Clinton-Trump-Sanders-Cruz:
Hey CC! Which of the above you think most likely to help you solve your (our) problem?
I don't think that Cliff is going to open up a political thing here, but in my opinion the answer would be
none of them.
The government doesn't run the economy no matter how much they try to tell you otherwise. So long as the consumer chooses price over quality there is no incentive to change their business model.
Buying power is the only way to change this and unfortunately that ship sailed when we all sold our souls to WalMart and ran all local business out of town. I mean what happens if we actually stop importing a large portion of our goods? First off we'd have shortages because we don't have the manufacturing infrastructure in place because we all decided with our wallets not to support American made products. That would create even higher prices because demand would outweigh supply.
Now personally I wouldn't mind it if goods cost a bit more money if they supported jobs in our country. The insane low costs of everything today has made us accumulators of cheap crap. I don't think that any society has had the buying power that we have today in terms of the sheer volume of stuff that we can buy. Maybe it's because I grew up very poor that I remember that everything seemed so out of reach, but I honestly think that I can buy ten times the amount of stuff today than just 20 years ago. Instead of the low costs driving down the cost of living we just buy more crap.
I do think that we could do some things in terms of trade agreements and tax incentives for manufacturing stateside, but it's got to be done incrementally or it could cause a lot of problems. Even then it comes down to the consumer. If things cost too much then nobody is going to buy it. There are a lot of things that we consider to be necessary in our lifestyle that really are luxury items. You take those out of the market and it hurts the economy more than it helps in terms of job creation.
I mean just think about this for a second. If you are trying to compete or even replace a factory that pays it's worker $.65/hr with a factory that makes the exact same goods with workers making $8/hr the item is going to be overpriced in most of our eyes. And who's going to go and work their asses off for $8/hr when it's not even a livable wage....especially when the cost of everything goes up?
Not to be a pessimist, but I think that the only way that it works is if we experience a massive economic "correction" which was probably what the bail out postponed rather than avoided.
Of course I reserve the right to be a complete idiot as I am not a financial expert. This is all just based on my perception of reality which could be completely wrong.
I will say that I think that a lot of people feel like the bottom is going to fall out soon and that's why it's been so divisive lately. Everyone wants to point the finger for everything that is wrong at someone else.....sure there are some things that we can't control, but our consumer buying power is one of them and most of us (myself included) didn't use it wisely.