http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43614400 i have a few questions. 1. will apple phones & apple computers have heavy tariffs put on them since they are made in china ? 2. who gets all the money made from the Government Taxation in a Capitalist society ? 3. what would "winning a trade war" look like in an ecconomic working example between USA & China ?
1) apple would fight this or just move their manufacturing elsewhere. 2) elites 3) bring back some manufacturing jobs that will soon be automated anyways so not completely a win. this is all about the elites and corporate greed. people are merely a commodity. when further automation takes over, less people are needed. when less people are needed, the elites still attain the production/goods. there is no reason to bargain. this is actually both good and bad as it reduces the need for a larger population, therefore less pollution, and eventually less competition for resources. https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/18/officials-thousands-of-skilled-jobs-are-going-unfi/ otoh, americans do have their advantages. they have pawned the dirty manufacturing jobs to other nations but demand those unskilled jobs back. do they want to bring back pollution and inflation to their shores just so they can buy their own products? or is it that the general population is too stupid to fill these positions? it doesn't look that way as most of these can be filled even by those with less than a bachelors.
They will get a break since Apple is a "US" company. The government. Which then goes into things like buying bombs, paying government workers and soldiers, paying for medicare/medicaid etc. From whose perspective?
Yeh The iowa hog farmers are hoping that the chinese will still want pork (some of them seem to be in denial)
very simply.... it appears the product prices have not included the required cost to pay for the labour to build them. thus the corporate entity has sub-prime-mortgaged the cost of labour out to collapse the market. now the cost of making the product is more than what the corporates want to pay and they have poisoned the market in pricing with no return to the market with profits to maintain the market health. its been dying for a while, so it appears. between the outright liars claiming free-lunches are perfectly normal in the global trade market to the conspiracy nut jobs hell bent on watching the entire global economy collpase its hard to see if there is anyone talking facts in the public domain.
china has cheaper pork and chinese wont pay more for US pork so its all over ? china likes cheap stuff too. china can also expand its own pork production it a much lower cost than US pork and has absolutely no need for US pork at all ?
china has other plans. it's trying to move it's manufacturing base to africa. the positive is that they pay market price instead of exploitation and to help build infrastructure. it's a win/win for both.
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/ The takehome for me (this article and others) was that the professional economists advising the governance of the US actually didn't know that the US manufacturing labor force had been hit as hard by job loss to other countries as it had been. They weren't dissembling and misleading - they actually believed that US manufacturing productivity had been rising overall, that the US was automating as fast as the other major economies, rather than just bleeding jobs. Might be relevant.
Another factor: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/american-factories-have-one-very-big-problem Apparently, "total factor productivity" - the aspect of productivity accounted for by higher quality work and better management and streamlining of production and so forth, not by invested capital or improvements in labor - has actually been falling. All the automation and labor pruning and so forth has been just barely keeping up with the loss of performance and capability in actually doing the work. That's scary, because there is no obvious fix. You can't throw money at it, you can't throw effort at it. And it's not true of China, or afaik any other First or Second World industrial power. And it's not the situation the US wants to be in at the onset of a trade war, or unsettled situation of any kind.
What I find so surprising about this is the apparent economic illiteracy of the people behind this policy. Surely the reason the US has a trade deficit is that it is spending more than it earns. The recent tax cuts will make this worse, not better, by putting more unearned money in people's pockets. If the administration demands China artificially restricts exports to the USA, the US economy will just suck in the equivalent imports from somewhere else, including places to which China will have diverted the exports they can no longer sell to the USA. It seems quite self-defeating. Or have I got this quite wrong?
Not wrong, but possibly misdirected: The recent tax cuts were targeted much more toward wealthy people, who spend significantly less of their income on imported consumer goods from China either directly or indirectly. And the people who do most of the buying from China are not doing it with "unearned" money - they were paying their taxes with earned money, as well.
