China is the worst offender, and it's not all imported manufacture. China isn't playing on an even field, that's all. They fix the value of their currency and they allow the environmental destruction of their country in ways that the USA wouldn't possibly tolerate. Free trade isn't fair trade when all we're doing is offshoring our pollution to China at an exchange rate that wouldn't hold up in a truly free market.
Lisa's preferred option is that nobody should be allowed to sell things in the US market that would be illegal to produce in the USA under the conditions sold. That is, anyone wanting to sell in the USA has to abide by at least the same environmental conditions and free-financial-trade (that is, currency exchange rules) that the USA follows. Countries with more-stringent environmental restrictions (Europe comes to mind) would be okay here, but not less-stringent ones.
Lisa contends that the way China is behaving toward the US market is reducing us to a colonial state: exporting raw materials and buying finished goods. In the long term, it's damaging the US economy.
It's not an all-imported-goods ban. Lisa says, for instance, in buying Mexican-made products over comparable Chinese ones: "If we buy Mexican-made goods, we're providing jobs to people in Mexico, meaning fewer Mexicans will be starving and having to enter the USA illegally." The problem is that you can't fit the longer economic argument onto a bumper sticker, so the over-simplified version is "Buy American: Save the Economy, Save the Planet." It's sort of designed to get both the right- and left-wing views something to agree with.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-12-27 03:09 pm (UTC)Lisa's preferred option is that nobody should be allowed to sell things in the US market that would be illegal to produce in the USA under the conditions sold. That is, anyone wanting to sell in the USA has to abide by at least the same environmental conditions and free-financial-trade (that is, currency exchange rules) that the USA follows. Countries with more-stringent environmental restrictions (Europe comes to mind) would be okay here, but not less-stringent ones.
Lisa contends that the way China is behaving toward the US market is reducing us to a colonial state: exporting raw materials and buying finished goods. In the long term, it's damaging the US economy.
It's not an all-imported-goods ban. Lisa says, for instance, in buying Mexican-made products over comparable Chinese ones: "If we buy Mexican-made goods, we're providing jobs to people in Mexico, meaning fewer Mexicans will be starving and having to enter the USA illegally." The problem is that you can't fit the longer economic argument onto a bumper sticker, so the over-simplified version is "Buy American: Save the Economy, Save the Planet." It's sort of designed to get both the right- and left-wing views something to agree with.