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.
The other day Cruz compared himself to Ronald Reagan (another disturbing parallel to our current megalomaniacal president) saying that Reagan was for `free and open trade’. Cruz has bought into the myth created by (as put by Buchanan here:) “ ... 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.”
IOW, our cheap labor and open borders, NWO/NAU friends.
Remember Gore dragging out the photo of Smoot Hawley and using it in debates with middle Bush? Democrats think of it as some sort of talisman now: “Free and open trade, good; protecting American workers, bad!”
Reagan was for free, open and *fair* trade.
Buchanan: “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.”
Reagan did this, imposing a tariff on Japanese cars, knowing that the Japanese were subsidizing their car industry just as they subsidized their electronics industry until the only American TV manufacturer was Zenith, and then one day Zenith was gone.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa107.html
We don’t need Buchanan to tell us—we don’t make things any more. We used to have a textiles industry, Reagan vetoed a tariff bill to protect our textiles industry.
So why is that we have Americans out of work, but American legislators still want to bring in foreigners to replace IT workers, even requiring them to train their replacements if they wanted their severance package?
And we don’t need another Party of the People-like president who has never made a payroll, who has produced nothing in his life but objections and reams of paperwork. Go Trump.
Then no tariff.
Exactly. Government should determine winners and losers rather than millions of free people freely making billions of purchasing decisions that are in the best interest of their families. We should increase taxes and the power of government over the economy to protect American industry from competition!
And we do have free trade...across state lines.
"All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state." Sound familiar?
And the opposite is true. Every time a new trade deal reduces or eliminates tariffs on goods imported into the US, that increases the incentive for US transnationals to move production to some cheap labor nation.
That's been a primary goal of many trade agreements: eliminate tariffs and make relocating US plants to cheap labor nations even more profitable because the goods they ship to the US will be tariff free.
And TPP will only continue and accelerate that practice. The usual BS about opening foreign markets for US products and creating jobs in the US is just that, BS. Agriculture and a few industries benefit from some trade deals, but that's about it. The deals always increase the incentives for US manufacturing to be relocated to cheap labor nations.
I’ve come to the conclusion that FRee trader types, meaning those whose espouse and make excuses to offshore business to communist (china, vietnam, cuba) and socialist (mexico, central-south america, europe) are no better than the people who did business with the NAZIs or the USSR.
If you want to abandon the US to deal with communist and socialsts, go right ahead. Pack up all of your US assets, shed all of your US workers, close all of your US assets, and leave. But keep this in mind: you will have NO protections under US law, anything that you want to import into the US will have a stiff tarriff against it, I.P. laws won’t apply to you, your former US patents and copyrights will be null void, and your now foreign company will be removed and not allowed to be listed on any US stock exchange.
If the FRee trader globalists want to continue, this is what will happen.
This is 30+ years of outsourcing/offshoring rearing its ugly head. People are truly pissed of, and they want blood.
And the means tested government poverty programs that already exceed a trillion annually are ultimately paid by the present and future taxpayers. The thousands of factories and millions of jobs exported to cheap labor nations are a major reason we have seen the drastic increases in beneficiaries accessing these programs.
And "free" traders think the one-sided deals provide cheaper products to consumers? Add in that annual trillion in poverty programs and see what the savings from free trade look like.
You are correct, but also a lot of the trade imbalance comes from currency manipulation.
I expect to get flamed on this, but Trump is NOT right on trade. If he starts a trade war with the rest of the world, the American economy will tank. Our economic problems are due to socialism, faulty bank regulation, and radical environmentalism. We need to stop blaming the Chinese for our economic folly.
Depends on what measures one uses. Their policies gave them the industrial might to start and fight two world wars against several of the largest and most prosperous nations on earth. And they had the knowledge to quickly recover from WWII and become an exporting powerhouse, selling some of the most high quality and highly sought products produced anywhere in the world.
And they remain a major exporter and a one of the sounder nations financially.
You’re not getting flamed from me.
Thanks for posting this Kaslin.
The crux of the biscuit is currency manipulation. If we allow China to peg the yuan to the dollar artificially in the world system, they have a built in advantage for trade. The ONLY lever we have to make them stop manipulating their currency is by threatening (and following thru with if necessary) huge tariffs to compensate.
Those who say this hurts consumers are profiting from the current system and don’t want their fortunes to change. Consumers will benefit by once again having real jobs instead of having to ask “do you want fries with that?”.
I’ve been to China a lot. My wife is from Xiamen, just across from Taiwan on the mainland. We have exported our entire middle class over there, and they are spending like trailer court tweakers that just won the lottery. It’s time to bring our economy back from the NWO.
“And they had the knowledge to quickly recover from WWII and become an exporting powerhouse, selling some of the most high quality and highly sought products produced anywhere in the world.
And they [Germany] remain a major exporter and a one of the sounder nations financially.”
True, but the post-war Germany “miracle,” especially in the critical first ten years, was accomplished by embracing the free market principles of Ludwig Erhard, not the protectionist proposals of Pat Buchanan and Donald Trump.
The main thing wrong with your logic is that there are no jobs. And the foreign goods are not any cheaper. Watch and see how much Ford discounts vehicles made in Mexico with cheap labor. Free trade did not build the American economy, it is destroying it (in case you haven’t noticed).
Post war Germany was made possible by the Marshall Plan and American tax dollars rebuilding the nation from scratch. It was our first real effort at “nation building”. Same with Japan.
“...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...â€
“That would negate your complaint.”
That’s ‘pie in the sky’. You can make statements like “could sell for $50,000” all you want. The real question is what would they sell for.
People who want tariffs only want to increase their wages at the expense of their fellow Americans. While that sounds good, the victims are those who are forced to pay higher prices for the tariffs.
“And the means tested government poverty programs that already exceed a trillion annually are ultimately paid by the present and future taxpayers. The thousands of factories and millions of jobs exported to cheap labor nations are a major reason we have seen the drastic increases in beneficiaries accessing these programs.”
OK, fine. Get rid of the welfare programs. But don’t force your fellow Americans to pay for the inflated price of your goods.
Amen. Enough of this ideologically driven national suicide. Free Trade is killing this country by impoverishing her workers thereby destroying the greatest middle class the world has ever seen.
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