Quote:
Originally Posted by fielderLS3
This leads into another important point. A lot of stuff produced by outsourcing hasn't gotten any cheaper (cars have continued to go up through it all), anything still made in the US has simply gotten much more expensive much faster (without the outsourcing, the "true" inflation rate would shock us all). Outsourcing has become a means for producers to keep their products affordable with inflation outpacing wage gains. So in my book, the Fed deserves a good piece of the blame along with the unsustainable union deals.
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I'm not sure that this is true. You hear these kinds of things based on running inflation figures from the 60s. However items that were considered luxury goods are now affordable due to outsourcing. The most common example is TVs. Now you have to do work just to figure out how to get rid of a TV, which was unheard of only 20 years ago. But you also have multiple phone #'s per household now, portable music, increased access to time saving kitchen appliances, etc. So there must be some extra money for luxuries in their somewhere at the average household level.
I don't think it's a zero-sum game to calculate inflation pressure. Outsourcing things like an SS badge doesn't bother me too much, there's not enough money there to provide for people (of course I don't want the bigger ticket items outsourced-including assembly). I don't want to see science and engineering outsourced. That's far more critical at this point-it's a little too late to put the genie back in the bottle on the small simple parts.