Tariffing is like anything else, it must be managed to ensure that the tariffs are not so high that the importers stop importing.
There's a wealth of information on the Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariff And it describes the history of the tariff in the US. Keep in mind that I'm not advocating elimination of foreign imports, but rather imposing tariffs that eliminate the advantage of a company moving jobs overseas. I'm not against free trade in principle, nor against a minimum wage. However, the combination of the two puts the US at a disadvantage because it eliminates any reason to keep jobs here in the US. Because a company can hire workers cheaper in Mexico and then ship the goods produced across the border without any tariffs just means that Mexico is taking the jobs away from Americans who would work those jobs. >From a company's perspective, this is great - stockholders make more money. >From a national standpoint, it's suicide. This means there are fewer jobs available in the US, there are no income taxes imposed on those jobs nor on the company, and there's less money being spent. People without more than a high school education will be left jobless and broke. At first, the jobs that will leave will be the manufacturing jobs. Next, those jobs that manage those people, and their managers, and so on will go next as companies move more and more senior positions to places where it's less expensive to hire a person to do the same job. This not only will happen, it has happened here in North Carolina and South Carolina, where textile and manufacturing jobs are leaving at incredible rates. An example: my brother is the CIO for an electronics repair company in Indiana. He's been assigned to go down to Mexico to set up shop down there so the company can move its operations from Indiana. It's great for the owners and senior management because it's cheaper. But the town that they are in will lose 500+ jobs. That's a serious blow to that town, and now it means that there are 500+ more people who want the job that you have. The only thing that protects the US's position as a global economic superpower is the amount of money we have to spend due to the jobs we have. When you allow the jobs to leave, you weaken your country. Here's the final paragraph from the wikipedia: "NAFTA and WTO advocates promoted an optimistic vision of the future, with prosperity to be based on intellectuals' skills and managerial know-how more than on routine hand labor. They promised that free trade meant lower prices for consumers. It also meant lower wages and fewer jobs in older industries that could no longer compete. Opposition to liberalized trade came increasingly from labor unions, but their shrinking size and diminished political clout repeatedly left them on the losing side." This means that people without higher education will have no jobs. There will ALWAYS be a large percentage of the population will less than desirable education, and guess what happens when somebody doesn't have a means to eat? They steal and kill for food OR they move to those places where they can make a living. Wanna move to India? The rich in the US get richer, the poor in the US get poorer. American free trade is a great idea for stock holders and foreign countries, and a terrible idea for the US. Matthew Small -----Original Message----- From: Gruss Gott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2005 8:38 AM To: CF-Community Subject: Re: also circulating the email lists....re katrina > Cameron wrote: > In the end, the entire beast is really a huge problem that can't be > solved with a sophomoric ideal like completely free trade or tariffing > the rest of the world to death. Basically tarifing starts a trade war and free trade demolishes industries. However, I think free trade is the *direction* to move, rather than tariffing. BTW, if we did move to tariffing the arbitrage blackmarkets would be larger than Russia's. All that would happen is you'd create 2 economies: the legal one, and the illegal one. Put another way, most of us on this list don't want to buy illegal drugs because we don't use them and/or are morally against them. However if we did want them we all know where to go. Now think if there were products we wanted AND knew where to go to get them cheap. The black market would be something to behold. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| Discover CFTicket - The leading ColdFusion Help Desk and Trouble Ticket application http://www.houseoffusion.com/banners/view.cfm?bannerid=48 Message: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=i:5:175358 Archives: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/threads.cfm/5 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/lists.cfm/link=s:5 Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.5 Donations & Support: http://www.houseoffusion.com/tiny.cfm/54
