You may be an economist, and I know I'm not, but I don't recall having to bail out banks, auto companies, and mortgages in the 50s and 60s. That was before all this "global economy" crap that has wrecked things here in MY country.
The reason we used tarriffs was to protect American workers from child labor, mud hut sweatshops that have proliferated since NAFTA.
I'm not interested in a "global economy". I want to see American workers get good jobs in the U.S.A. If they have good jobs they will afford and buy domestic goods. It was sound policy 50 years ago and it's sound policy today. I repeat, in order for this to work, there has to be substantial tax cuts and with our 50+% tax rate, we have alot to work with.
I don't want to be speaking Chinese or some kind or Arabic chatter twenty years from now just for the sake of the damned "global economy". We don't need excuses why we can't bring the jobs back; we need people to put out a plan that restores wealth to the UNITED STATES!
You can't change the world or the fact, that we are in a global economy. What happens in Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, China, Germany, etc, has a direct impact on us and what we do has a direc timpact on them. Ignoring it or not being interested in it won't make it go away.
What we have to do is have an economic system that is designed to leverage the global system that is there. In order for American manufacturing jobs to regain ground, there is only one thing that will work, and that is you need to be willing to compete on the same wage scale as the Chinese. Thats never going to work with our standard of living. So as an example, if we implement a Tarriff to off-set the wage disparity on the imported product, yes it will create an environment for the manufacture to on-shore the production. However, that same manufacture will never be able to sell those goods abroad to the developing countries. So who relaly gets hurt? The American consumer and the compnay that is forced to make its goods on-shore here in the US becasue they will not be able to sell abroad.
Again, manufacturing for the most part is history for this country. The jobs are in engineering, procurement, operations, legal, project management, logistics, distribution and service. And when I say service, I don't mean Burger King, I mean servicing the products that are manufactured off-shore that are sold here.
There ain't poop, that any politician can do the change the global economic environment. Off-shore manufacturing has nothing to do or the casue of bank bail outs or bail out for GM, Chrysler, etc. The crapper we are in now is due to a colapse in housing and mortgages which has spilled over to the credit markets and exsisting business can't get loans to keep operating and new business can't get loans to get started.