09-07-2019, 10:31 PM
(09-05-2019, 11:36 AM)Tim Randal Walker Wrote: A friend of mine described Chinese exports as "cheap trinkets". This obviously is not stuff that the United States is dependent on. (Quite unlike the situation with the OPEC oil embargo). It is very easy to imagine getting this kind of stuff from Mexico.
I'm old enough to remember when cheap, shoddy stuff was often disparaged as "Made in Japan". Japanese manufactures became better, outpacing American manufactures in quantity and becoming applied to bitter-ticker items such as televisions. With CRT televisions, there was a time when Sony Trinitron was the one to get if you wanted something that had a chance of lasting fifty years. Well, obsolescence made a joke of that. The actor Patrick Stewart shocked his Hollywood buddies by driving a Honda Accord to the lot -- he could have bought any new car that he wanted except for a Duesenberg, and that only because it has not been manufactured for eighty years. The Honda Accord is a perfectly good car, one that people have been known to keep for twenty years. (Whether the car was made in Japan or Ohio might be a different story).
Then it was South Korea and Taiwan. Then China. Maybe Myanmar, Laos, and Cambodia are next?
Quote:In terms of money the U.S. has a humungous trade deficit with China. Financially, China is much more dependent on the U.S. than the U.S. is dependent on China. A trade war may bring economic pain to some U.S. industries, but over all the United States has the advantage.
What Trump promised was that jobs would return to places like Rochester, New York; Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; Anderson, Indiana; St. Louis, Misery; and Camden, New Jersey. He promised much and will deliver far less -- lower real wages, more power to shareholders and corporate bureaucrats in business. The only job boom that I can imagine in Trump's America is in domestic servants, always a sign of a shrinking middle class and the filthy rich getting even more filthy-rich. .
Quote:I don't think the Chinese quite grasp something important...just how little enthusiasm Americans have for globalization.
What it will take will be the disappearance of discount marketing in Big Box stores, with people being satisfied again to buy less at list price and make it last or do without -- as they did before Wal-Mart and K-Mart.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.
