China exports to America: 440 Billion dollars.
America exports to China: 122 Billion dollars.
Every year, America buys more, and more, and more from China.
However we don't sell stuff to China.
This "free trade" experiment is a large failure. Bring back jobs to America.
Now.
Wait until an Earth quake strikes Beijing. Bu bye US bonds.
The USA would be very competitive is we reformed welfare, food stamps, the school system, reduced our miltary, and eliminated the black ghetto culture as a lifestyle.
Who cares about trade imbalances? There is no theoretical reason to care about them. The fact is that Americans get cheaper goods from China which allows them to have more disposable income.
We can make up for it in volume.
To the “bring back American jobs” crowd I understand. However, it will take either two things. One is to have an empowered central government that forces companies and people to produce products. The people won’t syand for that and I sure as heck don’t want the government to expand any more than it has. Two, is to cut back government power over the economy through the tax and regulation structures. And we all know that won’t happen. We can’t squeeze the toothpaste back in this tube.
You can thank Nixon for selling us and the Chinese people out. He promised and business leaders have promised since then that it would make China more like us and it hasn’t. Not to mention they steal our trade secrets and dump their unsafe goods on our shores.
The global free trade consortium (NAFTA, GATT, WTO) want equilibrium in the system, they want China to be equal to us. China is a culture that has been around for thousands of years (we are only pushing about 250 years). The Chinese are strategic. They created a honey pot of cheap labor with no regulations and relied on our short term greed and stupidity to transfer our manufacturing/technology base over to them, all in the name of profit.
Now that the inevitable outcome to decades of us strip-mining our economy for profit has finally started to play out for the average American, the guys that executed this strategy don’t care. They will just move over to Asia and begin milking that future consumer market. If America is to rebound, the free-market types need to appreciate that not everything is tied to “more and more” profit. Strategic long term viability must always be part of the decision making for a healthy economy that can be passed on to future generations. The Chinese understand this, we do not.