Scrap metal will be hurting soon!

[Monty]

We have one of only two steel mills west of the Mississippi River in my town. It converts millions of tons of scrap into steel every year.....up until now. There are 4 huge scrap yards and a short line railway company in the general area that live off the steel mill. They announced the mill is closing in October for at least 3 years, maybe forever. It has been the lifeblood of the community for nearly a hundred years, until now. Why? Two reasons. It will take close to 2 billion dollars to bring the mill up to new EPA standards and will take at least 3 years. The second reason is because of cheaper Chinese steel being imported. The scrap yards will probably fold and I don't know what the railway will do as the mill was 90% of their business. That will be close to a thousand jobs lost in this one small town. I just wish Obama would toss a few billion of our bail out money back in our direction. I don't need it but he town sure does. Normally all those cash for clunker cars would wind up over at the steel mill, but now where? Monty

 

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[Zofchak]

Re: Srap metal will be hurting soon!

Normally all those cash for clunker cars would wind up over at the steel mill, but now where? Monty

Same place that most of them have been going to for nearly a decade. CHINA! America needs to revolt and throw these greedy bastards out of office! (Both Democrat and Republican). Free trade my butt! The governments of Germany, China and Japan are smart enough to put their own interests above those of the rest of the world, but not us. Corporate greed and our corrupted politicians sell us out every chance they can get.

 

[diggummup]

Re: Srap metal will be hurting soon!

Normally all those cash for clunker cars would wind up over at the steel mill, but now where? Monty

Same place that most of them have been going to for nearly a decade. CHINA! America needs to revolt and throw these greedy --deleted--s out of office! (Both Democrat and Republican). Free trade my butt! The governments of Germany, China and Japan are smart enough to put their own interests above those of the rest of the world, but not us. Corporate greed and our corrupted politicians sell us out every chance they can get.

I agree.

Did talks make even a dent in U.S.-China trade deficit?

Published: Fri, July 31, 2009 @ 12:00 a.m.

Did talks make even a dent in U.S.-China trade deficit?

The official word out of Washington this week was that the United States and China reached agreements that will be good for both countries and good for the world economy.

Of course it is important for the United States, the world’s largest economy, and China, which is expected to soon pass Japan to become the second largest, to cooperate on global economic matters. They can hardly ignore each other, given that the United States is China’s biggest customer for everything from kitchen gadgets to pipe to electronics to lawn and garden machinery. And given that China funnels much of its profits into buying up U.S. treasury notes. China now holds $1 out of every $10 in U.S. public debt, making it the United States’ largest foreign creditor.
But forgive us if we’re skeptical about whether the United States got any meaningful concessions aimed at reducing the massive trade imbalance between the two countries.

Even before China joined the World Trade Organization in December 2001, trade deals under President Bill Clinton granted China greater access to the U.S. market and U.S. firms greater ability to produce in China for export back to the United States.

But for 25 years, the one trend that has remained constant is that no matter how much we sell to China, China sells more — in the last decade, much more — to the United States.

It grew like topsy

Back in 1985, the difference was almost miniscule. The total trade between the two countries was about $7.7 billion, and the difference was about $600 million in China’s favor. In 2008, China enjoyed a trade surplus with the United States of about $730 million every day of the year. For that year, China bought $69.7 billion worth of goods from the United States, while the United States bought $337.7 billion from China, for a trade deficit of $268 billion. Put another way, for every dollar the Chinese spent on U.S. products, Americans spent nearly $5 on products from China.

One of the factors that has been driving the trade disparity in recent years is the artificially depressed value of China’s currency, and no one in Washington uttered a public word about the need for China to allow the value of its currency to rise. The disparity allows China to sell its goods in the United States at artificially low prices, and increases the relative cost of U.S. goods in China.

And so it is not surprising that since China joined the WTO, the balance of trade deficit between the United States and China has totaled about $1.5 trillion dollars.
Certainly China is not the only country that sells more to the United States than it buys, but none of our major trading “partnerships” are nearly so lopsided.

And while American consumers could make a small dent in the trade deficit if they would be more careful in their buying habits, China’s ability to dominate American commerce was facilitated by trade policy that came out of Washington, and any meaningful reversal of the trend is going to have to start in Washington.

We suspect that didn’t happen during this week’s talks.

source- http://www.Vindy.com

 

[allen]

really sucks about the pending loss of over a 1,00 jobs !!

 

[Tank69]

I used to run my own trucking company an a mobile car crusher, we'd go into wrecking yards crush their scrap cars an haul em in for scrap, the US mills are slowly closing do to the fact all the scrap goes to Asia an Russia, its cheaper to refine point blank, those countries dont have the strict EPA laws they dont pay high wages to their employees , its a sad thing to face but its the way life is .

 

[Monty]

The scrap yards here had contracts for X number of tons of scrap to go to the steel mill every year. They also got a special rate on shipping the scrap because the mill owned the shortline railway that hauled the scrap. My wife retired from the railway about 6 years ago. The railway says it will stay in business but I don't see how. 80% of its business was the steel mill. And if the railway folds the other local industries will have to start trucking their products instead of using rail. It is so expensive to truck large heavy loads that I don't know if it might put them out of business. The savior would be if the Burlington would buy the shortline and run the line as just a feeder line. And I have noticed that nearly everything in the stores from clothing to hardware is made in China now. Usually inferior like the Japanese products were after WWII but improving. I try not to buy Chinese but can't always avoid it. Monty

 

[davest]

and there you have it guys, the rich will move their plants to anywhere to avoid paying a wage that would keep the middle class here. As far as the EPA and OSHA and the rest of the regulations, well, if you want to live in a toxic swamp and raise your kids there, no one is stopping you from moving to bangaledesh to earn 7 dollars a day.

I never thought I'd see the day when American labor would be sold out so completely.

 

[Monty]

Off topic but I have seen this advancing steadily throughout my short life. When I first entered the workforce at the age of 21, just out of the service I hired on to a tube manufacturing company. They employed union machinists and laborers who could work their way up, be taught shop skills and pretty much had a lifetime livable wage. Slowly and surely the unions (not all but many) demanded so high pay that the manufacturers had to find a way to offset this and still make a profit. Now the manufacturers were a bit greedy too, passing the cost of higher pay and benefits on to the consumer. When the product got too expensive for public consumption, they began loosing money instead of making a profit. This was compounded by the government charging higher and higher taxes. So it became a vicious cycle. I am not anti-union I want to be clear. I was in a union and so was my wife. But business had to do something to compensate. So, what they did was made it a routine employment tactic to replace the older higher paid employees with younger less experienced ones. I have seen it time and time again that when a person reaches an income level that is a comfortable level, they are laid off, fired on some trumped up situation or are bought out at a pitance of what they would have earned if they had stayed with the company. And when they reach their 50s and 60s they are unemployable because of age discrimination, have no stable insurance and face mounting health care costs many times just to stay alive. So, when they reach true retirement age the have nothing more than lower income earnings, with middle class debts and obligations. Hence the middle class is disappearing. And the most troubling consequence is that there are no longer lifetime careers to be had. One exception is to work for the government, whether it be city, county, state or federal. And now the government is the biggest employer in the labor force. But the same things that are destroying our middle class is beginning to eat away at the government jobs too. That is because of socialistic policies ever so slowly creeping into these professions as well. I hesitate to say that word for fear of being censored. But if you know what it is, everything I have just described is the definition. Look at the European and former Communist countries, and even the Arab states. They have no middle class and can you guess why? Monty