More tariffs paid by US consumers

[Dill]

(06-11-2019, 09:35 PM)Benton Wrote: Germanys auto industry has some similarities to our own from decades ago. As I understand it, companies are required to have labor represented. That was part of the issue when one of them wanted to come to Tennessee a few years ago and the gop had a come apart, as their right to work law was in opposition to the German requirement. They eventually worked something out.

But, to me, the issue isn't going to get fixed until there's a big collapse. We got close with The Great Recession, and some reforms were made, but companies invested a lot in the following years to promote 'socialism is bad' while benefiting greatly from socialism. I mean, you cant even mention things like wage control without some folks saying ' well in my day we all loved off a nickle each, nobody deserves that kind of money!!!1!1!!!'

The "right to work" is one driver of the current wage gap, I believe.  

How is it that German manufacturers seem to maintain profitability while paying their workers decent union wages, and kept those jobs in country?  Of course, they have offshored a lot of production to the US. Not only Tennessee.  The largest BMW plant in the world is in South Carolina.  Are we China to them? But their unemployment is lower than ours, so they don't seem to be losing jobs. (Hard to compare wages and economies, at least for me, since they pay more taxes but get more from them than we do.) And the country still exports more than it imports. Chinese want their cars.



I think you might be right about the big collapse. It took a depression to get Americans comfortable with "big government" solutions. Maybe we have to go there again. The recession, strangely, intensified the anti-government movement, crippling attempts to get the economy back on track.