Posted on 03/25/2006 8:07:17 PM PST by ncountylee
The Durabrand 10-inch portable DVD player available at Wal-Mart retails for $199.94. A group of senators would like to raise the price to $254.67. The Creative Zen Nano Plus 512-megabyte MP3 player seems like a bargain at $89.72; less so at $114.39, the price the senators would prefer that you pay. The price hikes would be the result of a 27.5 percent tariff on goods imported from China, a proposal sponsored by Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and is scheduled to come up for a vote in the Senate this week.
Schumer and Graham aren't crazy, of course—they know better than most that taking money out of voters' pockets is a sure way to be sent packing. In other words, that 27.5 percent price hike won't be coming to a retailer near you anytime soon. But as an attention-getter, it's pretty good, and attention is what the two senators, and a number of colleagues who support them, are after. The chief bogeyman they want to flog is China's communist government, which—according to Schumer and the rest—deliberately keeps its currency undervalued in order to sell more cheap imports to the United States and other countries. Reasonable economists differ on that question. The tariff, if you buy the argument, would bring prices on Chinese imports closer to their unsubsidized value, leveling the playing field for honest tradespeople in, say, New York and South Carolina, who can't possibly produce goods as cheaply as the Chinese and still earn enough wages to buy all the DVD and MP players that they need.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.com ...
Build your own company and then you can hire who you like.
endthematrix: "That's "just" your trade war. China has so much US capital funding that IF (never happen) the screws were set that the China economy would fall flat."
Thanks to its massive trade surpluses, China has plenty of capital. This capital is fueling asset bubbles in Chinese cities instead of productive investments. What the Japanese real estate investors discovered, and what Chinese and US real estate investors are about to discover is that the world is awash in capital - it's new and productive ideas that are scarce. The problem isn't capital - it's the patents and designs embodied in the Chinese and foreign plants that set up in China because they can export to the US. If a bilateral trade embargo is imposed, both Chinese and foreign manufacturers will move a big chunk of their production abroad, devastating China's domestic economy.
Joy to economic interdependency?
Your last point is noted. Move over Vietnam...
Did you hear the one about the lady who went to a combination fat farm & casino in Las Vegas and lost her ass?
> Naw, Just go and manufacture a superior product at a cheaper cost and put your friends to work. What, impossible? Welcome to the New Economy.
But I do. I just don't do it in flat screens. That's the beauty and morality of a free economy - I don't have to trade in the village square for my underwear.
Chinese Boeings. Oy.
I don't care where they go as long as I own the stock, however selling planes to foreign countries keeps people working here. If Boeing lost its contract I think I saw 25,000 jobs would be lost here. how many planes do you think Boeing would need to make if they only sold to people in the US. 3/4 of their sales are outside the US.
Theoretical, at best. Like predicting the stock markert.
Fact is, the Chinese are filthy rich. Absolutely swimming in money.
Yes, the VAST majority of Chinese are poor... but the vast majority don't have ties to American companies.
Sorry.......
I'm a little sick of folks complaining about everything EXCEPT what got us in this situation in the first place......
Instead of REAL FIXES to the causes of Job Migration, it's a blame game and Pie-In-The Sky fixes like tarriffs.....
Drop the Corporate income tax on manufacturing, and jobs START to come back...
Cap Civil Liability, and Jobs START to come back...
In short, drop the GOVERNMENT-REGULATED things that ADD COSTS to businesses in America, and the JOBS return. It's really as simple as that.......
Without those, businesses could COMPETE for available talent, wages RISE, and benefits INCREASE..........
The problem with China's economy is the communist Chinese government which dictates inadequate consumption and excessive investment in China. Instead of spending some of those export profits on American and European consumer products, the Chinese government buys Russian military hardware and US treasury bonds. The Chicom dictatorship is deliberately generating a huge trade deficit with the US because they don't want their people buying our products. They pay their workers very little so they can make huge profits from state-owned companies and buy weapons and US debt instead. The underlying cause of much of the huge trade deficit is lack of freedom and human rights in China.
Here's where I end my input.
You have some good points there. We have too many trial lawyers in American and too few engineers.
I mean I totally understand you, I share some of your concerns as well. However, your solutions (tariff, embargo) would only achieve the opposite of what you desire (American jobs and competition). Worse, it will make the "American worker" (that you purport to support) poorer in real terms in addition to devaluing the dollar (increasing inflation).
Business usually works out its trade differences and most are resolved reasonable. Its when govt. gets involved that the real problems start. However all the government sanctions in the world will not stop commerce. They can only delay it. The real problem for the US would be that they have few merchant ship if there was a trade war. The three largest shipping lines in the world are located in Hong Cong, Indonesia, and Dubai.
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