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!
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.
Trump wants to eliminate the trade deficit by expanding our exports, not by cutting our imports. It will be better for the economy
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.
The China Shock: Learning from Labor-Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade (PDF)
I read an earlier version of the paper last year. At the time, some economists were calling it the first scholarly paper ever written arguing against free trade. That's not what it is; but it does point out some things that classical free-traders ignore, which cause them to overestimate the benefits of free trade and downplay the problems.
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.
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That’s absolutely false. He railed against bad trade deals and cheating, such as currency manipulation.
It takes uber liberal economic illiterates like those at Vox to rail on free trade with China when we don’t have free trade with China.
Trump did no such thing.
He railed against STUPID TRADE DEALS with Mexico and China, negotiated by HACKS.
Trump said a million times he wants all kinds of international trade but with deals that benefit instead of harm America.
since it focuses on regions harmed by trade with China and doesn’t factor in benefits enjoyed by people elsewhere in the country.
Admittedly, I don’t always read these articles all the way to the end. Usually, I go thru the excerpt, and if it’s interesting I’ll click on the link. But that one sentence caused me to think about all these so called “free trade” advocates that railed against Trump. Those saying that he truly doesn’t understand it or he’ll turn back the clock.
Like most people, I don’t want to overpay for anything. But, as an American I really want to buy something made in the US. But, for now, things are what they are. If you really want to dig into the actual products, Chinese crap is just that, CRAP. Years ago they were manufacturing defective PVC pipe, causing home to flood all over the country. The resulting law suits, insurance claims, etc weren’t saving anyone any money. Whole home were completely gutted, all because they Chinese were putting out cheap, plastic pipes. Then they moved on to sheetrock. Anyone on here that is in the building business knows that for a while there, sheetrock was in very short supply. Builders went from ordering what they needed, plus 10%, to ordering it down to the sheet and you had better not made a mistake. Builder were having got place orders months in advance for homes that hadn’t even had their holes dug.
So, at the end of the day, trade with China isn’t really helping anyone, anywhere in the country. A $1 t-shirt sounds great, but if you have to buy a new one every other month because the material and craftsmanship suck, then maybe the benefits aren’t that good after all.
Most people don’t realize how fragile and poor our economy really is. We are propped up by massive debt. The Stock Market “gains” of recent years are mostly based on QE, more debt, and lies. The real unemployment rate is over 20%. Millions are on SS Disability because they cannot find jobs.