Posted on 11/30/2016 4:52:33 PM PST by bobsunshine
A group of distinguished trade economists have quietly released a paper estimating that if Chinese imports had grown half as quickly over the past 15 years, Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump would be preparing to move into the White House right now.
There’s reason to be skeptical about this specific result, since it focuses on regions harmed by trade with China and doesn’t factor in benefits enjoyed by people elsewhere in the country. Nevertheless, it underscores just how big an impact trade with China has had on the American economy — and on our politics.
For decades, experts have argued that freer trade is good for the US economy and downplayed the economic harms that trade can cause. On the campaign trail, Donald Trump did the opposite, railing against trade with Mexico and China and promising to stop the decline of the manufacturing sector.
To the surprise of many experts, Trump won. And new research suggests that Trump knew exactly what he was doing when he made trade a central theme of his campaign.
(Excerpt) Read more at vox.com ...
Trump used the same issues that Pat Buchanan used in 2000. He was able to get the media to cover him, which Pat was not
bump
one thing DT gets right about trade is that any honest assessement of same has to include all of its major costs (and benefits)
we constantly are fed reports about the benefits of trade, and I concur with many, most of them in fact
but the kind of one-sided trade we have with China and a few more major countries............especially..... has some major COSTS to Americans..... costs that the globalists and international corporations and their political hacks in USA almost never include, or even mention
such as MAJOR MAJOR UNEMPLOYMENT, lack of jobs and almost complete lack of serious investment so that we could get some new replacement jobs, even
too many Americans have had their lives ruined by all this deception.
I am for trade, and I respect how productive the Communist Chinese and Japanese and Germans etc etc are.... and I want to keep trading with them all... my thoughts anyway...but we need fairer trade balances and some jobs restored in USA
Maybe DT can help us achieve some of this? I sure hope so!
Thanks to the Apprentice, and his hotel chain and building construction, Trump had much more name brand recognition than Pat.
>>Trump used the same issues that Pat Buchanan used in 2000. He was able to get the media to cover him, which Pat was not
Even bigger than that is that 16 years ago, Pat was making predictions that went against what the economists claimed would not happen. Trump got to run by using history and current events that proves economists to be fools.
The economic orthodoxy behind free trade is the model of comparative advantage. Under that theory, everyone is better off if they do what they (or their countries) are most efficient at. However, the fine print is that labor is mobile, easily retrainable, and easily re-employable. If this flexibility is underestimated, so are the costs of transferring tasks, as in sending assembly offshore.
From the article: “In other words, economists had overestimated the flexibility of the US labor market. Workers who lose their jobs don’t necessarily bounce back and find new work in other industries as conventional economic theories predicted. A lot of them become persistently unemployed, eventually retiring early or going on disability.”
I’ve been saying this for years.
It’s a fine line between heavy duty protectionism and efficient trade. If you overdo it on the protection side, you get unionized, inefficient and antiquated factories making buggy whips. If you overdo it on the so-called free trade side, you wreck your society, enrich the places you’ve transferred manufacturing to, and enrich the industry owners, while hollowing out your economy.
I hope Trump knows how to walk the line between the two.
Pat Buchanan shot himself in the foot with his anti-semite ways.
I know, I was a supporter until i started reading and hearing (in person) some of his comments.
What's interesting about this is that we're starting to see a lot of automation even in countries that are "cheap" trading partners. This may bode well for the U.S. in some ways, because it means companies that do business globally will no longer have an incentive to go running all over the world seeking out the cheapest labor for their production processes.
That’s a good post that covers both sides of the equation.
Trump wants to eliminate the trade deficit by expanding our exports, not by cutting our imports. It will be better for the economy
most (not all but a whole lot) of that automation equipment is also made overseas
so my point is still at least valid to a significant degree
Yeah, that and the fact that Buchanan's career consisted of running his mouth and writing opinion columns.
Trump has actually done things, employed people, created things in the real world.
Compared to that, Buchanan didn't have much to offer.
I really like his choice of Commerce Secretary. Old buy, but seems very sharp. And is saying all the right things (to me)
I like it. Gives me hope.
Another school of thought views the danger from trade as political rather than economic. We don’t object to trade between the states of the USA — even though that trade also has its losers — because there is no loss of sovereignty. But there will be a loss of sovereignty or independence if we got hooked on trade with an entity like the EU — before long, they would be threatening to cut us off unless we accepted Muslim migrants, agreed to gay marriage, agreed to creeping socialism, junk environmental science, etc.
Lol, once most of an industry in the US has been destroyed by imports from cheap labor nations, those "lower prices" don't stay lower for long. Lower prices is one of the shibboleths so-called free traders always throw around, but they don't have the data to prove it and any shopper whose followed prices for certain types of items over many years will probably disagree with the claim.
There is little or nothing in this MIT 'study' that people with the common sense of an average twelve year-old hadn't concluded for themselves years ago.
Yes. Did you see the video interview with his commerce secretary pick, where some guy from the Ayn Rand institute sneeringly said that exports weren’t important, and we large trade deficits are no big deal, and Wilbur Ross said (I paraphrase) “Ask China how it managed to bring such wealth to its citizens through massive exports?”
Very calm and measured.
Pat Buchanan shot himself in the foot with his anti-semite ways.
I know, I was a supporter until i started reading and hearing (in person) some of his comments.
Yep, China followed the same Asian model for growth as Japan and South Korea. Gain maximum possible access to the US market and allow minimum possible access to your home market. That's the ticket, and use your cheap labor to attract US factories and technology. Japan was cheap labor in the '50s and '60s as was South Korea.
And now other Asian nations are following that model and even trying to attract factories from China with even cheaper labor.
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