Quote:
Originally Posted by Minte
My original statement, that forcing a competitive import tax on goods to level the playing field still trumps any theory about where imports come from. Vietnam, India, where ever. Tax the products at port of entry. If China can get by on paying their people $no money per hour, good for them. Make it economically impossible for Fortune companys to send work offshore. Then the jobs will come back. And I believe that will happen sooner rather than later. It has to happen.
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As a band-aid for a few years, a tax on items produced outside the US makes sense, so does requiring 'repatriation of assets' to prevent companies from keeping billions overseas and borrowing at home to avoid taxation as Apple and others have done. However all of that does nothing to manage the fact that assembling iPhones is something bots will soon do, along with just about every other assembly line job, shipping job and most other manufacturing work.
Let's assume your plan works as a given. The cost of goods will rise, wages will still remain essentially flat, executive pay increases, less people can buy the goods they make... and even the low amount these jobs will pay is still cost prohibitive in a few years when compared to buying a bot to do it instead. Your idea is better than the status quo. That isn't good enough.
Neil Degrasse Tyson was speaking on a show I watched recently and he made the point that when he was growing up, the country was focused on building a better tomorrow. The world's fair, the space race, the entire culture of American ingenuity was aimed at making the world and the country a better place for a better future to exist. I agree with him that the mindset of that era was the primary reason we actually did build a better future. Now we are locked into a 'what will work OK for now' mindset and it won't lead to a better a future... it may not even lead to a better next year or two.
It's time to move some of the BIG ideas forward.
