First, I doubt if it just came off. The day I brought mine home some kid marked my chrome caps off for his bicycle. Next day, two were missing. So I got some locking caps, the kind that has a little screw going into the side, a "spinner" type set of four for ten dollars and haven't lost one of those since.
Second, the valve stem for our car is unique. It's not just a rubber stem with a chrome sleeve jammed on top. The chrome sleeve is made into the stem, hence the high price. IMO the stem for our car is worth $32. Warn the guys when changing the tire and tell them to just replace the valve inside the stem. It's a standard Schroeder (AKA, "Schrader") valve.
{rant mode=on}
You Cheney-heads started it.
Third, our country had it's greatest period of industrial expansion in the late forties, fifties and early sixties, when unions were at their peak membership and highest adjusted wages. It was a time when union families had two cars in every garage, the wife didn't work and stayed at home with the kids which went to college, and dad took the family out to the marina on the weekends for a day on the boat they had in the slip. Unions built this country because those families had money to spend, save and even squander and
that was what was pumping up our economy. Corporations paid 90% income tax with the only loophole being investments in company growth and no way to ship labor overseas because of high import duties.
We became the model for world industrial domination because our unions were strong and the tax code fostored growth.
Since then the so called "conservatives" of the late sixties on to today have dismantled our industrial dominance in exchange for the "campaign contribution"
bribes paid to them by lazy international corporate fascists that don't want to work for this countrys' benefit but would rather see a "New World Order" where the democracies that won't allow child labor and insist on a living wage for their people are at a disadvantage to countries where the strongman and despot rule by having children getting their little fingers mangled in worn-out machines, living in ghettos sprawling over a starving population, desperate for any job at any cost, in order to fill the coffers of the corporate elite with blood money. All this happened because capitalism is an
amoral system. Not moral, not immoral. It has no morals at all, neither good nor evil, profit is the only concern.
BUT...
...
evil is easier.
That's why we need regulations on agriculture, commerce and industry. Laws that keep corporations moral. Laws that protect the workers' right to bargain collectively, not scab over their only bargaining chip, the ability to wound a company that has immoral objectives that fall outside the realm of law and hurt working families.
Scab over the wound with other less fortunate workers that, given the chance, will do anything to feed their families. "Right-to-work" laws are lies, and hurt all working families.
LONG LIVE TRADE UNIONISM!
LONG LIVE THE UAW!
{rant mode=off}
Have a nice day!