Hostess has had several long background of money problems due to the unions, so it isn't just this one issue you talking about. You think it is easily affordable to pay everyone crazy high and overstaff? There are limits and Hostess met them. 

USPS cripples itself because of the fact the people are sick of how crappy their workers are with customer service and people like using fed ex and UPS for mailing other things. Workers should get paid so much if their service is terrible. Point of a lot of unions is just get overpaid, hardly do your best, have to many people do one thing when one person can do it themselves.  Republicans? Is that that only party you can blame? Democrats are part of the blame since they put the country in massive debt.

I had this talk with my dad; I feel free trade on manufactured products should be abolished.  His response was "Anyone getting rid of free trade is going to be assassinated".

THAT is essentially the problem.  Large corporations are making a lot of money off cheap labour in foreign countries.  Every political candidate depends on some level of corporate backing.  So no candidate will curb free trade in anyway.

Free trade is good if it's a level playing field.  When some countries have slave labour, it's not level.

The problem is these US corporations are being short-sighted. By moving manufacturing jobs to foreign countries, there is no one in your home market to buy your product.  That is slowly the way the western countries are moving.

I think there's another problem here; the U.S. dollar.  If any country printed the same amount of money as the U.S.  government has and accumulate the amount of debt that that's been accumulated, prices of goods would be ridiculously high and the dollar would devalue to crap.  This hasn't happened yet; so corporations keep on doing what they want.  There's no threat to them and politicians keep on bending over to them.

Ideologically, this is great.  Unfortunately in our current reality, it's not the truth.

The fundamental problem is why pay a smart, hardworking employee $50,000 a year when you can pay a smart, hardworking foreign worker $5000?

If a worker at a competing company is willing to take a 30% pay cut because he is scared of his job being moved out of conutry or outsourced to a non-unionized specialty firm, why wouldn't you cut your own company wages 20%?  You'd still be the better employer, attracting the better workers.

The western global economy is in decline due to outsourcing the highly paid manufactuing sector to Asia decades ago.  The impact is being felt now, and will be felt even stronger in the future without drastic policy changes.

No, they were set up for solid returns with high-margian cars, which were SUV's and trucks.  They weren't necessarily well-built, just people were willing to pay for them.  And the bubble didn't burst so much as the whole market went into a 7-month black whole, and the US company business model was so poor that 2/3 couldn't survive it.

Decades ago my father worked for a steel company that supplied material for GM.  GM specifically requested that the steel be made to corrode after 3 years so that the vehicles would need to be replaced.  American car companies have come a long way since then, but at the point of the economic collapse they were still archaic in many aspects of their business.  Redundent models, engines,... making no money off most of your vehicles and depending on big ticket items for profit.  Poor quality entry-level products.  Everything about the business practices were terrible.  And this is coming from someone who likes American cars.

Printing the dollar is essentially an attempt to turn the US into China.  Rather than force China up to American standards, the approach has been to bring the US down to theirs.  It's sad.  The debt is a whole other terrible issue.  Invading countries for no reason has taken its toll.  The US has so much debt per citizen right now I don't know if it will ever climb out of the hole.

Yes, but why hasn't the U.S. dollar depreciate to crap like it should have already?  What's keeping it up?

I think every country is printing money, and deflating the values of their currencies. so while the dollar is worth less, so is every thing else, so in comparison they dont change much against each other. everyone just pays more for everything

The US isn't totally in the shitter.  It's just trending in the wrong direction.  There is still lots to love about the US, and it's still way better than most the world.  I think of it like a small town that lost a major industry that was in business for 200 years.  The town doesn't instantly die.  There are people collecting employment insurance.  There are retired folk that can live on their pensions for decades.  There people that did other things, and people that are willing to kick around town making much less than they made working at the industry so long as they can stay.  Eventually the impact will be felt of the closer, but not for decades.  There will be less money coming in, less wealth but it takes time to see it.

That is the US right now.  There is lots of accumulated wealth.  Much of the meat and potatoes manufacturing is gone, and every year more wealth is funnelled out of the US and into China with every pair of sneakers purchased.  But it takes a long time for China to become rich and the US poor.  The nature of capitalism probably means that before the two nations are equal, the flow of wealth will slow or reverse, but major damage is done each day, slowly.