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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (236666)	3/12/2002 10:05:54 PM
From: craig crawford	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769667

>> My only point was that there are useful tools... and than there are tools which 'work' by shooting ourselves in the foot << correct. this dogmatic adherence to free trade above all else has caused us to shoot ourselves in the foot. >> For every 'steel job saved' by tariffs we will lose 5 to 10 other jobs in the consuming and trade industries << gee, maybe that's because all the steel jobs are already gone. consuming and trade has some catching up to do! we can argue economics all day. it won't do me any good to try to convince you that your figures are incorrect. you still miss the point, and like everyone else you only focus on the bottom line. jobs in, jobs out. you don't care about the people behind those jobs and what they add to america. you think like an economist. well all these free trade espousing economists have never built a great country, so it's only natural that they will scribble calculations that are meaningless to the real world. >> The net effect is to tax consumers without having to actually vote for tax increases... it's a backdoor tax increase and will reduce our GNP. << it's only a tax increase if you buy foreign goods. buy american and you don't have to pay the tax. that makes it a discretionary tax as well. with income taxes we have no choice in the matter. most of the trade protectionists or people who believe in the role of tariffs also believe in reducing or even eliminating income taxes. buchanan does, keyes does--let's leave bozos like nader and perot out of this. >> And it won't save 'steel jobs' by removing the economic incentive for the most unproductive steel producers to invest in upgrading their physical plants. << to suggest that the reason dozens of steel producers have failed is because they are too cheap make investments is absurd. the steel industry has invested around $60 billion in the last 20 years. >> Germany, for example, can undercut our prices on certain high quality steel products - despite the fact that their wage costs in their steel industry are much higher than ours. The difference is that German steel producers have continually invested in high-tech process improvements... while our bloated and antiquated mills in OH, Penn, WVA have not invested in updating their own mills in years. << total nonsense. >> Rather, when the 'temporary' tariffs are scheduled to expire, the industry will simply ask for more handouts. << so tariffs are just handouts to you huh. you know those steel companies are just so greedy, lazy, and inefficient. almost three dozen bankruptcies and nearly 50,000 jobs lost in the last couple of years to those greedy steel companies. your logic is pathetic. don't talk to me about greed in the steel industry. leave that to the enrons and global crossings of the world who got plenty of handouts. steel is simply trying to survive. >> This was a political move by the President to secure votes in midwestern states << did it ever occur to you that it's possible to gain political favor by doing the right thing? you can drone on and on all you want about political moves but if he did the right thing i don't care if it's political or not. i only care that the president does what's best for the country. this action was in our country's best interest if you ask me. if it wins him some support in certain states as well so be it. >> If he really wanted to 'save jobs' it would have been far cheaper to just give all the laid-off midwestern steel workers lifetime annuities or some form of welfare and 'transfer payments' and job retraining << that's why i have been trying to explain to knuckleheads like you that our country is not a corporation. you keep trying to make every political move into an issue about dollars and cents and decimals. you need to wise up and learn that economists don't know how to run a country. if economists were left to run this country they would sell our nuclear secrets to iraq for a profit. after all it would look good on paper. as long as you continue to believe we should run our country like a corporation, you will never understand why unfettered free trade is destructive. free trade seeks to eliminate borders, eliminate allegiance to country, etc in pursuit of pure economics. there are numerous real world examples of this where countries abandoned all sense of patriotism and conscience, all in the name of increasing profits. it has resulted in a great deal of military technology being transferred to our enemies. china says to boeing, if you want a large aircraft order from us, you need to give us your technology and locate manufacturing plants in china. now boeing is a corporation, and we all know corporations don't have any morals. just look at enron. they only care about driving profits and boosting stock prices. so companies like boeing will just give away technology that will help our enemies wage war on us all in the name of profits.