The Made American Crusade: Purchasing USA Products, Day 2

For those of you just tuning in, this is the second day of a week-long challenge to purchase only products made in America. This is my log of how things are going.

Day 2 Status
So far so good.

Within the last 20 some hours, the only thing I've really needed to purchase was a subscription to Sports Illustrated for my son's birthday on Saturday, which I bought online through a Upromise link to magazines.com (30% of that purchase price goes into my son's college account). Since it's about American sports, I think it's safe to assume it's compiled somewhere here in the good ol' USA and probably printed in New York.

We did go out to dinner to celebrate the bonus my husband earned from his year of hard work. (It's rare we go out to eat at all anymore...the kids no longer qualify for or eat from the low-priced chiIdrens' menu, so we really only go to celebrate things like birthdays and good report card grades.)

I'll have to say that when faced with the limited choice of $3 pints of domestic beer, I skipped the drink altogether. For so long, I've been of the mentality: if I'm going to have one beer, I'm going to make it a good one--and sometimes its of foreign descent; if I were going to drink 10 beers (which I never do), I'd have the nice watered down ones, thank you very much.

You know, I wrote that "So far so good" part yesterday and since then I have heard an earful from my kid(s). On the drive to school this morning, my daughter, who was planning a visit to the mall (where chances are she'd buy with her allowance something made in Indonesia from Aeropostale) this weekend, bid me farewell like this:

"I hope you have a good day with your American products, because you obviously love them more than you love us."

Ouch. Not to mention a little extreme. Don't worry...I'm not falling for any guilt trip put on me by a middle schooler. It's one darn week.

The Potential Dangers
Yesterday, I said I'd cover the possible hazards of purchasing only American-made products, because it isn't fair to say it's as easy as banning foreign products to save jobs in our country. It wouldn't be right to ignore the other side to the story.

It is my not-so-expert opinion that with a small scale, one-week experiment such as this, there are no real consequences; however, when escalated to a larger scale, you may run into one of several unwelcome outcomes, depending on your school of thought.
 
Protectionism. Applying the theory of protecting domestic producers from imported goods and services ultimately results in higher prices for consumers, according to David L. Scott in Wall Street Words: An A to Z Guide to  Investment Terms. "It is also likely to penalize domestic exporters because foreign countries are apt to retaliate with trade barriers of their own."

As was the case during the Great Depression. It is a widely held belief that the Smoot-Hawley Tariff of 1930 attached high fees to more than 3,000 foreign products and contributed to deepening the world's already poor economic conditions.

"The Europeans immediately retaliated....When we refused to buy Swiss watches, for example, the Swiss refused to buy American wheat and Chevrolets," says Burton Folsom Jr., professor of history and management at Hillsdale College, senior historian at the Foundation for Economic Education, and author of the "Myth of the Robber Barons" and "New Deal or Raw Deal?"

Trade Agreement Violations. I'm way over my head here, but as I understand things, the U.S. is committed to abiding by our obligations to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the North American Free Trade Agreement  (NAFTA).

To publicly call for an all out boycott of foreign products would most likely break any sort position we've previously agreed to. Between that and other possible economic fallout, I can completely understand why President Obama won't touch this American Made thing with a 20-foot pole.

But, what if the call didn't come from the higher ups? What if it came from common, ordinary citizens from Chicago? Is there a round about way to bring back jobs to America? What do you think? Please post your comments below.

For more interesting discussion and opinion on each of these topics, read this New York Times' article.