m not sure where you got the impression that I wanted to force you to buy American made t-shirts. My point was that there was never any reason to move the t-shirt manufacturing to China in the first place. There was no massive t-shirt shortage in the United States. No one was clamoring for cheaper t-shirts. Nobody felt some cosmic sense of loss because their closet didn’t have fifty t-shirts in it.

The manufacturing moved because the owners could make more money. Once somebody started it, the horse was out of the barn and it was off to the races. Had we simply never allowed foreign made t-shirts into the country, who would ever have cared? Who would ever have known the difference?

We also got one of those unforseen side effects. The cheapening of everyday products didn’t result in Americans saving money and investing the difference. It resulted in them wanting more and more stuff. Now Junior has five pairs of sneakers instead of one, and fifty t-shirts, and twenty pairs of jeans, and he gets 20 gifts every Christmas instead of three or four. I think it’s coarsened us as a people and implanted a kind of insatiable desire for things into much of the populace. Who hasn’t seen a spoiled brat little yuppie snotnosed kid wailing in a store when they aren’t handed what they want? I don’t remember a whole lot of that when I was a kid, because you didn’t expect your every material desire to be satisifed, and in fifteen different colors.

I realize this is all just fantasy, because the deed is done. But imagine if the business interests in the US had never embarked on their outsourcing mania simply out of loyalty to the country, and goods manufacturing was by and large left where it was, with imports limited primarily to high-end products (e.g. Mercedes) and regional products (e.g. French wine). I’m sorry but I just don’t buy into the notion that just because something can be done cheaper somewhere, that it therefore must be done there.

Maybe some people think it would be a bleaker country if our lives weren’t buried under a non-stop avalance of cheap new twinkling manufactured goods. I think it would be a better, saner, cleaner, less envy ridden and happier country.