Trump's protectionism

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So your telling me something that cost less to make elsewhere, and is going to me more expensive to produce in the US becuase of the standard of living will somehow be more obtainable?

The myth is this has anything to do with unemployment. Unemployment when up after the bust, cause by people spending on the never-never, and the bad debts that resulted.

What about all those that were able to extend their house, that wouldn't have been able to without good value materials and labour? Have they got poorer? Don't think so.

What about the US businesses that benefited form the material and services that helped lower the costs and barriers to entry.

Western wholesale markets, tend to have built in protectionism. This produces barriers to entry of US business. Chinese "wholesale" is simple a cost/price distinction.

Industrial revolutions happen once, restarting them is near impossible. Even China is on the way out, one is yet to happen in Africa. As standards of living increases in China, Chinese goods will get more expensive.

Don't let the lowered unemployment figures fool you. The economy still sucks for many.

Sure it won't be solved by protectionism thought.

Some Americans their ancestors emigrated, becuase of protectionism was causing them to starve. Look up the corn laws.

I'm into free trade, not protectionism.

Nobody has mentioned that Trump is pitching himself as an anti-globalist anti-corporate.

However I suspect his own dealing in other countries are just as collusory.

I suspect like all big players he will avoid competition where he can get away with it.

i wish it was still 2014.

I know I've mentioned this before, but one of the few things that can get my blood pressure up (well, not literally) is the extremely narrow and nativist view some people have on the issue of free trade.

In 1979 (or more specifically, in December 1978), Deng Xiaoping launched the Chinese Economic Reform, thus opening up the Chinese economy to foreign investment, especially through the establishment of Special Economic Zones.

The impact of these free trade reforms is illustrated below:



From 1981 to 2010, China saw a drop in absolute poverty by 728 million using the lower poverty estimate of $ 1.90 a day, and 621 million using the higher estimate of $ 3.10 a day.

Using the lower estimate (extreme poverty as defined by the World Bank), the number of people lifted out of poverty in China from 1981-2010 is equivalent to 225 percent of the entire current population of The United States of America.

Also note that this *absolute* drop in the number of poor happened in a period where the population of China increased by 340 million, so the relative poverty has plummeted even more.

This development since 1981 is all the more remarkable considering that China only 23 years earlier saw the most devastating famine (The Great Leap Forward in 1958-1959) in the history of mankind - largely due to the explicit *absence* of free trade - which killed 36 million people or more and drove some people to cannibalism out of desperation.

Sources:
The World Bank - Poverty and Equity database (my graphical representation)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_E ... s_of_China
http://www.indexmundi.com/china/population.html

From a humanitarian perspective, free trade is thus literally the greatest social achievement in the entire history of mankind, and it's greatest beneficiaries have especially been the poorest of the poor. No development or aid project (public or private) has been able to produce even a fraction of the benefits from free trade.

And now we have not one - but *two* - presidential candidates in one of the richest countries in the entire world (where the poor are richer than the vast majority of the world's population) eager to dismantle free trade and (quite possibly) start a major trade war between the world's second and third largest economies.

The losers from such policies will definitely be the poorest of the poor, and especially the poor in the other Asian countries, who have yet to experience the massive increase in living standards that China has witnessed.

I care about my own QoL, not some faceless person in Asia

I do not want a humanitarian trade or economic policy, I want one that increases Americans QoL ad makes us rich.

You can take the vow of poverty, I will not.

It would be interesting if you could get a chart for the USA at the same time as China's emergence as an economic power, the wealth has gone from one country to another

Free trade is fine if the playing field is level but it's not so there can't be any competition, American workers shouldn't have to compete with third world communist slave pens. These countries protect their own industries, we don't. That's not free trade, I'm not one of these people who think it is a benefit above all else to have free trade if is steals all our jobs, maybe if your are one of the lucky few you can benefit from the slave goods but for most we've felt the crunch.

Personally I think we should shift away from income taxes to an across the board tariff, why should individuals of this country pay to just live while these foreign free loaders get to import their slave goods and steal our jobs?

Look at Vietnam's the economy it is picking up nicely.

Then your barking up the wrong tree.

Of course it is. And here is a Vietnamese version of the Chinese graph above:



(same source as above)

Here we are "only" looking at a poverty reduction of 31 (extreme poverty) or 41 million, depending on definition.

But hey, who cares... They're just a bunch of faceless Asians, right?

And the same relative reduction in poverty applies to Vietnam as well: This poverty decline coincided with a population increase in Vietnam from 1992 to 2012 of more than 20 million people.
http://www.indexmundi.com/vietnam/population.html

The US signed a bilateral trade agreement with Vietnam in 2000 (came into effect in 2001). Furthermore, the US normalized trade relations with Vietnam in December 2006 as part of Vietnam's admittance to the WTO.

Unsurprisingly, Bernie Sanders - who was member of the House of Representatives in 2006 - voted against the latter:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll539.xml
https://www.congress.gov/109/bills/hr64 ... 6406ih.pdf

So did 183 other members, but since it was an Omnibus bill, individual members might have had different reasons for voting "Nay" (or "Aye", for that matter).

(I think Sanders voted against the bilateral trade agreement back in 2000 as well, but I don't have an overview of older congressional records right now.)

Bernie Sanders, however, has made his views about US trade with Vietnam quite clear subsequently, so it is fairly safe to assume that he is no friend of the Vietnamese poor.

I always like dropping this exact argument on liberal types who get a little to pious with the 'we care about the poor, you're all a bunch of heartless bastards' routine, as it tends to pointedly cut through their BS; I never really tried it on protectionist conservatives, they never seemed to care about the callous heart charge as much as liberals do, and don't mind being seen as America first.

Protectionism and Isolationism will only lead to trouble.

why? because you say it does? I think the last 100 years is a testament to the fact that the alternative hasn't led anywhere but trouble.

We have to remain part of the international community. We cannot isolate ourselves.

Imagine if we remained isolationist during WW II? Imagine what would have happened if Hitler took the whole of Europe? If there was no Lend-Lease, and then intervention, Western Europe, probably including England, would have become part of the Third Reich. Russia would have been more difficult, though.

Last 100 years of what? Protectionism.

US is a country that levies trade, whist lobbying other countries to drop theirs. Nothing new there.

You just want your Putin figure, a guy pretending to be nationalistic, talking vague, creating an illusion of strength and stability. A perfect cloak their own dodgy dealings.

Honestly good luck to you, if you have to learn the hard way so be it.