It's OK that your wife spent 2 grand on a vacuum cleaner....as long as it sucks....she must blow......you of course!

 

I rented another Ford. A 2008 Explorer with 200 miles on it.
I don't like it. Not much more to say than that.

I just drove my '01 Toyota to Jackson Hole and back.

I love my truck. 128k miles. New battery, new tires, TRD headers, Banks Exhaust, Unichip computer. An enthusiastic road warrior.

 

If you all want to buy something that is no longer produced here, or are convinced the foreign product is superior to the American one, that's fine.

But as fewer and fewer and fewer value added products are made here, as the country devolves to third word status with a dumb bell high school dropout third world population, how is the average person gonna make enough money to buy anything from anywhere?

 

My son, who was crated around as an infant in this truck has taken an interest in my old 92 Dodge diesel. He drives it everyday. It has been in service for nearly 400K miles and gladly goes to work everyday.

It used to leak everything. Since he has taken over care of the truck it leaks a little.

 

Oh yah! Thats right all them forigners do is take our money and send it back to THERE country. They DON'T open up any plants OVER HERE, or create any jobs.



Honda US headquarters Torrance, California
Honda Marysville Motorcycle Plant Marysville, OH
Honda Marysville Auto Plant Marysville, OH
Honda East Liberty Auto Plant East Liberty, OH
Honda Anna Engine Plant Anna, OH
Honda Manufacturing of Alabama, LLC - Lincoln Auto Plant Lincoln, AL
Honda Manufacturing of Indiana, LLC - Greensburg Plant Decatur County, IN
Honda of South Carolina Mfg., Inc. - Timmonsville ATV Plant Timmonsville, SC
Honda Timmonsville PWC Plant - Timmonsville, SC
Honda of Canada Mfg. (Division of Honda Canada Inc.) - Alliston Auto Plant 1 Alliston, Ontario, Canada
Honda of Canada Mfg. (Division of Honda Canada Inc.) Alliston Auto Plant 2 - Alliston, Ontario, Canada
Honda Alliston Engine Plant (2008) - Alliston, Ontario, Canada
Honda Transmission Mfg. of America, Inc. - Russells Point Plant (1996) Russells Point, OH
Honda Precision Parts of Georgia, LLC - Tallapoosa Plant Tallapoosa, GA
Honda Power Equipment Mfg., Inc. - Swepsonsville Plant Swepsonsville, NC
Honda Aircraft Company, Inc. - Aircraft Plant - Greensboro, NC
Honda recently broke ground on a plant in Burlington, North Carolina

http://corporate.honda.com/press/art...d=200704023919



"In 13 locations across North America, more than 30,000 team members are producing* over 1.5 million vehicles, more than 1.3 million engines, and nearly 400,000 automatic transmissions per year. In fact, 11 Toyota and Lexus models are built in North America with parts purchased from hundreds of North American supplier locations.

Our annual U.S. spending on parts, goods and services with suppliers totals more than $29 billion** and counting, as Toyota continues to grow and build more vehicles, engines and transmissions in North America."

http://www.toyota.com/about/our_busi...ing/index.html


DAMN I HATE THOSE FORIGNERS

 

divingindatona;

Scratch the Marysville Motorcycle Plant from the Honda list. It's history.

I think it's nice that Toyota produces here a percentage of the products they sell here.

I've got nothing against Toyota, folks who buy Toyotas, or "foreigners". The U.S. government and the people who set trade policy? That's another story.

I'm trying to make at least what I think is a larger point. We live well in a wealthy country because until very recently, the U.S. was the greatest creditor nation with the greatest trade surplus. In less than a generation we have become the greatest debtor nation with the greatest trade deficit.

One thing that wealthy first world nations have in common is that they are creditor nations with trade surpluses.

One thing all busted *** third world countries have in common is that they run big trade deficits and they owe everybody money.

 

I see your point. The people to point fingers at are the government officials that agreed to the lame trade laws that they approved. Also the consumers, unions, and the auto industry executives.

The quality of American products isn’t good. Foreign companies are for profit businesses. There is a large amount of cost incurred in trying to set up shop over here. The cost of politicians that want a piece of the action and the rising cost of union workers. They can get the same product produced cheaper else ware.

Ford and GM decided to crank out gas sucking SUV's because they could turn such a large profit on them. While the domestics were cranking out huge gas guzzling behemoths the foreign companies were working on there level of refinement and attempting to make there cars more fuel efficient.

Up until recently the American consumer wanted there SUV or Truck.

The domestic companies are doing the same thing. Sometime between 2000 and 2003 GM set up a design headquarters in India. Why? They could pay an entry level engineer half of what they would pay there American counterpart, and that isn’t even considering the benefits package.

I am saddened that this has occurred. My home state of Michigan has gone to crap because the state relies on the auto industry. I saw this coming many years ago, but others were oblivious to it.

Each week I call my folks (they still live in Michigan) they tell me how there are so many people who's houses have been foreclosed upon. The owners of the house have been laid off. They owners of the house just give the keys to the bank.

Others are packing up and leaving for somewhere else because they can’t find a job. There house is left with the electric and water still on - abandoned. The bank eventually forecloses on the house.

The governor of the state - in her infinite wisdom - has decided that they need to raise the taxes on the middle class because the auto industry isn’t providing as much $ as she wants.

Is it OK for a person without a high school education to be paid $26 an hour to do the same task (screw in a bolt) for 8 hours a day? The unions think so. Meanwhile non union jobs are paying $8 an hour if you’re lucky.

How do we - as Americans, produce a higher quality product for less $. I think that we need to market our specialty knowledge and skills. We should do this as well as decreasing the number of dumb americans that we have. Higher education is the key.

 

The Marysville Motorcycle Plant is not being "closed down". It's being reallocated for other work, as are the 450 employees that work there.

 

I appreciate your comments and don't disagree with any of them. And yeah, the problem is the government.

We have labor laws, legal rights for unions, time and a half overtime, employer funded social security, workman's comp, healthcare, pensions. We have EPA, OSHA etc. with thousands of laws, rules, regulations which cost business enormous amounts of money.

The same government which requires all this of Americans then invites countries with no such requirements and expenses into the U.S. to "compete" with Americans in their own marketplace. They have the ***** to call this Free Trade.

How do Americans compete with countries having none of the above where people are paid 50 or 75 cents per hour? They don't, they can't. They move production overseas or they go out of business.

You can either have tariffs on imported goods commensurate with the disparity in workers rights, benefits and other government imposed expenses, or you go back to dog eat dog, every man for himself pure capitalism in the U.S.

Either would be better than what we have now. What passes for "free trade" now is really protectionism for foreign producers leveled against American producers in our own market.

 

And on your very last point, I agree higher education is the way for individual Americans to get ahead, but if the government and the business interests who control it really want fewer dumb, unskilled, uneducated people in America, why are they importing so many millions of them from points south?

Man I really hate thinking and getting all worked up about this stuff, but I love our country and believe it is being badly led and heading the wrong way.

 

Welcome to the New World Order, where our elitist policymakers are subverting national sovereignty and the US Constitution and supplanting it with transnational bureaucratic structures conceived, implemented and run by those who know what's best for us and who are not accountable to the people.