Search Results: reasons for favors

I'm in the U. S. Throughout my life, it has never surprised me to look at any particular item and see the words "made in China" on it. It's just so commonplace that any particular commodity purchased in the U. S. is made abroad, especially China.

A lot of manufacturing and other jobs used to exist here in the U. S. But ever since WW2, and especially throughout the 70s & 80s, a lot of them shutdown and moved to China in order to avoid minimum wage, employee benefits, OSHA / safe workplace laws, etc (the 90s & early 2000s saw technology jobs go to India for the same reasons). True, the price on the items dropped. But the economy went down with it as people were laid-off, and the value of the dollar dropped because America became dependent on other countries to provide goods.

Late last year, Trump started a "trade war" with China. In theory, it should be working in the favor of the U. S. The reality: businesses here in the U. S. are suffering from all of the extra taxes related to Chinese imports. Why are they importing from China? Because they either can't find the items anywhere else, or not at as low of a price. Most people have not felt the impact of this "trade war" yet because businesses are being forced to accept profit losses or are resorting to other measures to keep costs down in order to keep a customer base. For just about every business, especially mom-and-pop local ones, this trade war has been catastrophic to their finances (and ostensibly, their employees). But if our manufacturing jobs hadn't been sent overseas in the first place, this might not have the negative impact that it does.

Would you pay more to buy goods that are 100% made in your own country? How much more would you pay? Why?