Bringing factories back home to the U.S.
It pays to bring manufacturing operations back to the U.S.
Congressman Frank Wolf (R-VA) included a "cost of ownership" concept in his bipartisan Bring Jobs Back to America bill (H.R. 516), first introduced in the 111th Congress and reintroduced in the 112th Congress.
Wolf's efforts have now impacted the nationʼs “minibus” spending bill as part of a strategy to bring outsourced jobs back to the United States.
Recently, the U.S. Senate and House approved, and President Obama signed, the minibus spending bill, which involves the 2012 budgets for the U.S. Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, Justice, Science, Transportation, and Housing and Urban Development. In particular, the bill encourages the Commerce Department to focus its efforts on reshoring manufacturing and specifically instructs Commerce to develop an online total cost of ownership calculator that firms may use to determine the hidden costs of offshore manufacturing, such as shipping and inventory carrying costs.
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Problem is bigger but still solvable
Currency manipulation and buy American are important issues to solve but there is more. We have standards in our country that we feel are correct. Minimum age to work, minimum wage to earn, environmental responsibility in industry. Why do we turn our backs on these standards when it comes to buying products made overseas? Yes, they are cheap and many are not made in USA anymore. This can be fixed but not easily enough for a politician to understand. Any company that wants to sell their products in USA needs to go through a qualification process and where they do not meet our minimum standards, they pay an access fee to sell their products in USA. This sort of levels the playing field, company by company. If you try to do it country by country it drops every overseas manufacturer to the lowest common denominator. By doing it company by company, it raises the standards to the highest common denominator. If I am a manufacturer in China and pay my workers well (?) and demonstrate environmental responsibility, then I earn the right to sell my goods in USA while others end up paying a high access fee to sell goods in USA. The responsible companies will be winners and the losers will improve their manufacturing standards so they can access USA markets.
What this will do is bring manufacturing back to USA as long as the environmentalists, politicians and lawyers do not keep piling up regulations on top of regulations.
What do you think?