US Economy - American Manufacturing

Here is my 2 cents on what I see has been happening with the economy. 1st off, I started seeing a downward trend with the economy back in 2000 after President Clinton signed an agreement to allow the US to import (NAFTA) from China and made China the �Most Favored Nation�.

I came from the Tool and Die industry where we manufactured metal stamping dies mostly for the automotive industry. We saw a dramatic drop off of quoting in 2001. The main reason was because our customers started bragging how cheap they could buy tooling from China. What it costs us to buy steal, China was making two complete dies for. Well you certainly can�t compete with that!

America has always thrived on manufacturing. I don�t know the numbers of how many smaller mom and pop shops that used to be around that are no longer, but I would say that the average income of most of the people working in them was around $70k. Most of these people are struggling finding different work making half of what they use to.

It took 8 years to finally hit the rest of the US (housing etc.) and I�m sure there is more involved than just that but that is what I have seen. I�m still involved in manufacturing and it�s still a struggle to keep busy. I have had to lay off a dozen people in my department in the last three monthes and my company has let over 120 people go since last October.

When is our government going to realize that we need to start taking care of our own country?

I am interested of other views that you all have about what is happening to our economy!

all this sht is doing is bringing down the value of the dollar, the ones that are laid off permanantly are setting up store fronts....painting, landscaping, boat repair, plumbing.....the only thing is, to get the business they drop the prices, it creates competition and price drop along with qaulity drop. when i say de-value the dollar this is part of it, a house that was 300k is now 150k that means in reality 3 years ago you couldnt afford it but now that its priced where it should be in theory you now could afford to buy that same house

That's all wrong, we live in a post industrial economy now, (service sector), we're all going to eat at each others restaurants, buy insurance from each other and advertise on each others web sites, we don't need to make anything, just ask the politicians and the academics. It's much better for our economy if we can buy our goods at 30 cents on the dollar from china or mexico.

Brant is right, wall street wanted free trade, and they got it, they offshored all the jobs and leveraged the resulting profits in derivatives and securitized debt. The tipping point came last summer when energy prices quadrupled, now we were offshoring those last marginal dollars that were keeping the whole scheme afloat.

Eighty years ago, Henry ford had it right, he knew then that he had to pay his workers enough to afford his cars.

Got to go to work!

FairTax now and it all comes home...before another country does it; and a few are looking at it.

Nice Gary!

oh, and control of the info

I find your comments interesting and hopeful(on my part). My son has recently been visiting campuses of schools where he has been accepted for Civil Engineering. At least three times I heard "tool and die is a dead trade and the Cdn Gov't is paying to retrain workers and a few are coming to our program". The statement was also made that a Cdn manufactured die worth$300,000 could be made offshore, imported with the tooling to set it up for 1/3 the cost. Rather than repair the die they would order a new one for less than the Cdn repair cost.
All of this is second hand but I have a few good friends that work for ATS and a college buddy who has a small tool and die firm and it really bothers me that we send so much of our raw materials offshore and buy so much inferior junk in return and still fall short on the balance of trade and I don't think the US is much different.
Eric- what was the last article of clothing that you bought that was actually made in the US. I swear the only thing I have is the work socks my SIL knit for me from wool made just north of here.I use to be a big Eddie Bauer fan but even their sources have changed. Even some restoration car parts from a big US supplier came with China on them and must have been made from some of the dies that Peter talked about because they were way off.
We still do make toilet paper though and yes it fits!!!
Just a morning rant...

Pete,

Are you guys hiring?

The government involvement is not helping. It either taxes or overregulates to the point where business has to look to other areas, even other countries to be competitive. So many items these days are deemed throw away that the Chinese stuff (though inferior) is acceptable.
I live in an area that had thriving shoe and textile factories when I was a kid. They are all gone today. Everything that was made here is now foreign.

I work for a fastener cold forming company now. We are down to 4 days a week also. All of us salaried personnel took a 10% pay cut in January and haven't seen it come back. April we got to take 5 days off without pay. And now Monday I get to tell 8 of my 69 people that they no longer have a job. I'm not to happy about that.

skierbrant wrote:    We saw a dramatic drop off of quoting in 2001.

I thought I was the only one who thought this. In June of 01 my wife's large telecommunications company offered her a early retirement which she took.To this day the company still has not recovered. 9/11 came along changing everyones lives, but the seeds were already planted.

I still have a damn hard time figuring out who ok'd these loans and at what level, i dont think another bank would want to buy that risk either knowing default was down the road.
Ive seen these approved loan apps, 45k a year and they were buying a 350k house.....if that came across my desk a red flag would go up, my question is: how high up the ladder did these apps go because they had to go past the underwriters and to the managers desk and who approved them?

The unions are a topic on thier own, yes, there were needed at one time, the term protect the workers is an understatement, it protects them from wrong doings is all that means. now this is coming from working side by side with these guys and there is alot of good guys out there, but there were also alot of bad,
alot of ingredients killed the economy, a little greed, a little corruption, but i think the biggest economy killer is the Auto industry, it is a large tree with many branches that fed many families. everything ties into the industry.
other countries are thriving THRIVING because of the choice we make to purchase thier products and a good indication of this is they are seeing the effects of our slow economy. our large tree is gone, gone, gone, and people are throwing thier hands up in the air and wondering what happened?

Imagine, 30 years probably in the 100 millions, buying something anywhere from $6000.00 to nowadays $40,000 that adds up to a number that doesnt exist, put it all in a box and send it to another country.
that other country recieves the box which empowers them, now, we can build nukes, we can build manufacture plants, we can pay our army, fck, we can do anything we damn well please....sht the US did it in the 50's 60's and 70's and they gave up that power. life is like a game of Risk (milton Bradley) no different. we are looking for someone to put the blame on, the government, the housing collapse, bad products blah blah blah, in hind sight the consumer created the problems, anyway you spin it.
Now, you have a choice, to be part of the problem or part of the solution, it took 30 years for China and Japan to become what it is today because of the US consumer, we have the ability as the consumer to make the choice not for us but for our kids.
sorry guys, its a simple fix

eric lavine wrote: imagine if that money stayed here.......

1 more time...FairTax. It's estimated that 13 trillion would come home. Companies go where they can afford to be in business.

Irish revolution?

and a cazillion if we purchased all US products lol