Quote:
Originally Posted by reckless
Now, now, that's not what the financial, political and 'free' trade experts on this site say.
Those tens of thousands of manufacturing plants and factories closed in the past 35 years ... and those 700,000 plus blue collar jobs lost ... or the billions of US dollars and wealth transferred from America citizens to China, Mexico and others such as the international cabal of Fortune 500 corporations and their partners-in-crime bankers and paper shufflers ... all mean nothing to them. They're the smartest guys in the room, despite being wrong all the time.
Thanks to those one world/one market international globalists, with the help of the bought and paid for GOP and Democrat elites, this country has not had a trade surplus since 1975 or so! That's OK too, according to the smarty-pants, since steel workers really should learn another trade, such as coding in C+ or python.
Shameful for that thinking and for what's really happened as a result, but then again, it's still all a-OK according to our resident geniuses because they could now buy socks, scarfs and underwear at Dollar General or Wal-Mart cheap.
|
Exactly.
Free trade can work well when both sides have similar salary and cost structures, similar regulations, and everyone has good intentions and is fair. However, when conditions are very different, one side can win and the other side lose.
When you are running a large trade deficit you are losing.
They are getting the jobs and using their trade surplus to buy our stocks, bonds, real estate, and businesses (getting wealthier). We are getting the cheaper but slowly depreciating cars, electronics, clothes etc. and the liabilities for all the bond interest with accompanying political pressure from abroad because they own all our bonds.
The only ones that make out really well in the US are the large US multinational corporations that move their operations overseas to take advantage of cheap labor, lax regulations etc.. and the subset of people that have surplus savings to invest in them (those that didn't lose their job or take a job with lower income)
Why is it that people can understand that businesses will leave California for Texas or other greener pastures when the taxes, regulations, workers comp costs, and salaries etc.. are not similar, but not understand that companies will leave the US when taxes, regulations, and costs are not comparable. At least when they leave CA, it's another group of Americans benefiting from the switch. When it's global trade and you are losing, America is losing just like CA.
Trump is correct on trade. All the free trade economists have been wrong. Maybe they'll be right after another 50 years, but not before the rest of the world extracts so much wealth from the US we have dropped to their level while they were rising to ours.
I'm no fan of tariffs. That's not a solution. It's a risky policy if it gets out of hand. But if they are used as a hammer to try drive fairer trade deals that will allow US companies to export more and bring jobs and companies back to the US, so be it. We have been getting our clock cleaned for decades on free trade. More of the same is a worse solution.
