Or are you in the Caterpillar camp who wants to move $ 35 an hour jobs and pay $ 12.50 an hour AFTER they took bailout money and built a new plant in Brazil ?
Henry Ford paid double the going wage for one reason and one reason only, and that was to keep people working on the assembly line which he was unable to do paying standard wages of the day. In other words he paid it out of necessity not generosity.
I think it's a great idea... and it's not so much a direct comparison, but all those lost jobs... those people aren't building homes... they aren't paying taxes anymore to fund highway projects? does that help demand for caterpillar in the US? I guess they can always sell to the Chinese gov., right? last I heard they are building TONS of new projects... and I remember them talking about caterpillar when they did take a bailout... lol... they stuck around long enough just to get the money... we should make them pay it back or not allow their IMPORTS...
Ford did not have cheap foreign competitors. Ford did not have pension plans, payroll taxes, EPA regulations, or $5,000 per vehicle legacy costs. Ford did not have unions. Ford did not have robots that could do most of the work and work 24/7 with no lunch break. Ford did not have the highest corporate tax rate in the world. Comparing Ford's monopoly on the car industry 80 years ago to today's global market place is apples to oranges. Actually it is more like comparing apples to laptops, they are not even remotely similar.
Tea Party = The employers who moved overseas and have a big pile of money overseas. All of the companies who are making billions are moving overseas and being Union Busted. The whole inequality issue is wages have not gone up in almost half a century. Higher wages = more tax collected and goods sold. Tax cuts for the 1% = more jobs overseas and wage slaves in detention doing what they are told. America is 2 societies and Congress is the enemy. Tea Party is the Koch Brothers who are buying America. Corporate enslavement as warned by Thomas Jefferson. In an 1802 letter to Secretary of State Albert Gallatin, Jefferson said, “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their money, first by inflation and then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around them (around the banks), will deprive the people of their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.” Thomas Jefferson also said this in 1816, “I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations, which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country.”
Henry Ford and people like him made America strong!
