Reply #18: There is only one legitimate reason for moving production offshore:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

If you are making something for the Chinese market, then shipping costs and other considerations make it logical to produce it in China.

I have no argument with Coca Cola having bottling plants all over the world, or car manufacturers making right-hand drive vehicles overseas for sale in the UK and other countries where they drive on the left.

But when U.S. companies send manufacturing overseas and then re-import the products (shoes, TVs, clothing) for sale in the U.S., the "advantage" of lower prices is offset by the loss of the jobs that used to manufacture those shoes, TVs, and clothes. Working class people, whose parents and grandparents lived on one income and still owned houses and cars, are making less in real dollars than their parents and grandparents did, so they have no choice but to buy stuff made in the Third World.

In the 1950s, when we made almost everything we consumed, wages and prices were in rough balance, so that yes, stereos were pretty expensive, but people still bought them and kept other Americans employed.

If I were in charge of purchasing for the federal government, I would give absolute preference to items manufactured in the U.S. by legal workers. It wouldn't matter if someone with offshore plants was cheaper. If no U.S.-owned manufacturers made the product with U.S. workers, I would then turn to foreign-owned companies that had U.S. manufacturing plants. (What makes a company "American" if it has no U.S.-based rank and file employees and perhaps has its legal headquarters in the Cayman Islands, even if the owners live in Manhattan and winter in Hawaii?)

I would also lay confiscatory tariffs on products manufactured by American companies overseas for the U.S. market.

I recall hearing many years ago that about 1/3 of America's trade deficit is made up of such re-imports.