Buffeted by foreign competition, Mr. Bartlett recently closed his printed circuit board factory, founded 57 years ago by his father, and laid off the remaining 87 workers. Last week, he auctioned off the machinery, and soon he will raze the factory itself in Cary, Ill.
“The property taxes are no longer affordable,” Mr. Bartlett said glumly, “so I am going to tear down the building and sit on the land, and hopefully sell it after the recession when land prices hopefully rise.”
See......this is what's frustrating. The guy starts out by saying his property taxes were too high. However, if you go further into the article, you see that's not the real problem. The real problem is that China is able to sell its printed circuit boards 30% cheaper because of their undervalued currency. This blaming taxes has become a knee jerk reaction that has become meaningless and not helpful in the discussion.
He acknowledged that the recession was the immediate reason for the demise of his family’s business. But what really did it in, he said in an interview, was the competition from less expensive Chinese circuit boards — less expensive, he argued, because the Chinese undervalue their currency and this administration, like the ones before it, lets them get away with it.
“Our orders went from $8 million at an annual rate to $4 million, which was not enough to make money,” he said.
Mr. Bartlett, who is co-chairman of an organization called the Fair Currency Coalition, said that Chinese competitors charged only $1 for each printed circuit board sold in this country, while he charged $1.40. Like many economists and government officials, he says he believes the Chinese currency is artificially undervalued. As a countermeasure, he said the Obama administration should impose a 40 percent tariff on imported Chinese goods.
How do we get China to let its currency float and be properly valued when they hold so much of our debt?
Xunming Deng, a physicist and the chairman of the Xunlight Corporation, sees himself as a beneficiary of what he describes as the Obama administration’s more flexible loan guarantees. His factory in Toledo, Ohio, with 100 employees, is in the early stages of making solar panels, and Dr. Deng is already planning to quadruple the plant’s size. He has applied to the Energy Department for a $120 million loan guarantee. If he gets it, he will not have to pay the hefty fees charged for loan guarantees before Mr. Obama took office.
One of the things that has become clearer to me is for the US to revive, the Midwest must revive. We have to stop calling it the Rustbelt and we have to set up policies that encourage its revival. Too much of America's wealth is concentrated in the East, the South and the West at the expense of the Midwest. In the Midwest, production, land and employee costs are lower and will allow the US to be more competitive in the global economy. That's why I was psyched that ND, SD and NEB are doing so well. We need more success stories in the Midwest IMO. |
