> With our minimum wages, we can't produce
> jeans that retail for $16 and we don't want to.
This is utter bullshit. I buy my US-made jeans for under $15 at Kmart. In Spain, Pull and Bear jeans made in a factory outside Valladolid retail for $16 (I am wearing an excellent pair right now). By contrast, the horrendously overpriced garbage at Gap and like stores is all made in the Third World. I am not an expert, but it seems to me that manufacturing labor cost must be a fairly tiny part of the price of a $60 pair of Gap jeans. Is there any evidence that moving textile production abroad has resulted in lower textile prices for consumers in the US?
It's a bit disturbing to see Rakesh agreeing with a propagandist moron like Friedman.
-- Enrique Diaz-Alvarez Office # (607) 255 5034 Electrical Engineering Home # (607) 272 4808 112 Phillips Hall Fax # (607) 255 4565 Cornell University mailto:enrique at ee.cornell.edu Ithaca, NY 14853 http://peta.ee.cornell.edu/~enrique