If you go to China, you'll see that American and European brands are everywhere. These companies are making massive profits in China. The trade is by no means in one direction.

They're still made in China. Volkswagen to Nike clothes.

That depends very much on the product. For iPhones, which are ubiquitous in China, what percentage of the value added comes from China? The final assembly is in China, but most of the value is imported. The same goes for many products.

Since you mentioned VW, I just looked up the figures for German exports, and the largest destination for German car parts is China.

China imports about $9 billion in German car parts each year. That's in addition to about $17 billion worth of cars exported from Germany to China each year, making China the 3rd largest export market for German cars.

Yet any suggestion of avoiding Chinese products or supporting Chinese business is often attacked as racism or nationalism.

Buying Chinese goods isn't actively hurting the US... it's helping by providing Americans with cheaper goods.

As they lose jobs and have even less purchasing power… or trade in their machinist job for work at the dollar store… yah. I bet they like that they can buy a $5 T-shirt instead of paying $30, swap their red-wings for off-brand shoes to trudge the dollar store as a security guard. But, it is a lovely bargain for the professional class. Give me cheap and take my middle class job!

> Give me cheap and take my middle class job!

The trade-offs with trade are a little more complex than that. For example, if foreign steel was super cheap, you could have the people previously working in steel work in construction, and build more buildings. Or if midwestern auto manufacturing jobs were middle-class due to unions, but the economy shifts to services like Amazon, there is no inherent reason why service jobs couldn’t also be unionized.

In principle it’s not that different from automation - you can think of either as a black box you put money in and get product out. If you are playing your other cards right (admittedly a big if) it would be possible to largely benefit from either.

Sure! Except instead of replacing the machinists jobs with higher value jobs, they replaced them with security guard jobs at the Walmart and Dollar Tree. That’s happened every round. The working class has never got the long shrift in this deal. They always get screwed but they’re supposed to believe ‘this time’ it will be different.

I wonder if they can’t just be more aggressive on fiscal policy and run the economy hotter, leading to mild labor shortages and people moving away from Dollar Tree jobs (because higher productivity jobs lure the workers away with better wages).

Traditionally they’ve been worried about inflation but they’ve overestimated that most of the past decade (although it’s jumped up recently in response to the massive short term Covid spending). I don’t think the new stuff being proposed, while large, is nearly as high on a yearly basis so hopefully it can hit a non-inflationary sweet spot (although who knows).

Agreed. Dumb tariffs are not the answer. It needs to be a more nuanced strategy that makes US goods competitive locally and abroad.

There will always be certain costs associated with doing business in the West that don't appear in places like China. The most well known one being worker's rights. Even if you come up with some sort of "nuanced" miracle strategy that can make the west competitive whilst maintaining workers' rights, you probably can't prevent China from copying it and yet again being at an advantage due to labor law differences.

One concrete thing I would 100% advocate though, which I guess is an example of a "nuanced" strategy as you alluded to:

Gimp / legislate away white-labelling of foreign products and drop shipping-like businesses. These have had a huge "spam" effect on products and consumer's brand-awareness that it'd be so worth it. It's made people unable to discern quality which is a huge win for places like China that at the bottom-end of the price spectrum simply don't have the quality we expect and would usually want to avoid by virtue of paying more.

This argument could perhaps make sense if you replaced the US with a western country with proper worker rights.

But you're trading that for manufacturing jobs.

Cheaper parts means you can spend on local labor. Its much more complex than "you should be forced to buy American no matter the cost."

now its ok to say it right? because the guy who fought against it was deemed a racist for saying it.

He was deemed a racist for all of his racist behavior. The most positive thing people had to say about his presidency was his efforts to confront China on trade, though the first phase of that trade deal appears to be a failure. I don't know how much blame to assign him personally though, we're not seeing many examples of success to compare it to.

To be clear, that guy was deemed racist for promoting stereotypes from a position of power. There are ways of fighting against CCP / Chinese govt. aggression without resorting to racism

sure. he was deemed a racist for saying china is responsible for the virus and was countered by politicians who willingly infected people with covid by pushing them to go to superspread events from chinatown parades to BLM riots.

Comments like these make it really difficult to not argue on the internet.

* He was deemed a racist for many reasons. One of which was using his leadership and influence to stoke anti-Asian sentiment. You're not debating this point, right? Whataboutism is one thing, but worse when paired with denialism.

* "Politicians who willingly infected people with covid" - Does it bother you that politicians would downplay the safety of American citizens related to an infectious disease to suit their own political ends? Or is this is a criticism you only levy against your political rivals? Do you really want to compare scorecards on Trump vs. his political rivals on public health?

* Ignoring that the vast majority of BLM events were peaceful, which superspreader events are you referring to? They were outside, in the summer, often mobile, with a large share of mask-wearing attendees. I don't see any evidence of any of these events becoming superspreader events.

He did do that, but to be clear he was also called a racist for things like imposing travel restrictions with China early in the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s hard to take seriously the claim that accusations of racism are always made carefully and never used as a cheap partisan attack.

>because the guy who fought against it was deemed a racist for saying it

The guy who was against it was a racist because he couldn't articulate anything other than "China bad" and his policies to address China were useless at best and harmful to America at worst. He only wanted to look tough against a made up enemy but refused to change anything at home.

If he was actually serious about competing with China, we would have been talking about Trump's infrastructure bill and had a plan on how to ween us off Chinese high-tech manufacturing (which is the best in the world), but now 4 years later we are scrambling trying to figure out how we will build fabs (one part of the equation) at home. For all the crying about China, he did shockingly little in actually addressing the issue (like almost all the issues he cried about).

Anyone who looks at out current situation and comes to the conclusion we need to bomb China is a racist in my eyes. They are only motivated a fear of a rising eastern power and have no motivation in actually investing stateside to improve American hegemony.

I find it somewhat surprising that people are still defending that loser.

Furthermore, how many US industries and companies are compromised? Hollywood, the NBA, Blizzard, are a few that come to mind.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/10/steph...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy