How We’re Killing America

I read an article on Wal-Mart today from FastCompany.com and I want to share some highlights with you.

“Wal-Mart is more powerful than any retailer has ever been.” It is, in fact, so big and so furtively powerful as to have become an entirely different order of corporate being.

On basic products that don’t change, the price Wal-Mart will pay …..must drop year after year …… To survive in the face of its pricing demands, makers of everything from bras to bicycles to blue jeans have had to lay off employees and close U.S. plants in favor of outsourcing products from overseas.

Wal-Mart….. has doubled its imports from China in the past five years alone, buying some $12 billion in merchandise in 2002 [imagine how much more it is now!]. That’s nearly 10% of all Chinese exports to the United States.

“People ask, ‘How can it be bad for things to come into the U.S. cheaply?’ ‘How can it be bad to have a bargain at Wal-Mart?’ Sure, it’s held inflation down, and it’s great to have bargains,” says Dobbins. “But you can’t buy anything if you’re not employed. We are shopping ourselves out of jobs!“

America needs it’s workforce back

First

Cheaper taxes and less regulations on corporations, so it’s not cheaper to run a business in China. This is not some republican 1% agenda, it’s simple math and common sense. Stop letting the media and politicians turn this into a flashpoint! That’s the root of the problem.

If I have to pay 500% more  taxes to keep my business in America then I can’t compete on prices. If I have to hire a team a lawyers just to read the laws and regulations of my industry and pay millions of dollars in government mandated fees and fines, how can  I compete in price?

The simple answer is I can’t. I have to do what everyone else is doing and shut down my factory. If I want to stay in business and not file bankruptcy I am forced to move my business overseas.

If you want higher taxes on the corporations and more regulations, then shut down all foreign trade so we can compete locally on a fair playing field. It’s the only way. New laws and taxes will NOT help curb the deficit or bring you safer products, it will simply ensure you now buy those same products from China, India, or elsewhere overseas with even less regulations than before.

Second

Mega-stores such as Wal-Mart, Home-Depot, and Costco (to name only a few out of hundreds) must be made to stop forcing suppliers to drastically lower their prices. This is where it all starts, most have absolutely no choice but to move their factories overseas if they want to to compete because of the mega-store’s aggressive  pricing policies.

I know it sounds hyopcritical to say we need less regulations but then ask for more regulations on mega-corp’s, but it’s not. I’m not saying do away with all known regulations (we don’t need lead in our paint or mercury in our fish), but we need smarter regulations instead of the blanket laws that are nothing but taxes in sheep’s clothing or obvious panders for the vote of special interest groups.

The only people profiting from our current system are Mega Corporations. Most of the laws we have now that are holding back small business (and in turn our economy) were lobbied by, you guessed it, mega-corporations. Fix these laws and you will begin the snowball that will fix our economy.

What YOU can do right now

Stop waiting around for the government to change. You can break the cycle. Buy just one thing locally this week. It WILL make a HUGE difference! If only 10% of the Americans complaining about the economy would buy just ONE thing at a local store every week, or at the very least just ONE thing made in America, it could add up to $36,400,000,000 every single year!

That may not seem like much compared to our debt, but that’s still a lot of money; more money than most small countries make in a year. That’s real money back into the American economy every year. That’s real change, that’s the deficit being cut, that’s the economy getting back on track, and that’s fixing America.

Read more about how Wal-Mart is killing the economy at http://www.fastcompany.com/47593/wal-mart-you-dont-know