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>If you are thinking of buying a shirt, you could wait a few months, hoping that its price will fall because of a factory moving overseas. But you probably won't wait for that reason. Factories have been moving overseas for decades. Generalized deflation is what is happening now in Japan (where many of our factories went) and what Alan Greenspan is beginning to worry about. The price of everything keeps falling, so nobody wants to buy today, and the economy keeps shrinking and reducing spending capacity. The only solution I have seen is to improve on economic fundamentals and hope that things get better. Mr. Greenspan might not have had anything to propose that was specific to the problem of deflation.

I don't think too many factories went to Japan. Their standard of living was too high when the trend started. The corps. want to get the cheapest labour possible, with the least stringent labour laws possible.

So if it's "generalized" inflation - the price of everything keeps falling - then what is the cause of that????? To me learning that is step 1 in solving the problem.
I think I know what the problem is, as I said when I started this. Sure, the moving of factories has been happening for years, but now it is getting into the areas that are harder to do (they started with the easy stuff, of course) but still highly profitable.
A coupla months back I heard of an organic frozen foods operation that was planning to open its factory in China with ALL of the product being exported. I bet you never guessede that you'd EVER be buying frozen dinners from China, yet it's already on the way.

Economists and government can shout all they want about the need to increase productivity to meet the competition but North American (well, Canada & U.S.) labour laws, safety laws, environmental laws and social conditions all conspire to make it IMPOSSIBLE to be "competitive" with a country (like China) where there are essentially no such laws of substance AND local party officials run little feifdoms and those officials gladly accept graft to keep the "laws" favourable for the bribers.
It really is, if we let it happen, just a matter of time until ANY work that can be done offshore WILL BE DONE OFFSHORE. Programming is already done there and is fast growing. Who'da thunk that!!?? Soon radio and television stations will be broadcasting from off-shore locations. It may be soon too that medical operations are performed off-shore, the skilled surgeons living in some tax-haven and using robots and telecommunications to perform the operations on people who will convalesce in local 'hospitals'.
It's gotta end before the corporations profit US ALL OUT OF WORK!

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