Monday, September 02, 2019

Quora: Every country and people make mistakes sometimes, China made it once by stealing jobs from Americans. Still why is President Trump not showing mercy to China? What if, China implodes due to Trump's trade war?

Robert Walker, studied at Student of History answered.

China didn’t steal American jobs, Ronald Reagan did. For all those Republicans that keep whining and crying about the loss of American manufacturing jobs to China, Mexico and other countries, it was your great hero Ronald Reagan who created the policies and treaties that encouraged American corporations to offshore manufacturing thus creating the rust belt.

Reagan signed trade agreements giving away high paying American jobs for the sole purpose of busting unions. And Reagan got rid of the laws made during the depression to protect banks causing the savings and loan crisis and setting the stage for the sub-prime mortgage crisis in 2007 that led to Bush 2's Great Recession.

The current batch of Republicans have left Reagan's policies in place, so even now American companies still get tax benefits and subsidies for moving American jobs offshore.

And the NAFTA treaty that moved so very many good paying American and Canadian jobs to Mexico was Reagan's brainchild. Trump's replacement for NAFTA will continue to move even more good paying American and Canadian jobs to Mexico.

Republican policies starting with Reagan have been geared to making the rich much richer, and all other Americans to be f*cked over and damned. Reagan was a great talker and con man, and he pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes. He gave Bush 1, Bush 2 and his buddy Cheney, Trump and all the lesser Republicans like Moscow Mitch, Paul Ryan and Newt Gingrinch the blueprint for turning the Republican Party over to the Dark Side.

There is absolutely, positively no possible way that China will implode from the trade war.

All of Trump's tariffs so far have done very little to slow down the flow of Chinese goods to the US, it just means American consumers are going to pay more for the things they buy. The tariffs were expected to cost the average American family about $1,000. By doubling down Trump has just raised their costs even more. The current reality is that China is the only supplier of many goods to the US. For any Chinese goods that can be replaced by others it will take a long time to re-jigger all the supply lines.

Even if Trump’s tariffs caused all of the demand for Chinese goods to disappear, it wouldn’t hurt China all that much. Trade with the US accounts for about 10% of China’s exports, which sounds like a lot of business to lose, but in the big picture China’s business with the US accounts for less than 3% of China’s GDP, which is an amount China can live without if it had to hunker down for a while.

On the other hand, there is very little China buys from the US that they can’t get elsewhere. Look at soy and pork as good examples so far. Therefore Chinese tariffs on incoming American goods could hurt the US a great deal. In any case, Chinese tariffs on incoming American goods are just window dressing anyways. The Chinese government DOES have the power to order Chinese companies to stop buying American goods, and have already used that power very effectively.

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