Posted on 02/19/2016 6:56:22 AM PST by Kaslin
Republican hawks are aflutter today over China's installation of anti-aircraft missiles on Woody Island in the South China Sea.
But do these Republicans, good free-traders all, realize their own indispensable role in converting an indigent China into the mighty and menacing power that seeks to push us out of Asia?
Last year, China ran up the largest trade surplus in history, at our expense, $365 billion. We exported $116 billion in goods to China. China exported $482 billion worth of goods to us.
Using Census Bureau statistics, Terry Jeffrey of CNSNEWS.com documents how Beijing has, over decades, looted and carted off the greatest manufacturing base the world had ever seen.
In 1985, China's trade surplus with us was a paltry $6 million. By 1992, when some of us were being denounced as "protectionists" for raising the issue, the U.S. trade deficit with China had crossed the $10 billion mark.
In 2002, it crossed the $100 billion mark. In 2005, the $200 billion mark. In each of the last four years, Communist China has run an annual trade surplus at the expense of the United States in excess of $300 billion.
Total trade deficits with China in the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Obama era? $4 trillion. Total U.S. trade deficit in 2015 -- $736 billion, 4 percent of our GDP.
To understand why Detroit look as it does, while the desolate Shanghai Richard Nixon visited in '72 is the great and gleaming metropolis of 2016, look to our trade deficits.
They also help explain America's 2 percent growth, her deindustrialization, her shrinking share of the world economy, and the stagnation of U.S. wages as manufacturing jobs are replaced by service jobs.
Those trade deficits also explain the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.
Yet, with the exception of Trump, none of the GOP candidates seems willing to debate, defend or denounce the policies that eviscerated America -- and empowered the People's Republic.
Workers, however, know what our politicians refuse to discuss.
They are being sold out for the benefit of corporate elites who pay off those politicians with the big cash contributions that keep the parties flush.
Politicians who play ball with Wall Street and K Street know they will be taken care of, if they are defeated or when they retire from public office, so long as they have performed.
Free trade is not a zero-sum game. The losers are the workers whose jobs, factories and futures are shipped abroad, and the dead and dying towns left behind when the manufacturing plants shut down.
America is on a path of national decline because, while we have been looking out for what is best for the "global economy," our rivals have been looking out for what is best for their own nations.
Consider OPEC, which is reeling from the oil price collapse. Russia is colluding with Saudi Arabia and Iraq to cut production to firm up the market and prevent prices from falling further.
This is pure price fixing, but we all understand self-interest.
What might a U.S. national-interest-based trade policy look like?
Controlling the largest market on earth, we might impose on foreign producers a cover charge, an admissions fee, a tariff, to get into our market.
Example: Impose a 20 percent tariff on foreign cars entering the USA. This might raise the cost of a Lexus or Mercedes produced and assembled abroad from $50,000 to $60,000.
However, if Lexus or Mercedes buys or makes all their parts in the USA and assembles all their cars here, no tariff. Their cars could still sell for $50,000. This would be a powerful incentive to shift production here. As an added incentive, all tariff revenue could be used to reduce or eliminate corporate taxes in the USA.
Between the Civil War and World War I, under Republicans, the U.S. became the world's greatest industrial power and a wholly self-sufficient nation. How? We taxed foreign goods entering the United States, but did not tax the profits of U.S. companies or the incomes of U.S. workers.
The difference between economic patriots and globalists who inhabit corporate-funded think tanks and public policy institutes is that the latter think of what is best for their corporate benefactors and the global economy. The former put America and Americans first.
Academics revere Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Richard Cobden.
But none of them ever built a great nation. Patriots look to Alexander Hamilton and those post-Civil War Republicans who built the greatest national industrial powerhouse the world had ever seen.
Indeed, what great nation did free trade ever build?
As father of a united Germany, Chancellor Bismarck said, when he decided to build Germany on the American and not the British model, "I see that those countries which possess protection are prospering, and that those countries which possess free trade are decaying."
So it is true today. Unfortunately, it is America, now wedded to the fatal dogma of free trade, that is decaying.
A true sales or use tax is applied at the point of sale to the final buyer, or at the retail level. That being the case, there would be no point in assessing the VAT at the point of importation of goods. That VAT on imports is adding costs to imported goods to make up for VATs charged at various wholesale or other points before something is sold to the final buyer (of new goods). But those levels of taxation have nothing to do with imported goods.
The VAT on imported goods is nothing but a tariff designed to treat imported goods as if they have been through business transactions in the VAT country prior to becoming a finished good, when in fact they have not.
Some in the US are trying to change this unfair border tax treatment of US goods:
A paragraph from the Wiki "Value added tax" entry:
Many politicians and economists in the United States consider VAT taxation on US goods and VAT rebates for goods from other countries to be unfair practice. E.g. the American Manufacturing Trade Action Coalition claims that any rebates or special taxes on imported goods should not be allowed by the rules of the World Trade Organisation. AMTAC claims that so-called "border tax disadvantage" is the greatest contributing factor to the $5.8 trillion US current account deficit for the decade of the 2000s, and estimated this disadvantage to US producers and service providers to be $518 billion in 2008 alone. Some US politicians, such as congressman Bill Pascrell, are advocating either changing WTO rules relating to VAT or rebating VAT charged on US exporters by passing the Border Tax Equity Act.[53]
You need to learn to understand something more complicated than a single move in a game of checkers.
I haven't used it to justify tariffs. I've said the loss of thousands of factories and millions of jobs have significantly increased unemployment and the millions of Americans qualifying for the some of the trillion annually paid out in government poverty programs.
And we can add that those job losses also contributed to the skyrocketing false claims for disability benefits.
Of course out-of-control immigration and little immigration law enforcement is part of it. But very complex problems like our unemployment and trillion in annual poverty program payouts have more than one cause, and usually several causes. And the loss of thousands of factories and millions of manufacturing jobs is definitely a major part of it, if not the major part.
You need to learn to understand something more complicated than a single move in a game of checkers.
Okay.
The thousands of factories and millions of 1)jobs exported to cheap labor nations are a major reason we have seen the 2)drastic increases in beneficiaries accessing these programs.
Did I clarify your 2 moves?
Price adjustments.....
What about “market fluctuation” do you not understand???
Have to do more research on it, but this article says the lower labor participation rate is due to a population aging out of the prime employment years (which I was definitely suspecting), younger people staying in school longer (yet another government-created catastrophe created by cheap, subsidized loans so people can go to school without working) and they say the third cause is lower participation by females. I don’t know if they explained that last part adequately, but I doubt shifts in manufacturing is a main cause of lower female employment.
A tariff should be used to stop AMERICAN companies from MOVING overseas, causing American workers to lose jobs...They, then bring back into the country the products that they were making in the states by American workers at pretty much the same retail price but costing them less...
The tariff would actually level the playing field...
Of course Trump is right..., but you still have IDIOTS that NAIVELY and are VERY GULLIBLE. They believe hook, line and sinker, that RIGGED TRADE AGREEMENTS are good for America.
They remind me a lot of people that are government assistance that play lotto.
We seem to have a few socialistic globalists in here....
Does the article claim that there a millions of unfilled jobs in the US? The demand for labor does not necessarily decrease if the supply decreases.
And what did the article say about 1.1 million legal immigrants each year, and the several hundred thousand illegals and temporary workers who enter the US each year, little things such as H1-Bs? I’m not buying it there the total labor force willing to participate is smaller.
The $10 tariff causes the domestic market to fluctuate? Why?
What are you talking about?
If foreign oil becomes more expensive because a $10 tariff is placed on it, what domestic producer will leave his price unchanged?
What do you think causes most all domestic market fluctuations?
Your refusal to answer the question.
Was my comment about self reliance too complicated for you?
And you have???*LOL*
“...What do you think causes most all domestic market fluctuations?...”
I’ll give you a little hint...S&D...
I'll go slowly.....because....you know.
Which is more in demand, domestic oil at $32 or the $42 foreign oil?
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