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Originally Posted by jplinville
You've got to love the effect of the free trade market...we sell them our resources and give them our manufacturing so that we aren't polluting OUR land, in return for cheap labor on cheap crap that used to last a whole lot longer when we built it here. The parts for them were cheaper then, too...compared to the cost of the entire thing.
I try my damnedest to NOT buy Chinese crap. I'm not ALWAYS successful in that endeavor, but my intake of it is much less than the average person.
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Please do not insult free trade or free markets. US has major tariffs on Chinese products and China manipulates their currency values and has huge influence on the companies operating there (including full state-owned enterprises) there is nothing free about that
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I am unsure of things lasting longer or being cheaper. I mean compare anything you have from the past and how long it lasted. American-made TV of 1985 probably lasted 10 years before repair and cost probably what, $399? Today you get TV twice as large and much better for like $180 and it probably last 10 or 15 years without needing repair. And that was 399 when gasoline was 67 cents, while today it is 189 at gas being $4,00. There is no way anything from say 1980 was cheaper than today, even considering TCO with repair vs replacement.
Anyway what could the US do? You have no time to waste making cheap crap and you're too lazy to earn 5 or 10 bucks an hour on an assembly line. US is still the world's largest manufacturing nation, but they pay guys $100/hr to rivet together Boeing airplanes or build Cadillacs. And still you have guys jumping fences from Mexico to wash toilets and pick vegetables. Who is left in the country to make those weed-whackers, and at less than $1000 each?
Quote:
Originally Posted by spdrun
If it so wrong to want to buy white (German, American, Italian, Polish, whatever) because you have more in common with all of those folks than with the Chinese and other Asians?
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I admit having some pride when I pulled the inside door panel off a 2001 Saab in a pick and pull and it had a Polish language "quality approved" sticker, panel made in PL
