</font><font color="blue" class="small">( You mean I'm not the only one who sees that? Unlike China, Japan knows we are important to thier economy. Even more scary is that China has the natural resources and cheap labor to sink us financially while we pay to build their manufacturing base.)</font>
Jstpssng,
I doubt if we could ever start a "grassroots" effort to leverage - say - Wal-Mart to offer more domestically producted products. We've all gotten to used to getting this or that for too cheap.
We buy something, because it "looks" like it could do the job, so we try it. Sure enough, it makes it through the job shining, has paid for itself and is just about put away before we even look anymore at "where was this thing made"? Most of us just want the project over.
But, if the tools cost two to three times as much, then the project itself is in danger of not even beining started.
We seem to stuck to this "imported" trend.
How many ZXY tractors would ABC sell if they sold their American made 25HP tractor at $40K? Not too many. So, you sell less iron, so you get less R&D (which makes it hard to compete with the almost blank check R&D brands), etc, etc etc.
Vicious cycle.
You know, growing up we always heard Dad say things like, "of course this is a good brand, they helped put us on the moon". These days even the Rock of Gibralter companies (read Fortune 500) and our gov't, military etc are all outsourcing abroad. How do we stop this divebomb? All the companies are sending out for all sorts of stuff from all over the globe.
I recently called talked to Dell support. The person I talked to had such poor English. He was very obviously of Indian or Asian descent. I believe I was on the phone three times as long trying to dicipher and having to repeat again and again. Funny thing is, I know Dell is also from Texas, and We have plenty of unemployed people here that can type, talk on the phone, and read from a script while interviewing a client. Who knows what the answer is.
Please refer to my previous post!