China

By free trade wt China, did we supply the rope by which they will eventually hang us with economical

  • Total voters
    0
Here is a sophomoric idea: Tell China they can go F themselves and ban all imports from China.  Ban all imports from every country.  Have American businesses create all the products we buy.

Oh, but we can't do that because Americans love cheap goods and services.  And heaven forbid American based manufacturers actually pay American workers a wage they can freaking live on.

On FoxNews a while back I heard that the majority of Trump supporters want to buy American goods, but they don't want to pay any more for them.  A-holes.

 
Last edited by a moderator:
^^^  It is amazing that prior to WW 2, America did produce approx 96% of what it consumed.  We couldn't fight another WW2 again since now we are so dependent on imports.   The strength of globalization is that we are all tied together like a woven cloth - war would destroy the whole cloth. The weakness of globalization is that we are all tied together like a woven cloth - national self determination becomes somewhat limited.

Here is an excellent, scholarly article on the challenge we face wt Chinese economic competition.  It is an issue of societal differences - not just in governance but also in culture.  Long term vision vs short term.   I encourage you to read the full article as it gives historical perspective and also touches on the geo-political game plan of China.   I've copied sections of it below.

https://imprimis.hillsdale.edu/how-to-meet-the-strategic-challenge-posed-by-china/

First Paragraphs:

China poses a formidable strategic challenge to America, but we should keep in mind that it is in large part motivated by insecurity and fear. America has inherent strengths that China does not. And the greatest danger to America is not a lack of strength, but complacency.

China is a phenomenon unlike anything in economic history. The average Chinese consumes 17 times more today than in 1987. This is like the difference between driving a car and riding a bicycle or between indoor plumbing and an outhouse. In an incredibly short period of time, this formerly backward country has lifted itself into the very first rank of world economies.

Over the same period, China has moved approximately 600 million people from the countryside to the cities—the equivalent of moving the entire population of Europe from the Ural Mountains to the Atlantic Ocean. To accommodate those people, it built the equivalent of a new London, plus a new Berlin, Rome, Glasgow, Helsinki, Naples, and Lyons. And of course, moving people whose ancestors spent millennia in the monotony of traditional village life and bringing them into the industrial world led to an explosion of productivity.

Where does America stand in respect to China? By a measure economists call purchasing power parity, you can buy a lot more with $100 in China than you can in the United States. Adjusted for that measure, the Chinese economy is already bigger than ours. In terms of dollars, our economy is still bigger. But the Chinese are gaining on us, and in the next eight to ten years their economy—unlike the economies of our previous competitors—will catch up.

China, on the other hand, is an empire based on the coercion of unwilling people. Whereas the United States became a great nation populated by people who chose to be part of it, China conquered peoples of different ethnicities and with different languages and has kept them together by force. Whereas our principle is E Pluribus Unum, the Chinese reality is E Pluribus Pluribus with a dictator at the top.
Click to expand...


2 issues:

The single most troublesome deficiency we have in the United States is not the industrial base, which is relatively easy to deal with. It is the lack of scientific and engineering education. Six or seven percent of U.S. college students major in engineering. In China that number is 30-40 percent. That’s our biggest problem. Second to that is the fact, already mentioned, that there is a massive distortion of the global economic system caused by Chinese industrial policy.

The Chinese play very dirty. One of the issues raised in the Trump administration’s recent National Security Strategy is forced technology transfer. That is, if Intel wants to get access to the Chinese market—the biggest chip market in the world—China requires Intel to divulge everything it knows. From the standpoint of Intel stock price over the next five to ten years, that’s a pretty good deal. But it is bad from the standpoint of America’s national interest. If the U.S. government prohibits the transfer of technology to China, the Intels and the Texas Instruments of the world will scream, because it will hurt their stock prices. I’m a free trader, but national security sometimes supersedes the free market. This would be such a case.
Click to expand...
final paragraphs

In 1983, I wrote a memo for the National Security Council arguing that the Strategic Defense Initiative would pay for itself—that the impact of the new technologies we were researching, once they were commercialized, would generate more tax revenue than we’d spent on R&D. When you do R&D, you don’t know the outcome. Manufacturing using CMOS chip technology came about because the Pentagon thought it would be great for fighter pilots to have a weather forecasting module in the cockpit. The semiconductor laser came about because the Pentagon wanted to light up the battlefield during nighttime warfare. These technologies produced unforeseen consequences that rippled in unimaginable ways through our economy.

We have failed to continue this innovation in recent decades. Starting with the Clinton administration, we came to believe we were so powerful that we didn’t have to invest in national defense and new technologies. Investment went into the Internet bubble of the 1990s, as if downloading movies was going to be the economy of the future.

I’m a free marketer. But the one thing markets cannot do is divorce themselves from culture. It is when we have a national security requirement, forcing us to the frontier of physics to develop weapons that are better than those of our rivals, that we get the best kind of innovation. So the government has a role—a critical role—in meeting the Chinese challenge.

If the Chinese are spending tens of billions of dollars to build chip fabrication plants and we come up with a better way of doing it, suddenly they’ll have a hundred billion dollars’ worth of worthless chip manufacturing plants on their hands. But you can’t predict the outcome in advance. You have to make the commitment and take a leap of faith in American ingenuity and science. We can meet the strategic challenge of China, but we have to meet it as Americans in the American way.
Click to expand...

 
China tariffs will be announced this week.  Unlike the steel tariff, these may be needful and hopefully well targeted. 

https://www.axios.com/trump-will-announce-anti-china-tariffs-tomorrow-1521655581-d2005e93-6b2e-42ba-a35f-3ad558da950a.html


The big picture: Two sources with direct knowledge tell me Kevin Hassett has been crunching the numbers, and the dollar value of the tariffs will likely be around $50 billion per year — or slightly less. The administration has used an algorithm to select a batch of Chinese products and then apply tariff rates to those products in a way that will hopefully limit the harm to American consumers. 
 
Why it matters: The Trump administration is cracking down on intellectual property theft by the Chinese, and the president has publicly expressed his interest in reducing the U.S. trade deficit with China. The administration is looking at range of options, from clothing and shoes all the way to consumer electronics, sources told Bloomberg for a story earlier this week.
Click to expand...

 
Tariffs targeting specific value added products make way more sense than tariffs on raw materials.

But, to be successful, they need to be done in a way that doesn't piss off the rest of the world.

For instance, when I have to raise prices, I don't go to our customers yelling at them and accusing them of ripping us off.

I have zero faith in that this administration can accomplish that.

 
BigRedBuster said:
Tariffs targeting specific value added products make way more sense than tariffs on raw materials.

But, to be successful, they need to be done in a way that doesn't piss off the rest of the world.

For instance, when I have to raise prices, I don't go to our customers yelling at them and accusing them of ripping us off.

I have zero faith in that this administration can accomplish that.
Click to expand...




And I'm assuming if your business has any loans, you didn't get those loans from your customers.

 
This administration is obviously composed of a bunch of ham-fisted boneheads with approximately zero diplomatic savvy. But they understand they like protectionism.

I'm actually pretty sure you could make a national security case for tariffs against China, because intellectual property theft on their part is actually a very real problem. That would likely make the tariffs legitimate in the eyes of the World Trade Organization (my understanding is they would block tariffs if done specifically for economic advantage rather than NatSec).

However, this does nothing to protect us from reciprocal tariffs from the Chinese. That trade war is starting to look more real.

 
Oh this is going to get so interesting with all these Nebraska farmers that think trump is awesome. 

And dont even start talking about corn and Mexico. 


Good thing we aren’t pissing people off that actually buy our products. 

 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/trump-weighs-rejoining-trans-pacific-partnership/2018/04/12/37d59500-3e71-11e8-8d53-eba0ed2371cc_story.html?utm_term=.1a7c1a8cc2d3

President Trump ordered top administration officials Thursday to look at rejoining the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a major shift on the sprawling multination trade pact he rejected just days after taking office.

Rejoining the pact would come as Trump escalates a trade conflict with China. The Pacific Rim trade deal was intended to counter China’s influence, but Trump criticized the pact as a candidate and pulled the United States out of it in one of his earliest moves as president.
Click to expand...

 
commando said:
maybe he is realizing he gave china all the cards when he dropped us out of the agreement.  or is this some 6th dimensional chess he thinks  he is playing?
Click to expand...
I am guessing that he thought he was the best negotiator and now he realizes he is the best deal maker.

Don't mind 7 years of Obama's work to make it happen, he was the one who made the worst deal ever! MAGA!

 
Last edited by a moderator:
Back
Top