GE Closes Last US Light Bulb Factory

pickens writes "The Washington Post reports that last major GE factory making ordinary incandescent light bulbs in the US is closing this month, marking a small, sad exit for a product and company that can trace their roots to Thomas Alva Edison's innovations in the 1870s. What made the plant vulnerable is, in part, a 2007 energy conservation measure passed by Congress that set standards essentially banning ordinary incandescents by 2014 but rather than setting off a boom in the US manufacture of replacement lights, the leading replacement lights are compact fluorescents, or CFLs, which are made almost entirely overseas. GE developed a plan to see what it would take to retrofit a plant that makes traditional incandescents into one that makes CFLs but even with a $40 million investment the new plant's CFLs would have cost about 50 percent more than those from China. 'Everybody's jumping on the green bandwagon,' says Pat Doyle, 54, who has worked at the plant for 26 years. But 'we've been sold out. First sold out by the government. Then sold out by GE.'"

Comments

another victim of gov't law

[roman_mir]

if the plant is unprofitable, it is supposed to die off in a market that provides alternatives (competition) that are more cost effective or are much better quality, something somewhere must give.

it's the same thing as with copyrights, patents and other gov't dictated regulations, gov't messes with economy by laws, by taxes, by subsidies, by bailouts, by stimulus, by copyrights, by patents, by creating monopolies, by setting interest rates, by passing wage laws, by creating moral hazards with FDIC, Freddie, Fannie, medicare, CHIP, fixing food prices and subsidizing food producers, etc. etc. etc., everything gov't does is against economy in specifics and in general. No surprise economy is shit.

Blame it on minimum wage laws.

[bobv-pillars-net]

Any country which makes and enforces a minimum wage law will effectively cause all exportable labor-intensive jobs to move elsewhere. Simple economics, people.

Re:You gotta compete on the global marketplace!

[lgw]

There's a word that decribes "we will take things from you for the common good": evil. The government's job is defense, infrastructure, and contract enforcement. Enforcing the will of the mob is not it's job.

Re:The easy way out

[Khyber]

Yep, I'm a troll and a bullshitter and a serious person, just like most everyone else on the internet. It all depends on the day and the mood. Anybody that has known me for the past DECADE on this site knows this.

And you had to post AC to state that? LMFAO! It's hard to separate the chaff from the wheat when you don't know the difference!