My husband emailed this to me and I really enjoyed reading it. I think it totally fits the 4th of July. Hope you enjoy rading this.
Before you
slice the watermelon and watch the fireworks, take just a minute to think about
what "Independence Day" means today, in our current volatile economic climate.
Please take just a minute of your time to read this...I promise there is
something very important in it for all of us.
Every day we see the bad news...gas prices
are up, and so is the unemployment rate in our country. Everything seems
to cost more, and we seem to get a lower quality product costing more of
our money. More of the products we use every day come from overseas,
places like Japan, China, even Mexico. Each time we send our hard earned
dollars overseas, we add another drop to the flood-a flood that appears cannot
be stopped and will soon cover us all.
But there is something we can do to stop
it, and it costs us nothing. As a matter of fact it pays us-now and in dividends
in years to come. That thing we can all do is strive to find ways
to spend our money on products that come from the USA. We can
also look for locally owned businesses that sell American made
goods.
It seems that "buying American" makes
such sense; you wonder why we ever got away from it. The truth is, for a
while we got complacent in this country and our product quality dipped and
foreign companies began producing products that were of higher quality
than we made here. Then, with the high value of a strong dollar,
these countries were able to produce those products for a much lower price than
we could, and thanks to cheap oil they could afford to ship them across the
world and still have a price advantage. There is no longer a
quality or a price advantage to foreign made products. As a matter
of fact, many American made products are ranked as having best-in-world
quality at prices much lower than their foreign competitors.
If this is true, why do Americans
continue to devour foreign products? Habit perhaps. Maybe we justify
it by saying that although it is a foreign company, it is assembled here. Maybe
we feel impervious to dependence on imported products. I think that
$4.00/gallon gas is exposing some of our vulnerability. What if most
domestic production went bankrupt and disappeared? How would we feel if,
like oil, we were dependant and beholden to other countries to produce the
things we needed to survive, and they could charge whatever they wanted and
deliver whatever quality they chose because we had no choice? We had no
choice because we collectively walked away from our national production
base. The American farmers, the factory workers, the steel workers, the
electronics manufacturers, the textile workers, software programmers, and so
many other once vibrant American industries that are now withering because
Americans are sending their dollars overseas for these products that we can and
are producing here at home, but people aren't buying.
Again, we can do
something about it. You see, our economy doesn't just get a
dollar spent and that is it. When an American made car is sold, the
factory gets paid for the car, pays the factory workers for the car, the
suppliers for the parts, and those dollars get spent on other items, and
reinvested into American businesses. As long as the dollar stays in our
system it keeps on doing it's magic. As soon as it leaves our economy it
is gone. Sure, the spending power of that dollar still exists, now it is
just bolstering Japan's, or China's or another countries economy. If we
keep a dollar in our economy, the net effect is much more than just a
dollar.
Each time we choose to "buy American" we
declare a little more Independence from foreign sources. Each time we buy
American we help stop the flood. Alone, we move only drops, but together we can
stop the flood. Think about it. Talk about it. Pass it
on.
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