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The issue that really irks me is the oft repeated phrase of how China stole industry from the US, stole intellectual property, etc. When the reality is that the more US citizens became part of the working class and middle class, the more those people became consumers of goods. They were earning the salaries they'd always hoped for, but the downside for industries that hired them had to pay salaries that were attractive to American workers, but to satisfy their shareholders had to charge more for their product to offset the increase in wages. It became a never ending cycle. So they made overtures to countries like China and Mexico to start manufacturing goods at prices the population wanted BUT could afford.
So the trade off was that some of those Americans earning good salaries lost their jobs but those still with jobs could afford the products now made off shore. Again, the problem was that the base of well paid employees kept getting smaller and smaller as the companies started closing factories and businesses to move production of their products off shore - whether that was TV's, electronics, washing machines and dryers, pretty well anything you can remember from the 1980s that no longer exist. Like Motorola, Zenith, RCA, etc. Can you imagine how much a 77 inch TV would cost if it was manufactured in the US using humans and not automated? If an LG 77 inch TV costs $3800 in Canada right now, it would probably cost about $7000 if it was manufactured in the US.
And don't forget, there is always going to be an income gap between the middle class and the upper class - they demand it. Which is why upper class people pay $12K for entry level Rolex or $30K for a Patek Phillippe. That's why working and middle class people are willing to buy knock offs for $300. They don't care they have a fake Tag Heuer watch. That's why there's so many counterfeit products out there. It's a never ending cycle -separating the wheat (the rich) from the chaff (the not rich).
And here's an interesting conundrum: when companies like Coach, an upscale American company that made purses and wallets starting in the 1950s they were considered a badge of success. You'd made it if you had a Coach purse. I have a lot of Coach purses. Many made in Italy, the creme de la creme. One, a pearlized leather Grace Kelly style bag in pistachio that I've never ever worn made in 1996 cost about $550USD. In today's dollars that's about $1100 USD. What regular person would be willing to pay that now. So to feed the American public's demand for Coach products, around 2001, they started manufacturing their products off shore in, you guessed it, China. So all of a sudden the market was inundated with much cheaper Coach products that even a teenager working a part time job could afford one if they saved up for a few months. The Coach cachet kind of lost its sparkle to the better off and they moved on to Louis Vuitton, Burberry and Gucci, but Americans with modest incomes could afford them. To get back into the good graces again, Coach started moving production from China to places like Vietnam and India. Even cheaper wages there but now the products were trying to attract those they lost. They could charge $800 for a purse and still make a decent profit.
You know what it's like when a store, for whatever reason, decides to move - like a furniture store moving to a larger location - they don't take their merchandise with them; it's cheaper to sell it at a sale price that attracts customers, to avoid the cost of transportation and it's considered a win/win for company and customer. In the case of Coach, when they moved a factory from China to Vietnam they left everything there, the machines, the space, the leather, the hardware for their products. They only thing they took was the authority to state the product was an authentic Coach item. So when that Chinese factory stood empty, the Chinese looked around and said, hey we can still make stuff, so they did. But now all that product is considered counterfeit.
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