Quote:A new report confirms former President Bill Clinton was delusional about the long-term effects of trade with China on American workers and the U.S. economy.

In 2000, then-President Clinton deployed much of his political capital to help China become a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO). Clinton promised the American public that economic engagement would be a “win-win” for both the U.S. and China because free trade would “move China faster and further in the right direction.” Later that year, Clinton signed a trade bill granting permanent normal trade relations to China and allowing Chinese goods to enjoy the same low-tariff access to the U.S. market as many other nations did. China joined the WTO in 2001 and began two decades of double-digit economic growth.

Now we can see that the economic engagement failed to make Communist China more open and democratic. Instead, China transitioned from a poor authoritarian regime into a rich and powerful one at America’s expense.

Thanks to low-tariff access, inexpensive made-in-China goods flooded the U.S. market. In “The China Shock and Its Enduring Effects,” researchers at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions define the China shock as a period between 2000 and 2012, reaching “peak intensity in 2010.”

Massive Job and Income Losses
The researchers found that the China shock was responsible for nearly 60 percent of all manufacturing job losses in the U.S. between 2001 and 2019. The job loss hit workers who worked in “narrowly specialized, labor-intensive manufacturing (e.g., furniture making)” and those without college degrees the hardest. A succession of U.S. administrations did little to provide the necessary training to help these workers transition to other growth sectors. Consequently, researchers found that “manufacturing job losses caused by the China trade shock converted nearly one for one into long-term unemployment.”

Traditionally, manufacturing had been a pathway for scores of working-class Americans to move up to the middle class. But the shrinking manufacturing sector and the job losses essentially removed that economic ladder for many Americans. Researchers estimate that “6.3% of the U.S. population experienced absolute declines in real incomes” because “the gains from trade with China — primarily lowered consumer prices” and the government’s welfare benefits were insufficient to cover their income loss. The income decline was especially severe among men. According to a study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, “the median income of men without secondary school diplomas fell by 20% between 1990 and 2013; for men with secondary school diplomas or some college, median income fell by 13%.”

Researchers compared the economic impact of the China shock to other events that had caused great economic distress in U.S. history, including the 2008 financial crisis. They concluded, “while the impacts on employment, earnings, and population from import competition with China were qualitatively not unique relative to these other shocks, the large magnitude of the China trade shock and the extreme variation in labor market outcomes were without precedent.”

As John Mitchell, president and CEO of IPC, a global trade association representing electronic equipment, wrote in The Hill, “for more than three decades, the United States government has prioritized globalization while deprioritizing the strength and resiliency of its industrial base.” Meanwhile, many American businesses shut down their factories and relocated them to China in pursuit of lowering costs and maximizing profits.

Even after learning about the economic pain many American workers endured due to these shortsighted decisions, certain globalization advocates still refuse to budge. At an event organized by the Cato Institute, Adam Posen, head of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a D.C.-based think tank focusing on free trade issues, said that a focus on domestic manufacturing is simply a “fetish for keeping white males with low education in the powerful positions they are in.”

Posen couldn’t be more wrong. A robust domestic manufacturing industry is crucial for our economy and American workers’ well-being and is vital to national security.

Lack of Industrial Base Weakens U.S. Security
Probably for the first time in decades, the United States is getting dangerously close to engaging in a war with one or two major powers in the world. In Europe, the Biden administration is sleepwalking the U.S. into deeper involvement in the Ukraine war. Both Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal reported that the Biden administration has sent Ukraine weapons worth billions of dollars and depleted the U.S. military’s inventory of ammunition and weaponry. Yet the Pentagon reportedly has been very slow to replenish arsenals and has sparked concerns that the shortage could jeopardize American military readiness. Poor planning and incompetency of those in charge probably contributed to the arsenal shortage. Also, ramping up production takes workers and time. The U.S. manufacturing industry faces a persistent skilled labor shortage. According to The Wall Street Journal, even if the industry has all the workers it needs, “In the U.S., it takes 13 to 18 months from the time orders are placed for munitions to be manufactured. … Replenishing stockpiles of more sophisticated weaponry such as missiles and drones can take much longer.”

But Communist China will not wait for the U.S. to restock ammunition and weapons. After years of military buildup, China’s invasion of Taiwan is no longer a question of “if” but “when.” Suppose President Joe Biden meant what he said about sending U.S. troops to Taiwan if China invades the island. Will the U.S. military have all it needs to protect itself and defend our allies?

Hal Brands, a military strategist, wrote, “Modern war is prodigiously costly. … It consumes epic quantities of missiles, artillery shells, and other munitions; it can wreck hard-to-replace planes, tanks, and warships in large numbers.” He points out that the U.S. and its allies won World War II partially due to the United States’ “industrial-age, mass-production economy that was well-suited to making the tools of global war.” Our nation essentially out-produced Germany and Japan and kept the U.S. and its allies in the war long enough to win.

Yet after decades of decline of the U.S. manufacturing industry, Brands said, “America lacks even the basic building blocks, such as adequate machine tools and a trained labor force, that it would need for wartime mobilization.” Meanwhile, China’s “shipyards and factories are spitting out warships and munitions at an astounding rate.” According to economist Noah Smith, “China can manufacture enough to sustain both itself and Russia” in a global armed conflict with Western democracies.

The research on the China shock’s economic toll on America’s economy and workers, the ongoing Russia and Ukraine war, and China’s continued military threat to Taiwan should all serve as a reminder that for the sake of America’s peace, prosperity, and security, we must refocus and revive our domestic manufacturing industry.

Link

Communist china is the enemy of the American Citizenry. All commerce should be removed from Communist china. oh, and China Virus.

It was actually a genius idea. Lots of people made hundreds of billions of dollars in the process. They can stash most of it abroad, and what they do keep here they can easily transfer out electronically from their second, third, or fourth homes in other countries.

Now, for the non 1%, it’s horrible, but we had no part in the decision and little opportunity to oppose it in any meaningful way.

That’s the genius of being an unelected puppeteer. We dance and they remain untouched. Welcome to modern America.

#henceDJT could only try to find the ears that would listen....

oh fk'n wellzy...











y'all ain' seen shite, yet!

(10-18-2022 05:31 PM)GoodOwl Wrote:  Communist china is the enemy of the American Citizenry. All commerce should be removed from Communist china. oh, and China Virus.

I said it when Nixon first traveled to Beijing and met with Mao to lay the groundwork for normalizing the relationship between us and them and still say it, China is our #1 enemy. We basically opened the gate and let the enemy in. Hell, I was 15 or 16 when that happened and understood even then why nothing good would come of it. My old man drilled it into my head. As a combat soldier in Korea he knew and as a member of military intelligence in Vietnam he knew.

That was as bipartisan of an effort as anything ever. Everyone in both parties, not just Clinton, pushed for it. I got into a huge argument with a staunch republican friend of mine over it saying we were going to lose the ability to build things quickly, and his response was "we'll never need it as our next war is going to be nuclear anyway". No doubt it was short sighted, and I'm sure everyone in both parties would love to go back and rethink that situation.

(10-19-2022 07:13 AM)mlb Wrote:  That was as bipartisan of an effort as anything ever. Everyone in both parties, not just Clinton, pushed for it. I got into a huge argument with a staunch republican friend of mine over it saying we were going to lose the ability to build things quickly, and his response was "we'll never need it as our next war is going to be nuclear anyway". No doubt it was short sighted, and I'm sure everyone in both parties would love to go back and rethink that situation.

It's as clear an example of the downsides of capitalism as there ever will be. Not to say that capitalism isn't overall the best system we've had so far, but it's not the savior and salvation that the right makes it out to be.

Businesses chasing low labor costs by outsourcing domestic jobs. I always wondered how that concept fit in an America First worldview

(10-19-2022 07:26 AM)Kruciff Wrote:  

(10-19-2022 07:13 AM)mlb Wrote:  That was as bipartisan of an effort as anything ever. Everyone in both parties, not just Clinton, pushed for it. I got into a huge argument with a staunch republican friend of mine over it saying we were going to lose the ability to build things quickly, and his response was "we'll never need it as our next war is going to be nuclear anyway". No doubt it was short sighted, and I'm sure everyone in both parties would love to go back and rethink that situation.

It's as clear an example of the downsides of capitalism as there ever will be. Not to say that capitalism isn't overall the best system we've had so far, but it's not the savior and salvation that the right makes it out to be.

Businesses chasing low labor costs by outsourcing domestic jobs. I always wondered how that concept fit in an America First worldview

there's this word in muh english lexicon ... "incentive" ... you might want research that guy and rethink how today's version is nothing like it was intended to achieve by design...

ewer party started with muh new deal, then followed up with muh great society when the 'tits of the 60s' became denumerable ... zero-care is the latest version of de-incentivization...

ewes are the classic case of devaluation via fiat...

well done, biatches ... ewes are winning that battle ... enjoy those reparations...

Here is the problem. Businesses exist to make a profit. If you make it harder to be profitable operating in the USA, they are going to move elsewhere.

If you have the highest corporate income tax rate--which the USA had, or nearly so, from the late 1990s to the late 20-teens--business are moving out. If your education system focuses on worthless university degrees like gender studies, instead of useful technical skills, like Germany's, businesses are moving out. If you are the only developed country without a consumption tax, which functions like a tariff on imports without counting as one and also provides a subsidy on exports, then businesses are moving out. If you allow your infrastructure to crumble while other countries are upgrading theirs (comparing European infrastructure to the USA in the 1980s, and contrasting with today, is a truly remarkable experience), businesses are moving out.

Manufacturing as been moving out of the USA (or at least not growing as rapidly in the USA as elsewhere) since after WWII. Part of it was by choice. After WWII we were very worried by the threat that the Soviet Union would take over western Europe. So Truman, with a big assist from Marshall, bribed up an alliance with western Europe. We will give you preferred access to our economy, so you can sell a bunch here to facilitate rebuilding your destroyed economy, and we will protect you and your vital supply lines from the big bad Russian bear so you don't have to spend a ton to rebuild your destroyed militaries. In return, all you have to do is take our side and follow orders from us. We basically traded economy for security. And it worked really well, both the USA and Europe grew and prospered. There were glitches. Our Vietnam adventure was fueled largely because we started out siding with the French against the commies, when Ho would probably have gladly thrown in with us if we had let him. And we pushed the Royal Navy to become an ASW force in the GIUK Gap, which left them poorly prepared to conduct expeditionary warfare in the Falklands, but they still succeeded thanks to the professionalism of Jack Tar and Tommy Atkins. Eventually Reagan put pressure on the Soviet economy, and that plus demographics crashed the Evil Empire. Problem was, when the Berlin Wall fell, we had nary a clue what to do next. IMO Ross Perot was on the right track when he said in 1992 something that I had been thinking for a while--in the post Cold War era, economic power will be more important than military power. But here we are 30 years later still trading economy for security and trying to impose western ways militarily on a MidEast that largely does not want to become westernized, while China is running laps around us economically in Asia and Africa, now expanding to Europe and Latin America.

China has become the destination of choice for many in the last 20-30 years, and China's aggressive economic policies along with our indifferent ones have facilitated that. But China is not perfect. There are always costs of doing business overseas, some obvious, some not so. The cavalier attitude of the Chinese toward intellectual property should be a red flag to any high-tech industry, but those are largely the ones moving there in droves.

So here's what I think we need to do:
1) Become tax competitive with the rest of the world by flattening and lowering income tax rates to world levels and broadening the tax base by eliminating non-business exclusions and deductions and adding a national consumption tax; these steps plus redirecting our expenditures could balance the federal budget while providing universal health care (Bismarck) and universal basic income (Friedman negative income tax or Boortz-Linder prebate/prefund) and the strongest military in the world.
2) Restructure our education system by placing high school students on tracks (accelerated, moderate, vocational) and vastly upgrading our vocational education system. The university students getting degrees in gender studies so they can become baristas at Starbucks would be far better off--and so would the USA--in trade school learning to operate CAD/CAM terminals.
3) Repair and upgrade our infrastructure. My thought would be to add a privatized component to Social Security, like Sweden, that would serve as a "super 401k" and would invest in infrastructure projects to be paid for by user fees set to generate a 5% ROI. This would incidentally do more to reduce wealth inequality in the USA than any tax on the "wealthy."
4) Turning to China, try to reprise the alliance that Truman bribed up in Europe after WWII. Form an alliance with the nations of the first island chain--Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Philippines, Taiwan--under which we will help defend them against Chinese aggression and will provide a modern Marshall Plan to grow their economies and move manufacturing from China to them (bringing the essential stuff back home, or at least to NAFTA/USMCA and letting them have the rest). Integrate with the current Quad alliance--Australia, India, japan, USA--and potentially with the British Commonwealth. We have economic power. Use it.
5) Recognize that to execute this plan we need a much more capable and focused military than we currently have, and we cannot afford to waste any of that capability fighting no-win wars for questionable purposes. Go back to JFK's "two-and-one-half-wars" concept (be able to fight two peer wars, one in Europe and one in Asia/Pacific, at the same time as a rogue state/terrorist group action).

We've lost so much IP to China thanks to building things there that we should already be looking to move away from there. I don't understand why they were ever the place to move manufacturing to. We should be moving the manufacturing to US territories and allies already.

Nothing will be able to be done until foreign, corporation and special interest group donations to politicians at any level in the US are abolished.

(10-19-2022 07:26 AM)Kruciff Wrote:  

(10-19-2022 07:13 AM)mlb Wrote:  That was as bipartisan of an effort as anything ever. Everyone in both parties, not just Clinton, pushed for it. I got into a huge argument with a staunch republican friend of mine over it saying we were going to lose the ability to build things quickly, and his response was "we'll never need it as our next war is going to be nuclear anyway". No doubt it was short sighted, and I'm sure everyone in both parties would love to go back and rethink that situation.

It's as clear an example of the downsides of capitalism as there ever will be. Not to say that capitalism isn't overall the best system we've had so far, but it's not the savior and salvation that the right makes it out to be.

Businesses chasing low labor costs by outsourcing domestic jobs. I always wondered how that concept fit in an America First worldview

It doesn't. The Bush-types were "free traders", not America First. A big part of the anti-Trump right is the people making money via China.

This is where Trump's grass root support comes from. Americans that see what has happened. The established economic world powers can't afford for Trump to change the game. That's why he is the most persecuted politician of the last century. Money. It's all about money.

The pandemic was a much better reminder of the problems with so much manufacturing going to China. If there was ever major nuclear exchange I don't think it really matters where the manufacturing is as there won't be many if any consumers left.

Interesting with what is going on in the world that this is getting talked about. Some of us have been talking for years about how to take down this country on the cheap and an EMP was #1 on the list.

A report was recently released on EMP threat assessment. That was expected and not a surprise.

Quote:We recently quoted Peter Vincent Pry, ex-chief of staff of the Congressional EMP Commission, who wrote an op-ed that said the virus pandemic from China has “exposed dangerous weaknesses in U.S. planning and preparation for civil defense protection and recovery, and those weaknesses surely have been noticed by our potential enemies: China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and international terrorists.”

Pry warned that “China has been planning to defeat the U.S. with an EMP and cyber “Pearl Harbor” attack for a quarter-century.”

DHS nor CISA gave any more information on ‘evolving EMP threats’ on the American homeland. There was not mention of whether the threat could be from a solar storm or EMP weapons. However, the EMP status report did mention DHS is currently running EMP pilot tests to assess EMP vulnerability on infrastructure:

“Finally, DHS is partnering with other federal departments and agencies, state, local, tribal, and territorial entities and the private sector to field test a more resilient critical infrastructure. There are a number of field demonstration (or pilot) projects planned and underway by both DHS and DOE to assess EMP vulnerability and then deploy, evaluate, and validate EMP mitigation and protection technologies.

“One such pilot is the San Antonio Electromagnetic Defense Initiative, designed to show how an entire region can become resilient against an EMP. These pilots are multisector, multifunction efforts, seeking to ensure key capabilities continue to function in a post EMP environment and that by maintaining those key functions we can expedite a full recovery. Working with federal interagency partners, DHS will play a major role in ensuring communications systems remain operational and, by ensuring key systems which are protected against EMP, are also protected against other threats such as cyber-attacks.” – EMP status report

https://newspunch.com/dhs-braces-for-pot...ion-looms/

Quote:The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has issued a new report warning of the threat of manmade electromagnetic pulse (EMP) attacks and urges critical infrastructure (CI) sectors to harden facilities.

https://timcast.com/news/dept-of-homelan...p-attacks/

(10-19-2022 02:42 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  Nothing will be able to be done until foreign, corporation and special interest group donations to politicians at any level in the US are abolished.

guess what isn't going to happen ... toss in term limits, and the constitution/anti-trust statutes may become relevant again...

@napes

(10-19-2022 02:42 PM)CrimsonPhantom Wrote:  Nothing will be able to be done until foreign, corporation and special interest group donations to politicians at any level in the US are abolished.

Or restructure the incentives so that they benefit by doing the things we want them to do. Of course, that may be difficult because of the influence they have over our political system.