CFL production being moved out of the US

[Guest guest]

Because Congress in all its glorious corruption went along with GE and banned incandescent lightbulbs in favor of GE's more expensive CFL bulbs, banned all incandescents by 2014, the US will soon not even manufacture something as simple as a lightbulb. I knew this Winchester plant going to stop making incandescent bulbs, but not that it was closing completely. It doesn't surprise me though.

Something to remember: all this stuff we buy from China puts dollars in their economy that can only be spent on things priced in dollars. They don't import much from us, aside from raw materials they make into things to sell back to us, so what do they buy? Well, right now they are trying to buy up oil assets in Texas and other parts of the country. Isn't that nice? China will be buying up US oil to ship home as our own energy crisis gets worse. In addition they are buying up companies and looting all the intellectual property and taking that home too. Unrestricted Free Trade has worked out so well for us.

The 2007 law imposed energy efficiency requirements that cannot be met by traditional incandescent light bulbs. Compact fluorescent lights (CFLs), which are much more expensive than incandescent light bulbs, are the least expensive alternative. The manufacture of CFLs, however, is labor-intensive and too expensive to be done at U.S. wage rates. GE could retrofit its Winchester plant to produce CFLs, but GE CFLs would be 50 percent more expensive than bulbs made in China with the benefit of cheap labor. Realizing it could not compete with such a cost disadvantage, GE is closing down its Winchester factory.

Two hundred workers at the Winchester plant are being put out to pasture during the worst economic conditions since the Great Depression. Many others preceded them while CFLs gained increasing market share under the looming incandescent light bulb ban.

“Everybody’s jumping on the green bandwagon,†Pat Doyle, who worked at the Winchester plant for 26 years, told the Washington Post (September 8). But “we’ve been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.â€

"Environmental activists and their allies in Washington were either too ignorant of basic economics to see these job losses coming or they were simply too callous to really care," explained Heartland Institute science director Jay Lehr. "Either way, compact fluorescent light bulbs in the real world fail to live up to environmental promises, unnecessarily subject American households to toxic mercury, produce poor-quality light, and are sending American workers to the unemployment line."

http://www.heartland.org/full/28516/GE_Closes_Last_Incandescent_Light_Bulb_Plant_Jobs_Sent_to_China.html