Wish List

by Bryan

Scorpio has a wish list of changes to be made in tax policy and government purchasing to help American workers.

This is how things once worked, specifically in the 1970s and 80s when I was in public service and had purchasing authority. You looked for the best price, but in my jurisdiction we had policy of local purchase or product, then state purchase or product, and US purchase or product, before buying outside the US was considered. What the policy meant is that you bought as close to “home” as possible, even if it cost a little more, to keep the money as close to “home” as possible.

There were some items that were only made in Canada and I bought them through a local distributor, so some of the money stayed local. The US versions of these products were more expensive, not as durable, and did not match certain specifications. If a US manufacturer had matched the Canadian product, I would have switched to the US product, to keep the taxpayers’ money at home. Without getting too specific, plastic is not a good replacement for metal in a squad car.

Somewhere along the path to the WTO and NAFTA, local purchase has been cast out for lowest possible price. The money you save at time of purchase is lost in reduced replacement cycles, down time, and repair costs. When “cheap” is the only consideration, cheap is what you get, when inexpensive is what you want.

9 comments

1 Kryten42 { 05.15.08 at 2:16 am }: Many companies that once supported local suppliers went that road with the promise of huge profits from the Outsourcing God! Here in Aus, most of those companies have realized it was a sham and are pulling their investments back here (some rather sheepishly).

I was just reading C&L speaking of financial matters… and John asks a good question:

What do you guys think about this?

I’m not sure what to make of it really. As he points out, the story is just hitting the blogsphere. Could be interesting.

It was good to see Olbermann ripping into the Bush moron for yet another load of BS and lies.

Countdown Special Comment to President Bush: “Shut the hell up.”

The video is worth watching! I think If Bushmoron had been in the room, Keith would have strangled him gleefully! He was quite… peeved! 🙂
2 Kryten42 { 05.15.08 at 10:22 pm }: Speaking of *helping workers*… have you seen this latest insanity? (From the NY Times):

Blunt Federal Letters Tell Students They’re Security Threats

At the rate the US is going, the USA will make Burma seem open and inviting. Way to go!
3 Kryten42 { 05.15.08 at 10:35 pm }: Hmmm… I should have waited a bit befor posting that last comment. I could have added this (from C&L, the above is also at C&L):

Coming to Amerika and getting shackled

But on April 29, when Mr. Salerno, 35, presented his passport at Washington Dulles International Airport, a Customs and Border Protection agent refused to let him into the United States. And after hours of questioning, agents would not let him travel back to Rome, either; over his protests in fractured English, he said, they insisted that he had expressed a fear of returning to Italy and had asked for asylum.

Ms. Cooper, 23, who had promised to show her boyfriend another side of her country on this visit – meaning Las Vegas and the Grand Canyon – eventually learned that he had been sent in shackles to a rural Virginia jail. And there he remained for more than 10 days, locked up without charges or legal recourse while Ms. Cooper, her parents and their well-connected neighbors tried everything to get him out.

And then:

Ms. Cooper said that at the airport, when she begged to know what was happening to Mr. Salerno, an agent told her, “You know, he should try spending a little more time in his own country.”

Welkom to Amerika! We need more of yous for our Prisons! All are welkom! We need to build more to keep our wealthy developers wealthy! Hahahahahahah!

Yup. The insane are truly running the asylum.

Oh, BTW… The Aus Gov has issued a warning to citizens thinking of traveling to the USA. If you have an unusual name (one that isn’t Bill, Bob, Ben, Tony or Joe), or you don’t look like a card-carrying member of the KKK (or is that Republicants? I get them confused), Don’t! You may get in, but you probably won’t get out. And Aussies in the USA are being quietly suggested to leave ASAP.

After all, Aus is multicultural (and we have a shitload of resource wealth), so it’s only a matter of time before some Bushmoron thinks we’ll be an easier target than Iran. 🙂

Ahhh… what are friends for? LOL
4 Kryten42 { 05.15.08 at 11:08 pm }: Here’s the NY Times link for that story:

Italian’s Detention Illustrates Dangers Foreign Visitors Face

He was a carefree Italian with a recent law degree from a Roman university. She was “a totally Virginia girl,” as she puts it, raised across the road from George Washington’s home. Their romance, sparked by a 2006 meeting in a supermarket in Rome, soon brought the Italian, Domenico Salerno, on frequent visits to Alexandria, Va., where he was welcomed like a favorite son by the parents and neighbors of his girlfriend, Caitlin Cooper.
…
“We have a lot of government people here and lobbyists and lawyers and very educated, very savvy Washingtonians,” said Jim Cooper, Ms. Cooper’s father, a businessman, describing the reaction in his neighborhood, the Wessynton subdivision of Alexandria. “They were pretty shocked that the government could do this sort of thing, because it doesn’t happen that often, except to people you never hear about, like Haitians and Guatemalans.”

Each year, thousands of would-be visitors from 27 so-called visa waiver countries are turned away when they present their passports, said Angelica De Cima, a spokeswoman for Customs and Border Protection, who said she could not discuss any individual case. In the last seven months, 3,300 people have been rejected and more than 8 million admitted, she said.

And these are people from countries the USA considers friends to the point where no entry Visa is required! Who needs enemies?
5 Bryan { 05.15.08 at 11:21 pm }: Yeah, I wrote earlier about a woman from Iceland who came with a group of friends for Christmas shopping and was thrown in a cell for overstaying her visa a decade earlier.

I wouldn’t advise anyone to travel to the US for another year, because it will take that long to “chain the dogs” that the Hedgemony have released on travelers. This is killing our tourist industry. With the dollar at a new low and many Canadians owning condos down here, we haven’t seen them. The Germans were our second biggest group of winter visitors, and nary a hint of lederhosen this year. They are really having an impact with their “attitude” at the border.

Considering the “criminal class” that keep getting given government positions of authority, you have to wonder if this is about making the country safer or reducing competition?
6 Kryten42 { 05.15.08 at 11:30 pm }: I just discovered that Mr. Salerno (I thought that surname was familiar!) is from Calabria! :O :O My paternal family came from Calabria, and I spent time there on R&R… The morons who detained him better pray the Calabrians don’t find out who they are! The Calabrians are intensely proud and REALLY look after their own! Hell, most of the *old family* mafiosi are from Calabria! Talk about making a suicidal mistake.

Oh well… you won’t have to worry about those morons doing anything that stupid again soon. 🙂

Check the obit’s. 😉
7 Bryan { 05.16.08 at 10:08 am }: It’s not like you couldn’t call any large urban police department in the Northeast and be on the phone with someone who speaks Italian in a minute. If you called the NYPD you could specify the town of origin for the local dialect.

This is arrogance combined with incompetence, and the fools in charge can’t figure out that it damages the country. You would think that the goal is to create terrorists.
8 Kryten42 { 05.16.08 at 10:30 am }: Hmmm. You know, you may not be far from the truth. We know that most of the current administration have tight ties with the MIC, and the last thing the MIC wants is peace on Earth. There’s no money (and therefore massive profits) in peace. Without the GOP in power, Halliburton et al would be nothing.

“There’s many a true word spoken in jest.”
9 Bryan { 05.16.08 at 11:01 am }: The hypothesis becomes the theory becomes the law. The people at the bottom may well be petty and arrogant, but the upper level of the “food chain” must agree or this wouldn’t continue to happen.