I haven’t written here for a couple of weeks…I’ve been busy buying my first home! It’s a great 105-year old bungalow in Arlington, VA.
I’m blogging about our efforts to buy appliances, products, fixtures, etc. for the house that are manufactured in the U.S. over at ManufactureThis. I’ll be cross-posting here as well. Please add your recommendations for relevant products made in the U.S. in comments on either site.
My husband and I just bought our first home! It’s new to us, but was built in 1904. Despite being in great shape for being more than 100 years old, there are a lot of improvements we need to make.
So, why am I blogging here?
Well, we are going to do our best to practice what we preach and buy American-made products for our new home. We need all kinds of things: appliances, insulation, fixtures, etc. How many of these items are still made in the U.S.? We’re about to find out.
We made our first trip to Home Depot this weekend. We needed new door locks. Made in America? Not at Home Depot. We had three options: two made in Mexico and one in Taiwan. We went with Mexico – we figured buying something from North America was the best we could do. If anyone knows of door locks made here, please note it in comments.
We also needed a couple of tools. We were able to find American-made pliers after picking up and replacing lots of tools made in Taiwan and Mexico. The measuring tape we bought was partially made in the U.S.
And the new air filter has components made here, but it was assembled in Mexico.
If any ManufactureThis readers have some good resources for finding products that are made in the U.S., please note them in comments. We have lots of work to do (and products to buy) over the coming months! Thanks!
P.S. Some things that are still made in the U.S.: cardboard boxes and packing tape.
You could probably have figured this out by now. The more liberal economist is saying the stimulus was not big enough and another infusion will be needed to get the economy fully on track. The more conservative economist is saying the stimulus has been a disaster and is not working, proving that big government is bad.
The snipping is all well and good. Those less likely to inject politics into the mix admit the stimulus is working to, um, stimulate the economy despite it’s failings:
But with roughly a quarter of the stimulus money out the door after nine months, the accumulation of hard data and real-life experience has allowed more dispassionate analysts to reach a consensus that the stimulus package, messy as it is, is working.
Jobs savings and creation are on track. The recession didn’t turn into a depression. By all accounts we are beginning the slow – and painful – turnaround. Government spending did indeed prevent the Republican fueled economy from eating itself. The policies of 8 years of Bush are going to take some time to fix. You don’t turn such things around in 100 days, much less a year in office. As we pointed out in our recent Palin book signing camp out video, those who voted for George W. Bush fucked up the country and they can’t have it back…at least until we fix it.
One of the nice young fellas in the video (the one who duct taped over McCain on his McCain-Palin tee – duct tape boy we’ll call him) got into an extended argument with us about the cost of the stimulus being greater than the Iraq war. Again, the stimulus cost $787 billion. Cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars so far? $915 billion.
Now, if you want to argue the relative importance of such spending of taxpayer money, I’m all ears. I, for one, would much rather like to spend it on jobs for American families than bombs for Iraq. Especially when you consider the payback. Iraq and Afghanistan will most likely fall back into old patterns of rogue nations and failed states. The cost benefit analysis of such a fools errand in Iraq has always been highly questionable, even at the start.
The interesting thing about the stimulus is that a concession to Republicans took $70 billion of the impact out (emphasis mine):
Even the $787 billion price tag overstates the plan’s stimulus value given changes made in Congress, economists say. Nearly a tenth of the package, $70 billion, comes from a provision adjusting the alternative minimum tax so it does not hit middle-income taxpayers this year. That routine fix, which would do nothing to stimulate the economy, was added in part to seek Republican votes. But to keep the package’s overall cost down, provisions that would stimulate the economy — like aid to revenue-starved states and infrastructure projects — got less as a result.
Hey wingnuts. Want your country back? You can’t have it. You fucked it up. You might get it back just in time to fuck it up again after we fix it.
I had to skip my second night with the Palin book to attend (and work at) a town hall meeting in Baltimore about U.S. manufacturing policy, or rather, the need for a U.S. manufacturing policy.
I’ve been working on this issue for a while but I finally understood more about why U.S. manufacturing has declined so significantly. I always understood that China was part of the problem, but I just assumed it was because they were winning in the market place: they could make and sell products more cheaply than we could. I thought this was only because they paid their workers much less and ignored the environmental damage their manufacturing methods cause.
That is only part of the problem.
China is not competing with U.S. manufacturers in an open market place. They are cheating.
“Chinese currency manipulation” is a term that gets thrown around by people who understand these issues.
I had no idea what this meant, other than the fact that “manipulation” is a bad thing. Last night, I finally understood and I think it’s important that more people do too.
Basically, if China operated as other countries do (and as they are supposed to do under international agreements), our trade imbalance would tilt out of their favor, jobs would be saved and created here in the U.S. and we could fairly compete (and even win) in the international marketplace.
China is artificially setting the exchange rates of their currency in order to gain an unfair advantage. That’s why Chinese products are so cheap. As AAM, the host of last night’s town hall, describes it:
“This made China’s exports to the U.S. relatively cheaper than they should have been and made U.S. exports to China more expensive than they should have been. This had two-fold negative effects on American industry. On one hand, the relatively cheap Chinese imports drove domestic manufacturers, who could not compete with that price, out of business. On the other, the relatively expensive imports of U.S. products into China limited consumption of U.S. goods there, putting many export-intensive U.S. companies out of business.”
And China has taken full advantage – to our detriment – since they entered the World Trade Organization in 2001 and then established Normal Trade Relations with the U.S. Check out this graphic:
I grew up in Cleveland in the 1980s and my dad was a machinist. I remember the dips shown on this graphic. I had no idea how much worse it’s been in this decade! Looking at this graphic, it is NO wonder our economy is in the shape it’s in now.
But it also points to some solutions – like requiring China to compete fairly. If they don’t, we should do exactly what the Obama administration has started doing: enforce international trade rules. Tariffs were recently added to Chinese tires which had been flooding U.S markets at artificially low prices (and costing U.S companies and U.S. workers). The result of the tariff: American companies have actually been able to successfully compete and have even started rehiring workers.
Imagine what would happen if we fully enforced the trade rules. It’s only fair.
Dow Hits High for Year at 10,226.94, signaling mass approval among the business community for the recent passage of health care reform.
…no, not really. But it’s a nice rhetorical point for the wingers who want to superimpose an Obama speech on top of minute-by-minute Dow levels. I’d be an idiot to make the above point. They’re idiots for already having done it.
Sixty-eight percent of speech-watchers questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey Tuesday night had a very positive reaction to the president’s address, with 24 percent suggesting they had a somewhat positive response and 8 percent indicating they had a negative reaction.
The entire poll is bad news for McCain. This 73/48 gap has swelled from 67/55 in April. Clear plan for solving has also swelled greatly:
Obama is also now viewed as just about a strong and decisive a leader as McCain was back in April. Back then McCain was +13. Now he’s +2. The debates and the contrast between how Obama and McCain handled the economic crisis surely have moved these polls.
Those numbers are stunning when you think about it. If John McCain wanted to live up to his sloganeering of “Country First”, he’d be focusing like a laser on the economy and not trying to “turn the page on the economic crisis” in order to talk about people Barack Obama knows who did bad stuff 40 years ago.
The reality of the situation is that “Country First” is just a vapid slogan meant to fool the average voter into thinking it’s true. What John McCain really puts first, however, is his campaign to become President. Country be damned. Especially during an economic crisis.
Tonight’s debate should be interesting. Note to Obama camp: Hammer these Gallup findings like you are trying to beat gray off of concrete. Don’t stop hammering until McCain is a stuttering fool.
So on the day they went to “turn the page” from the economy the Dow drops another 369.88. We are under 10,000 now. 60% think a DEPRESSION is likely. Credit squeeze causes SBA loans to drop 30%. September saw a jobs loss of 159,000. Year to date jobs loss is at 760,000.
I doubt Americans will be doing any “page turning” anytime soon. No, wait. They’ll be turning a page alright. Closing the book hopefully on our right wing nightmare.
Update: It was about 20 minutes late, but it’s up.
From the inbox:
Over the weekend, John McCain’s top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and “turn the page” to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.
In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.
But it’s not just McCain’s role in the current crisis that they’re avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.
During the savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s, McCain’s political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.
Sound familiar?
In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain’s Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts — and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.
So at noon Eastern on Monday, October 6th, we’re releasing a 13-minute documentary about the scandal called “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis” — it will be available at KeatingEconomics.com, along with background information that every voter should know.
“Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that they can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They’d rather tear our campaign down than lift our country up. That’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time.”
