“Not only are our policies failing us, they are empowering China. What the hell is in that D. C. water?”
Money talks. Wall Street and multinational corporations made billions on the migration of US manufacturing to Asia in the 1990’s and 2000’s. Politicians were given large campaign donations to support ending quotas and lowering tariffs. The loss of tariffs, and taxes paid on profits from US manufacturing, forced Washington to borrow more and rely on individual income tax revenue. It was no coincidence the Clinton income tax increases of the 1990’s correlated with the passage of NAFTA and the lower of tariffs to China and other Asian countries.
No doubt the Chinese have been channeling money to individual politicians for two decades through laundered campaign contributions, insider trading information, and probably offshore bank accounts. Clinton should have been impeached, tried and convicted for illegally taking campaign and legal defense funds from a foreign government (remember Charlie Trie?) and then giving the Chinese access to high technology secrets. No doubt too many politicians were already receiving back channel payoffs from the Chinese for Ken Starr to explore this issue or Congress to investigate.
Wall Street is corrupt, Congress is corrupt, the Executive Branch is corrupt and the bureaucracy is corrupt. We are moving rapidly toward becoming the totalitarian state the foundering fathers feared.
You ask, “Can someone explain to me how anyone could back tax breaks for corporations moving jobs overseas?”. My answer is the politicians who vote for these tax breaks receive more from the interests benefiting from those breaks than they do from the middle class voters losing their jobs. As we’ve reached the point of 50% of the population living off the other 50%, the “takers” now rule the “producers” and the politicians behave accordingly. It matters not whether the taker is a welfare leech or a Wall Street banker. Keep in mind, our Congressmen belong to the taking class, not the producing class. Most of them started their political careers as lawyers.
China can currently make stuff cheaper than the states can, because they are a society of slaves. That might not last forever, but while it is going on it creates chaos for the erstwhile US manufacturing base.
Of course the devils advocates need to be considered too. Let’s take the extreme case: if China could furnish everything we wanted, free, would we be foolish to refuse it?