| You're right. Japan and China are not taking our money. In fact, they are loaning us all kinds of money. More truthfully Japan and China are taking our jobs. The long term effect of our current policy is to hollow out the market for high skilled, high pay American workers. The greatest book I ever read on economics was Economics in One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt. In that book, Hazlitt makes a strong case for free trade. However, Hazlitt also said the best economic policies are "those that deliver the greatest economic benefit in the long run and not the short run." Trying to take back clothing manufacturing from Asia is not going to work. If we did that, retail stores couldn't operate because they need the high profit margins from the clothing to make up for the cost of workers at their stores. But in auto manufacturing and other high end industries, I think we need to stop the "sucking sound" that Ross Perot once warned us about. I think we need a whole series of trade discussions on FR. It's a huge -- and complex -- issue. |
You’re right about trade needing much more thought/discussion.
Our trade imbalance can’t be solved easily. One problem for the US is we have a high standard of living and yet we must now compete with hard-working low-standard-of-living people in the rest of the world.
Something has to give and unfortunately, we’re outnumbered and outworked by more desperate people in the world to the point where Trump’s seat of the pants trade-barrier ideas won’t work. What’ll have to give is the US standard of living (e.g. wages) will have to drop. So many Americans are spoiled. Unless we work smarter and continually invent new productivity tools in the fight against cheap labor, we’re sunk.