General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: So, fans of free trade, how does shipping jobs out of America create jobs for America? [View all]badtoworse
(5,957 posts)Let's be honest - it started with NAFTA under a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president.
The fact is our own government opened our markets to foreign competition and ignored the fact that those foreign countries were trashing the environment and the workers were being paid shit. It's pretty easy to undercut dometically produced when you don't have to cover those costs. The government held our own manufacturers to the high environmental standards and labor costs leaving them defenseless against the foreign competition. You can't blame blame businesses or the banks for what followed. People in this country shop on the basis of price and the only way for a domestic company to compete with the cheaper imported goods was to move its own manufacturing offshore which is exactly what happened. Why the government isn't being held accountable is beyond me.