If that's not the most NYC finance-centered headline ever, I don't know what is.
"If we just offload our bus-building industry to somewhere else, we could save $x on taxes each year. Yeah, it eliminates jobs and is another blow against strategically-important heavy industry, but please, think of my balance sheet!"
Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived? Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
_What benefits_?
> Would you really be better off if you could only buy cars made by US manufacturers? Did americans really lose out when Toyota and co arrived?
Been through Flint, MI lately?
How about Gary, IN? Camden, NJ? East St. Louis, IL?
> Would Boeing aircraft really be better if they didn't have to compete with Airbus? Or would the incumbents just get lazy?
They already do have to compete with Airbus for pretty much everything that doesn't involve the US Government as a customer. That's the majority of the global aircraft market. How's that working out? The incumbent still got "lazy", not so much from entitlement but from a "need" to constantly reduce costs while simultaneously increasing revenues for the benefit of shareholders. You can only make aircraft building (or anything else) so profitable before you hit a ceiling. Boeing hit that ceiling, but of course, that doesn't matter. Number must go up.
People in postindustrial economies cannot work as cheaply as people in developing economies because they must pay local prices for goods and services required for them to live. Going with the global competition because "it's cheaper" doesn't address the hundreds of thousands of people in the US who now don't have the ability to earn a living in the way that they did before while still being forced to consume using the value of their labor. Worse yet, it enriches people who don't have our national best interests in mind.
This kind of "globalization benefits Americans" mindset is why we're in the mess we're in now with a tyrant in office and people having no faith in the economy or the future. It's not 1990 anymore. The experiment's over, it failed. Horribly.