RV Tourism in Mexico

The vast majority on this board are "Pro American. anti buying goods made elsewhere (especially from China) etc.

So stay out of that messed up country and spend your dollars here!

It is next to impossible to determine where some things are made anymore - or where things come from. The cars with the highest percent or parts and assembly made in the US these days are Toyota Camry and Honda Accord at 80% with Corvette coming in third at 75%. No Dell computer - or most other computers - or phones - are made in the US. No coffee is grown in the US. No bananas are grown in the US. No rubber from the US. Almost nothing on the shelves at Walmart comes from the US.

It may be only theoretical to say but we supposedly live in the "Global Economy". If people in other parts of the world have money they will be more likely to buy things made in the US. If people go to other countries and spend money they help the economy of that country so the people there can afford to buy things made in the US. Our balance of trade with Mexico may not be perfect but it was closer than I thought - I think I read it is under 10%.

It is certainly very important for people in the US to buy things made in the US. But if wages stay low it is a proven economic fact that people cannot spend money they do not have. It all adds up to being very difficult to figure out. No simple way to look at it. The US imports oil from other countries and then sells oil produced in the US to other countries - go figure?

The US has trade agreements with other countries - we'll buy from you if you buy from us. But they do not have agreements with a lot of other countries. Mexico has trade agreements with quite a few more countries than the US. So US manufacturers build plants in Mexico to build US products that can be sold in more countries where Mexico has trade agreements with - very soon there will be more cars built in Mexico than in the US. The big three US automakers all have huge plants in Mexico - as do many of the rest of the world's automakers - Toyota - Honda - Nissan - VW - they are all building cars in Mexico because of trade advantages. Freightliner trucks and John Deere tractors as well as a lot of Caterpillar equipment - all built in Mexico.

At the same time all the world's automakers have assembly plants in the US employing US workers - Toyota - Honda - Nissan - Hyundai - BMW - Mercedes - all built in the US - and many others. Volvo trucks are built in the US.

So how do you BUY AMERICAN? How do you know. And if we do not buy from other countries they cannot afford to buy from us so sales of US goods around the world goes down and jobs in the US are lost. It can get extremely complicated.

US ag-business - the corporate farms - have all bought up huge chunks of land in Mexico and are farming there instead of in the US - and/or they have major contracts with Mexican growers. We see a line of trucks 3 wide and a mile long waiting to cross the border at Nogales. Many other crossings have as many or more trucks crossing the border daily - with food to feed the US. Do you know where your fruit or vegetables come from? How do you know you are buying American?

The world is no longer a simple place. It is not as easy as some seem to think to have certain principles and to live by those principles. There is no automobile you can buy that is 100% made in the US - they do not exist. Very few things are. You can research all of this if you really want to try to BUY AMERICAN. You may find it cannot be done.