heck, i wish american vfx professionals could afford one!

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I wish I had a veyron

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We live in a land where law students should be able to have a $120,000 second car.

Oh the humanity!

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And I live in a land where I have one car and it cost me $3900. America! (where at least I know I'm free ;-)

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I wish even 25% of Americans could afford a Tesla. Sadly, thanks to the Walmart culture it'll never happen.

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Walmart culture!!! (FTL)

We are the country that took discounting global - That just means that Tesla roadsters will have their chinese-built and GM badged discount versions soon enough, for the low low (always low) price of $39,995

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And Chinese crap quality to go with it. By the time Walmart has fully completed the conversion of our economy to that of a third world $*ithole with minimum wage jobs, again, and still, nobody will be able to afford it.

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@daleam
Actually it's because of the Walmart culture that you might someday be able to afford an electric car. Competition drives prices down, and free trade and investment help everyone get more money.
No not everyone will be able to afford a 125,000 car, but everything would cost more without free global competition.
And the belief that somehow we have to have manufacturing to be rich is plainly idiotic. A place like Hong Kong has tons of money and plenty of exotic sports cars but it's no manufacturing powerhouse.
When someone in Europe buys a Dell laptop with an Intel chip running Microsoft Windows then connects their iPod to it most of that stuff is manufactured in China or Malaysia but if you think the Chinese manufacturers are the ones that get most of the money you're an idiot. Sure you could force all those US companies to only manufacture in the USA, but then the iPod would cost so much money it'd never be competitive against music players from Japan, South Korea, or China like Sony's Walkman mp3 players. And nobody would buy Dell laptops anywhere, they'd buy Lenovo laptops. And intel chips wouldn't be competitive because they couldn't manufacture in China like companies that asked TMSC to manufacture in China could.
And all this is ignoring the fact that if you forced other countries out of your market they'd do the same to you.
A trade deficit isn't actually a problem if enough of your deficit in goods exchanged is actually going to your own companies. And like 90% of the time when you buy something made in China it's an American company that's manufacturing there.
Why do you think that the economy managed to grow over the last 30 years even though manufacturing shrunk? We've made money on manufacturing elsewhere, lots of it.
The PROBLEM in the US is that the money we made gets largely distributed to the top brass at those corporations and their shareholders, and the people who used to hold manufacturing jobs didn't really get a cut even though the country as a whole didn't really lose any money. So all the money has been shifting upwards towards the richest people.
That's why the wealth gap in the US has grown through the last 4 decades:
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/29/news/economy/wealth_gap/
But that's just it, the problem is that we're no longer splitting the pie as evenly-the pie didn't really get smaller, the economy actually grew.
Forcing manufacturing back over here wouldn't make the pie bigger since people would just stop buying our products. The solution is to get more of the population to focus on being the people designing new products and technologies, as well as getting the wealthiest to spend their money to help create jobs. Of course this is easier said than done.
Either way though I don't think we'll ever all be able to afford $125,000 cars, but at the very least the Walmart culture means that BYD's electric cars will force other electric car makers to keep their price competitive. That Toyota's Prius will force other hybrid manufacturers to lower their prices (although hopefully not by making a horrible car like Honda did). And that's just it-competition helps the common man live a better life.
For one thing Walmart has actually saved Americans more money than the total amount of goods they've ever sold-in other words they lowered the average price of everything by more than 50%. And I don't know about you but I certainly remember the old days when you purchased stuff out of mom and pop shops. While they sound charming when reminiscing now they were also about mom and pop trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and if you didn't have some serious haggling skills or good knowledge of pricing you'd end up paying some pretty insane markups.

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The trade deficit is at the heart of our problems. China is but one example. The wealth of this country was largely built on agriculture and manufacturing. You can disagree with your well articulated wall of text, but you cannot fool everyone. Everyone has an opinion and here is one of them:

"The U.S trade deficit is a bigger threat to the domestic economy than either the federal budget deficit or consumer debt and could lead to political turmoil... Right now, the rest of the world owns $3 trillion more of us than we own of them."

- Warren Buffet to the Associated Press, January 20, 2006

The trade deficit the United States has with the rest of the world has accelerated from under $100 billion to over $700 billion from 1991 to 2005. If you do not see this as a problem then you are blind.

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@ Krazeeddd

Ah, but you're forgetting that this isn't an American law student. If it was, you'd probably be right.

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