Do those shirts come from Jiangmen ?

T-shirts used to cost one dollar to make in Mexico. In China they only cost 40 cents. That’s why Mexico was upset when China joined the WTO a while back.

I looked at the apparel today unfortunately at the prices they are asking for the shirts, sweaters, hoodies and other items is way too much IMO. Sorry as much as I support the games coming to PG at the prices for the apparel my support only goes so far.

Whether the cost of their making is $ 1 from Mexico or 40 cents from China, each is a completely “debt-free” injection of money into the economy of the country that made the T-shirt.

One the maker can use to pay down what they’ve borrowed from a bank in those countries.

While, looking at the overall effects of this, we not only then can’t repay what’s been borrowed from our banks here, (because someone here who received that money as an income has just spent that on the import), we also then can’t buy whatever product that $ 1 or 40 cents was costed into that was made in Canada here in Canada.

Unless we borrow either of those amounts AGAIN. But when we do that, those sums are then costed into the price of some OTHER product made here. And each time we do this we’ll not only add to our indebtedness, we’ll multiply it.

This is not to say that trading internationally is necessarily a ‘bad’ thing. It isn’t. So long as it is actually TRADE. Like their stuff, for our stuff. Some of it is just that.

But if you’ve also got a situation, like we actually do, where ‘money’ enters the equation as it currently does, and not one of the industrialised countries can actually buy and pay for ALL their OWN ‘production’ from the amount of wages, and salaries and profits distributed as incomes in the course of making that ‘production’, then how in the world are they going to be able to really buy and pay for its exchange through any actual ‘trade’ internationally?

The set-up we’ve got now enslaves the working people in the exporting country as they compete in a race to the bottom to undercut prices internationally, while it impoverishes their alternates in the importing country, since they’ve no other source of income than from ’employment’, and if the costs of that employment can’t be fully recovered in prices they’re not going to remain employed for long.

We have priced ourselves out of the market? My mom told me that about 40 years ago. Somehow I remember that.

Hey, socredible ….. quit posting the same gibberish over and over again.

Let’s talk the language of any “trade”, whether it is business to business or business to purchaser in Canada, or Canada to the rest of the world.

So, what is the balance of trade month to month and country current account balance total, or that balance per population or that balance as a percent of GDP?

So, in 2011, the top rankings were:

1. Saudi Arabia US$252.756 billion
2. Germany US$219.938 billion
3. Russia US$198.760 billion
4. China US$155.142 billion

Working from the bottom up the USA was first with a US$784.775billion deficit.

Canada was 25th with a US$10.268deficit.

Since these are finite number, not a per GDP or a per pop rate, they are virtually meaningless unless one adds some other information.

You wrote: ” ….. impoverishes their alternates in the importing country, since they’ve no other source of income than from ’employment’, and if the costs of that employment can’t be fully recovered in prices they’re not going to remain employed for long.”

You are assuming that the cost of employment can’t be recovered. Tell that to countries such as Germany, Switzerland and several others who have gone to high end quality products and services to actually recover that through prices.

Quit producing junk for the masses.

I just walked by a school in Vancouver’s west end that was built in 1907. Beautiful brick and stone building. One those 100 year plus buildings.

We have no clue how to build buildings like that anymore. We are a throwaway society. What a waste of money. Not very productive.

We have to learn how to be more productive. We have to relearn what the word “conservative” actually stands for.

“We have priced ourselves out of the market”

When one is a medical doctor, one sells one kind of service.

When one is a baker, one sells another kind of service/product.

The market has to be assessed product by product.

As far as I understand, companies like Bombardier have not yet priced themselves out of the market.

If I got subsidized, given non binding non- repayble loans, forgivable grants, and a whole mess of financial gifts as Bombardier has over the years I would do well financially also. I think it is what the NDP called it, corporate welfare. Remember that phrase? I do.

I do, too, Harbinger. We artificially feed companies like Bombardier because they create employment in an area of Canada our government is anxious to keep contented.

And, Gus, just ‘how’ are the Germans going to get paid for all the high end stuff they’ve sold ‘on credit’ to all their other ‘partners’ in the European Union?

How many Greek Islands will it take to pay the bill that’s owed by just one of their fellow European nations? Aside from that, just what DO the Germans ‘need’ from Greece anyways? A cheap place to holiday, a little olive oil?
Or a compliant ‘dumping ground’ to keep Germans employed?

I believe Gus mistakenly assumes because some countries that are not ‘resource rich’ are able to make high end manufactured products for export that EVERY country should be able to do the same thing. I think you’d run out of markets for those kind of products pretty quick. And if the Germans couldn’t ‘export’, what are they going to do with all that stuff? And how many Rolex watches does any Swiss need?

Lets suppose you had a country like the USA, for instance, which still has considerable natural resources of its own. Many of them not currently being utilised because it’s said to be cheaper to source the same things abroad.

The USA is potentially self-sufficient in softwood lumber, for instance, if it set about managing its National Forest lands as intensively as private timber lands are managed there. Not moonscaping them, but just managing them ‘sustainably’. Which can be done. Lumber industry trade magazines originating there have stated that for years, with statistics to back up their assertions.

And there’s already talk of the US’s growing self-sufficiency in natural gas and oil, thanks to modern technologies.

But if the USA were again, as it unquestionably once was, completely internally self-sufficient physically in virtually all the things it needs, could Americans buy and fully pay for ALL the things they’re able to make out of those resources FROM the incomes they’ve been paid in the course of making them into products for personal consumption? I don’t think so.

Even in the 19th Century, before the USA had even finished fleshing itself out in the ‘lower 48’, it was sending its Navy across the Pacific to ‘open’ Japan to ‘trade’. It needed a dumping ground to get rid of the surplus manufactures it COULDN’T sell at home.

Same as Britain needed India. Into which it put far more in terms of the value of its exports than it ever received back in terms of imports from its ‘jewel in the Crown’ of Empire.

I’ve read that a shirt made in Lancashire was for sale in the bazaars of Bombay or Calcutta at a small fraction of the price that same shirt would sell for in any village in Lancashire, or anywhere else in the UK.

Notice that when Gandhi started stirring up the demand for independence in India, he didn’t tell the Indians to go on strike and stop producing cotton and tea and other Indian exports to Britain. He told them to stop buying British imports into India. That hit the Raj where it really hurt. For they weren’t ALLOWED to ever have the thought that something just might be wrong with a set-up where the figures of finance DIDN’T accurately ‘reflect’ what was really going on in international trade.

Not so much different from what brought an end to apartheid in South Africa. Mandela gets the credit, but it was the cut off of ‘international credit’ that really did the trick. (And at a propitious moment, when those in control of that credit had a willing puppet at hand to ensure the more things change, in government, the more things remain the same when it comes to all things ‘financial’.)

Dearth: “I looked at the apparel today unfortunately at the prices they are asking for the shirts, sweaters, hoodies and other items is way too much IMO. Sorry as much as I support the games coming to PG at the prices for the apparel my support only goes so far.”

Wait until the games are over and this stuff will be in the bargain bin.

Gus wrote:-“I just walked by a school in Vancouver’s west end that was built in 1907. Beautiful brick and stone building. One those 100 year plus buildings.

We have no clue how to build buildings like that anymore. We are a throwaway society. What a waste of money. Not very productive.

We have to learn how to be more productive.”
——————————————-

The problem isn’t with our not being “more productive”, which can ultimately only mean more product output from less labor input ~ which we would certainly get, in an overall sense, if we built things ‘to last’ ~ but rather that we need to find a way to be “more distributive” of what we are already more than fully capable of producing.

Notice I said “more distributive”, NOT “more re-distributive”, as those on the left continually call for.

We certainly could build as we once built. In fact, even better, since we now have tools and technologies our forefathers lacked. And considerable greater knowledge ~ much of it learned the ‘hard way’ by structural failures ~ than they possessed in 1907.

I think the craftsmanship may have been a bit better then, when it came to brickwork and ornate masonry, for instance. But those are skills which could be regained, IF we could afford to pay anyone for the time to put them into practice nowadays. Which is what actually prevents what still COULD be done, physically, from being done, financially. Our ability to pay. In money. An entirely ‘artificial’ restraint.

If you’ve got a financial system that can only distribute an income through the processes of ‘production’, while that income is only a PART, and a continually declining part, at that, or ALL the costs any business must recover in the prices it must obtain for that ‘production’, you cannot help but have a continual problem equating the total flow of costs, with the total flow of earned incomes necessary to fully liquidate them.

We overcome that, to a degree, with the modern day version of what Herman Goering told the Germans back before World War Two. That they must make “guns before butter” ~ the proposition being that they couldn’t buy a pound of butter unless they first made a gun to pay for it.

Fine, but how then do you pay for the gun? Well, Adolph provided the answer to that, you use it. And take what you want from your neighbor. Plunder can solve any ‘balance of payments’ problem for the plunderer. But it’s still a relatively short term solution.

Was there any problem with the ‘production’ of butter in Germany at that time? Likely it was just like here, they could make way more butter than everyone in Germany ever needed.

But making butter didn’t distribute enough incomes to allow all those who had a hand in its making to fully pay for the total cost of its manufacture. And the more the butter making process was automated, the worse the ‘financial’ problem became.

“We certainly could build as we once built. In fact, even better, since we now have tools and technologies our forefathers lacked”

LOL .. LOL… LOL… and a big HAHA too!

Ever hear of the leaky condo problems in the lower mainland. How about the roof collapse in the Burnaby shopping centre?

One brought about the “building envelope” specialists …. the other the registration of “structural” engineers.

We are discovering more and more that there are perishable skills … as well as perishable knowledge … and certainly perishable attitudes.

How about several airplane failures due to materials fatigue?

These are just a few to wet the appetite.

There is

What an old fashioned view that one has to be able to buy from Greece if one sells to Greece!!! Stupid! …

Those who look at world trade in that fashion do not understand world trade.

As long as the Greeks provide some goods/service to some other country that needs their service, it works!!

If they can’t, or any other country, can’t, then they will eventually be cut off. No different than any local yokel bartering system.

The gear is very expensive. I can’t see myself buying any of it. Could probably go to Value Village after the Games to buy the same stuff cheap.

Good god gus, do you not have someone else to vent all those words to?

“Plunder can solve any ‘balance of payments’ problem for the plunderer.”

Any imperialist society knows that. Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Vikings, Moors, Christians, Mongolians, Brits, Spain, Portugal, Dutch, USA, Japanese …. and on and on and on. The list is endless.

It is the history of the world.

bornandbred wrote: “Good god gus, do you not have someone else to vent all those words to?”

Vent? Who is venting? I am responding to someone’s opinion. I am allowed to provide mine in response, just as you are.

None of us is a second class poster on here! ….. There, I have vented again if that is you term for expressing an opinion based on what I know and have experience.

That is what this site’s posting section is all about. I’m not sure if you understand that notion.

The “gear” is a fund raiser, that is why it is “expensive”.

No different than attending a $100/plate fund raising dinner and getting a meal which would normally cost you $40 or so at a restaurant.

If “It is the history of the world”, we sure haven’t learned much from it.

As for the ‘leaky condos’ and the shopping mall ‘roof collapse’ in Burnaby being signs of OUR times, you might want to look back at the attempts to bridge the St Lawrence River in that era you seem to think people built everything to last.

The bridge at Quebec City was a cantilever design, modeled on a bridge of the same type that crossed the Firth of Forth in Scotland.

But to ‘save money’ the engineer that designed it cut way back on the amount of steel that went into it compared to its counterpart in Scotland.

Even bragged at an engineering conference in the US that the British taxpayer had been rooked royally for the ‘overbuilding’ of
the Forth Bridge.

A week or so later his own efforts plunged into the river, and the whole job had to be started all over again. With a different engineer, obviously.

Just because there’s a ‘financial’ push to build things cheaper, doesn’t mean that we’ve lost the skills to build things properly in any ‘physical’ sense.

And we certainly DO have tools that our forefathers didn’t have, and knowledge they didn’t possess, too. But can we make best use of them when it’s those mere ‘figures’ with the dollar signs in front of them that determine how something is going to be built, and those figures continually mis-represent ‘waste’ as ‘wealth’?

Sorry I am taxed more than enough already, expensive Canada Winter Games apparel will not be on my christmas shopping list!

I did not ask for these games, i will not support them, not in a box with a fox, not in a house with a mouse, I will not support them Sam I am!

Gus wrote:-“What an old fashioned view that one has to be able to buy from Greece if one sells to Greece!!! Stupid! …

Those who look at world trade in that fashion do not understand world trade.”
——————————————–

And those who think a reciprocal trade imbalance can be solved by simply expanding its boundaries amongst more countries are going to be in for a horrific awakening one day, probably sooner than later.

Canada Winter Games. Who could forget such a great endeavor. Try everyone.

There have been 13 Canada Winter Games since 1967. (Prince George will be number 13)

Close to home we had the games in Lethbridge Ab in 1975, Grande Prairie in 1995, Whitehorse Yukon in 2007.

Does anyone remember these games??? Did anyone attend???

The rest of the games were further away, and therefore further from our minds.

To suggest that these games will have any fundamental impact on anyone in Prince George over a period of time is misleading.

We will be remembered the same as Whitehorse, Grande Prairie, and Lethbridge, in other words, not at all.

The 13th Canada Winter Games and they begin on Feb 13, which is a Friday. We better invite some black cats.

You will remember them Palupo – I am sure you will whine about the games for many years to come ;)

I love the design. Triangles and big block numbers. Soooo creative :)

“And those who think a reciprocal trade imbalance can be solved by simply expanding its boundaries amongst more countries are going to be in for a horrific awakening one day, probably sooner than later.”

Who ever mentioned anything about reciprocity?

Enjoy the link. All you ever wanted to know with who trades what with whom.

It is a wonderful world despite social credit supporters. ;-)

http://atlas.media.mit.edu/country/abw

A product of MIT … The observatory of economic complexity.

Ad to think that socredible’s philosophy can even make a dent in that …. ;-)

$ signs misrepresent waste as wealth?

To me $ signs misrepresent savings as wealth.

As a result of not making an attempt at calculating NPV of spending, we appear to save city $ which come from taxpayer $ by not maintaining fixed assets properly, thereby throwing the cost of the users of the un-maintained assets back at those users – damaged vehicles, trips not taken, facilities not used, more expensive belated repairs, earlier replacements of totally damaged assets, etc. etc.