ROMNEY WORDSWORTH - Ford announced Wednesday that the car company is moving all of its small car production to Mexico, and is investing $1.6 billion to build a plant in Mexico and create 2,800 jobs there. This is a Big Deal, because the U.S. Government’s own CAFÉ regulations require that small cars make up the lion’s share of each American auto maker’s fleet totals. This means that when Ford says it is moving small car production to Mexico, it’s basically moving most of the company to Mexico.
The only autos that Ford will continue to make in Detroit are the Lincoln Town Car and the Ford Mustang, both models having miniscule market shares for niche car markets.
This is NAFTA, folks. This is Globalism. This is “free” trade. When your domestic labor market has to compete with dirt cheap foreign labor under “free trade”, guess what happens? Either your wages drop to the dirt floor to compete, or companies just move the jobs overseas. Either way, the Middle Class of America gets hollowed out. With the costs of Obamacare and the costs of using United Auto Worker labor unions, NO country has a higher cost of labor than America. Nobody. Without tariff protections, manufacturing jobs will continue to bleed out of America like blood from a gunshot wound. Just like an untreated gunshot wound, the result to the American economy will be DEATH.
But the Ruling Party Elites don’t care about America, and they don’t care about you in the Middle Class. They don’t care about your kids who are graduating from College and into a jobless, stagnant economy. They want to pass the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership, which will extend NAFTA trade competition from North America to places like China and Vietnam. Hell holes that will make the Mexican labor market look well paid by comparison. We can’t compete with slave labor. A Global Market without tariffs means that America bleeds out white until our economy goes into cardiac arrest. With no manufacturing, and even our agricultural sector under assault (notice how everything is from Mexico in your local produce market these days?) we will have no jobs and no wealth. We can’t have a prosperous economy when we are all reduced to selling each other insurance and reading each other’s blogs.
In response, Donald Trump (and only Trump) has vowed to erect a 35% importation tax on Ford’s Mexican plants:
“Basically, when they make their car they think they are going to get away with this and they fire all their employees in the United States, they move to Mexico,” Donald Trump told a Fox News show on Thursday. “But then that car comes back across the border into our country that now comes in free, we’re going to charge a 35 percent tax. And you know what’s going to happen? They are never going to leave. They’ll never leave in a million years.”
Trump also proposed to the Economic Club of New York a cutting of the corporate tax rate by 40% to create 25 million jobs in America and return us to a 4% GDP growth rate.
But the real money quote from Trump was this:
“It used to be that cars were made in Flint, Michigan and you couldn’t drink the water in Mexico. Now our cars are being made in Mexico, and you can’t drink the water in Flint.”