I'm responding to your post in pieces, Iggy, to not create another monster quote.
We gave companies big tax breaks as they moved overseas and took the good paying jobs with them. People took work for less money and got turned on to the dole to keep up. More government debt loaded onto the corporate handout debt. And, save for the oncoming information age in the mid to late nineties, we keep going back to the juice with predictable results.
That is exactly the problem. When China and the eastern bloc opened up, along with the rest of southeast asia and central and south America to "free trade".
"Free trade" is when two equal partners with equal benefits and wages for employees exchange goods. Despite the misrepresentative nomenclature, "free trade" does not exist between the U.S. and its trading partners of the last 30 years. U.S. workers and businesses are unfairly competing with workers that don't have the same wages and benefits or regulation in China, Mexico and elsewhere in the Third World. And the only way to insure that is tariffs on good from these countries.
The problem compounded exponentially with the passing of NAFTA and GATT in 1993.
And as you say, fining companies for exporting jobs, and tariff their good to not profit a second time at the expense of their competitors who remain in the U.S.
"Free trade" destroyed the British Empire, and now it is destroying us.
