First Cessna Skycatcher arrives in Wichita from China

[KSCessnaDriver]

With that said, there are companies making LSAs for less than 115k in the United States, so Cessna is doing something wrong.

Who's making a similarly equipped aircraft, that has the customer service support of Cessna, and selling it for less than $115K? I'd really like to know, honestly. Even the guy's building the LSA Piper Cub's are selling them for more than 115k.

 

[greaper007]

Mini, the problem with protectionism is that we live in a global marketplace. If we put an enormous tariff on things like Chinese imports several very bad things can happen. The Chinese can respond by putting huge tariffs on American goods. Sure we don't produce as much as the Chinese, but the market for things like Boeing aircraft is generally more worldwide than domestic. The Chinese could also start requesting that we immediately repay all of our loans, or they could stop investing in our currency. Both of those situations would be devastating to our fragile economy.

As I said before we tried protectionist tariffs in the 30s during the Great Depression. They hurt us enormously and most economists would argue that they among other things perpetuated the depression. That was in a market place that was far less global than our current one.

I'm as blue as they come, and if tariffs alone could help American manufacturers I'd be all for it. It's just an overly simplistic solution for a very complex problem. It would seem that the US can not have both an extremely high standard of living and a manufacturing base.

 

[wjmiller3]

Employees are an expense to a business, period. They add no benefit whatsoever. Businesses are not there to give people jobs. So the it is in the best interest to minimize all cost (ie emplyees). Just like electricty is mandatory for a business, you go shopping for the best deal on that wouldn't you? I am not saying I would not rather see the jobs in America...But I understand..

This is coming from working as middle managment in manufacturing for 10 years before I switched careers to aviation, I had to explain this everyday to employees bitching about plants in our company opening in china. They just couldn't belive that the company would "sell out" and move to china when they are making $80,000 a year as unskilled laborers with nothing more than a high school education. And the workiers in China doing the same job (actually a whole lot more) for .70 an hour.

If you were a MAJOR shareholder and you could get significantly bigger dividends based on company decisions and they didn't do what they know would give you more money, you would be PISSED!!

 

[Joe Gremlin]

Employees are an expense to a business, period. They add no benefit whatsoever. Businesses are not there to give people jobs. So the it is in the best interest to minimize all cost (ie emplyees). Just like electricty is mandatory for a business, you go shopping for the best deal on that wouldn't you? I am not saying I would not rather see the jobs in America...But I understand..

This is coming from working as middle managment in manufacturing for 10 years before I switched careers to aviation, I had to explain this everyday to employees bitching about plants in our company opening in china. They just couldn't belive that the company would "sell out" and move to china when they are making $80,000 a year as unskilled laborers with nothing more than a high school education. And the workiers in China doing the same job (actually a whole lot more) for .70 an hour.

:clap:

We have a country full of NIMBY's. We all want lots and lots of prisons so we can keep crime down. But we don't want to live near them. We all want to buy widgets that cost $0.99 and we all want to get paid $100k to make them. Or since this is really an aviation forum, we all want to buy airline tickets for $99 round trip to anywhere. And we all want jobs as airline pilots that pay $200k/yr.

Something has to give. And since the consumer ultimately makes these sorts of decisions for us, I suspect the thing that gives will be that we no longer will have much of a manufacturing sector in this country for many of our goods. If you want to assign blame for that, go to a shopping mall and point your finger at every person leaving with a shopping bag.