RE: I don't want to alarm anybody
This is an EXTREMELY complicated subject, very hard to even attempt to put in a nutshell or a post, so I'm just gunna spit out a few principles and explain why protectionism or subsidized products is a bad thing. In a nutshell it causes complacency and is socialistic by nature. And that's not the America I know.
What the heck ever happened to our American "Spirit of free enterprise?" Don't we still encourage and cheer for the guy with the best quality product for the lowest price? Are we turning our heads toward protectionism in favor of lower quality and higher priced domestic products? Kingfish, you know more about the airline manufacturing economy than I would ever hope to know, but one thing you guys have an impossible time trying to compete with is the fact that Airbus is government subsidized. Do you thing those French workers work smarter or harder than you guys? Nope, not even close. But if their government is subsidizing 50% of the cost to build a plane, how can you compete? How can you cut 50% of the cost out of your planes? You can't.......so, like Ferrari or Lamborghini, you have to have a much better plane for a smaller market, albiet it at a higher price. We've run into the same problem (and others) in a global market for our Satellites....Alcatel (France) is doing the same thing, getting 50% subsidized. There's no way that's an equal playing field. So we have to get clever, create new markets (Direct TV, XM radio, broadband, etc.) and new technologies that customers WILL pay the extra bucks for because they can't get em elsewhere.
A simple example of our complacency in automotive manufacturing; look at what the Japanese did to help our automakers get out of their old ways, poorer and poorer quality and fat corporate profits.........they took away the market share by coming up with a high quality product at a good price (Honda, Toyota, etc.). That got Detroits attention PRONTO and Detroit has since mended their ways & are now coming out with cars and trucks with better quality, more competitively priced, and on top of it all, better designs (IMHO). All to the benefit of American consumers. That was all PRE-NAFTA, BTW. And knock NAFTA all you want, but from that turnaround, now the Japanese (Toyota, for one) have plants here in the states making their trucks (Tundra) and engines, employing American workers to do it. Only the engineering and the corporate profit portions go to Japan, and rightly so.
What I described above was a wakeup call to the complacency that naturally sets in when things are going well. Japan is now starting to go through that same phase and are having troubles with it, since they are very good at copying and not so good at creating (generally speaking) products. What we need to do is what we have always done for the past century.....use our unique ability to innovate new products and new technology for new markets. Look back through our history and you'll see that the one huge difference is that we have always been the innovators. We need to continue to do that if we want to continue to manufacture those products....otherwise, subsidies and 3rd world countries with cheap labor simply will swallow up the manufacturing of those items by copying our products.
