We have to face the facts here. China is destroying America. They took our jobs, left us with the unemployed and are gleefully watching us implode our civil rights because frantic and desperate people are doing desperate and sometimes violent things here. There's an easy answer. Impose trade tariffs. Its a law. You vote on it. It taxes all Chinese goods making them cost more, which then makes room for American goods to compete because the prices balance out. This then allows American manufacturers to hire American workers, they get money, and start paying bills, buying restaurant meals, taking vacations, trading in their cars for new ones, renovating their house, lots of economic activity which would abruptly END the Depression. China already does this to American goods. Most countries do. Return the insult, I say.
The only arguments against China Trade Tariffs are the facetious complaints that the Chinese are buying our Treasury bonds and would sell them all in protest and crash our economy. I don't think so. Even if they did, T-Bills pay out in US dollars, which the last couple heads of The Fed create by pressing keys on a computer at US Treasury, created with nothing to back it. So we'd lose nothing. Literally nothing.
Creating money out of nothing is where the inflation is happening. Not in wages. The Money Supply is known as M3 (not the car) and used to be reported by the US Treasury department in a report until 2003 when they were allowed to hide it. Now nobody knows how much fake money there is, and it was the first step in a long slide into economic uncertainty which makes investing in US T-Bills a big risk and caused international credit rating agencies to downgrade the USA. At the time, economists worried that there would be a run on the dollar, however, attacking foreign countries and the Euro collapse in Greece distracted people from the only competitor capable of giving us any trouble. So foreigners kept buying the US T-Bills and we didn't collapse in a 1929 mess. Not all at once. The very rich stayed rich. The poor stayed poor, and half the Middle Class slid into poverty. Ponder that.
Democrats thought this would be great because most poor people vote for Democrats, not realizing it's in the Democratic Party's best interest to keep the poor there to keep getting votes. Dependency is the primary Platform. Republicans have become a little too Rich oriented and have put forth no bills to regulate/deny Chinese trade, something they NEED to do if they're going to stop exporting jobs. India is their own worst enemy, having terrible quality and driving away business. Any company that uses Indian call centers is currently in scandal in the real world of Customer Service horror stories. But Chinese quality issues are famous, Chinese worker suicides don't cause Apple cultists to boycott smartphones or shame them, the hypocrites. We could be making those here. Motorola has moved production of smartphones to Texas after years of manufacturing overseas. Thank Google for that.
Many big computer firms no longer do business with Indian firms because their quality is terrible and it was hurting their products and stock values. That's what you get where average employee turnover is 3 weeks. I've heard horror stories of contracts for computer code that arrive with no documentation and all the people who worked there have long since left for elsewhere, yet the Indian firm itself is demanding payment for the useless garbage. India has an even bigger problem. If not for GMO wheat that resists a nasty fungus called "Rust", India would starve. So would Pakistan. And that has to be reformulated annually because the Indian wheat rust is so aggressive it defeats every variation within a year. Kinda scary place to be when your population is 99% impoverished and there's a billion hungry mouths dependent on Wheat. America needs to get out of that economy. It is teetering on violent collapse. Everybody still depending on India will see a major blow to their bottom line. And they have nuclear weapons. So does Pakistan. And they hate each other. Yeah, just NO.
Look, America needs to start employing as many people as possible with living wage. It will end most of the crime and spree killings of the distressed and hopeless. Give families a reason to stay together. Give children TWO parents instead of one that's never home. Full employment solves our problems. This dependency thing is ridiculous. Bring back the jobs. Manufacturing doesn't have to be boring. Considering most of the factories shipped the equipment to China already, we'd be building new factories, maybe inside abandoned Walmarts, for supreme Irony value. We already know that JIT (Just In Time) is actually a bad thing in the real world because a single transport or manufacturing delay can cripple or collapse a production run or sale that's been hyped as the next big thing. Apple deals with those constantly. So does Toyota. When the Tsunami hit Japan, it was in their car manufacturing district and suddenly you can't get a Honda or Toyota or Suzuki and the Accord and Outback and Camry Diesels didn't happen. They were supposed to be the next big thing. Their JIT saw the parts destroyed along with the worker's lives. All that effort and preparation were lost. JIT is just too fragile.
Warehouses and production runs, with flexible retooling for the next run, that's the modern way. And since the USA has exported its Pre-War factories machinery, we have no excuse not to modernize. Design and put together a line, bring in the employees as temps, do a run for all production expected for domestic use, warehouse it, shut down the line, send the temps home, do another line for a different product, repeat. Do this in every town with access to the raw materials and labor, anyplace with reason for production. Its more efficient and still provides jobs. If the temps can coast or bounce from line to line, such as multiple factory buildings doing coordinated production runs so the labor shifts from job to job, just as the designers are moving from product to product in different buildings. Keeps folks working, busy, not making trouble. It becomes sensible. This is what America needs.
It allows the non-factory workers to serve them breakfast and sell the movie tickets and fix their cars etc. All the usual associated spin-off businesses to primary production. This is how Oakland was before the Bradley Fighting Vehicle Union mess in San Jose killed off military contracting in California back in 1981. Full employment was good for Oakland, and crime was much lower then. It was the end of manufacturing jobs that brought Oakland low and gave it the reputation of a murder/rape hellhole filled with crack and thugs it has now.
Our cities don't have to be like that, and manufacturing doesn't have to only be in cities either. Any transport hub, or even trucking dock, is fine. Railroad spurs work great for that too. There are dozens of empty towns in the Central Valley with cheap real estate and empty shops which would hugely benefit from local manufacturing. Something more than just agriculture (drying, canning, rice polishing, bagging). Give people something to aspire to, locally, and you'll have healthier and less disrupted communities losing their youth to the cities. They'll stay close to family and maybe out of trouble.
It all starts with trade tariffs against all Chinese goods. Since we're not selling them anything anyway, it won't hurt us. And they will starve if they don't buy our food, so we win either way. They can dump our bonds. The money is fake anyway and with half the population in poverty and unemployed already, who cares? It's not like it will get noticeably worse for the poor. If we leave things alone, more of us will end up poor anyway.
We have nothing to lose by imposing trade tariffs. China can sell to other markets. We have to protect our own.
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