Plan B Forum

dales wrote:I'm sorry......didn't see your posting.

My error.

dgs49 wrote:Quick question: Would you rather be employed for $9/hr, or unemployed at $15?

PORTLAND - Customers at Hostess stores in Portland began clearing the shelves Friday after news that the company is shutting down.

The company said Hostess stores will remain open for several days until the remaining products are sold.

Hostess announced it was closing Friday amid a workers’ strike, citing that the company was unprofitable "under its current cost structure, much of which is determined by union wages and pension costs."

The privately held company filed for Chapter 11 protection in January, its second trip through bankruptcy court in less than a decade.

Since 1934, Congress has supported tariffs that benefit primarily a few handful of powerful Florida families while forcing US confectioners to pay nearly twice the global market price for sugar.

One telling event: When Hostess had to cut costs to stay in business, it picked unions, not the sugar lobby, to fight.

“These large sugar growers ... are a notoriously powerful lobbying interest in Washington,” writes Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute in a 2007 report. “Federal supply restrictions have given them monopoly power, and they protect that power by becoming important supporters of presidents, governors, and many members of Congress.”

Such power has been good for business in the important swing state of Florida, but it has punished manufacturers who rely on sugar in other parts of the United States, the Commerce Department said in a 2006 report on the impact of sugar prices.

Sugar trade tariffs are “a classic case of protectionism, pure and simple, and that has ripple effects through other sectors of the economy, and, for all I know, the Hostess decision is one of them,” says William Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

Trade restrictions on sugar have a long, complex history, and sugar is certainly not the only major industry to have Congress play nose tackle against global prices by restricting imports. Yet as those policies have come under fire in the past decade, both Republicans and Democrats have so far refused significant reforms.

That refusal to address tariffs that neither support infant industries nor provide national security has come despite damning reports from the Commerce Department about the impact on US jobs, including the fact that for every sugar job saved by tariffs, three confectionery manufacturing jobs are lost.

Some of those job losses came when candy companies like Fannie May and Brach’s moved the bulk of their manufacturing to Mexico and Kraft relocated a 600-worker Life Savers factory from Michigan to Canada, in order to pay global market prices for sugar.

dgs49 wrote:Quick question: Would you rather be employed for $9/hr, or unemployed at $15?

Lord Jim wrote:Oh God, not the fruit pies too....