Look, this is the future of warfare. Drag your heels on that one as much as you like and find yourself in the same position as the old fleet admirals that felt big battle ships were the way to go.
Airplane and carrier killed the battleship. Its done. Its an inferior weapons platform. If you had a choice going into war between having a bunch of battleships or a bunch of carriers with planes, trained pilots etc... you're going for the carriers or you're going to lose horribly.
same deal with the AI systems. If you go into war, which do you want?
Do you want to die?
One of the problem with the anti AI stuff is it tends to draw from the anti war political movements.
Keep in mind, I'm not advocating war. War is terrible etc.
But war also happens and is sometimes required. Disarming or debilitating yourself so that when it happens you'll be crippled is not how you preserve peace. You preserve peace by being a clearly formidable power such that generally no one is dumb enough to challenge you. All the wars stopped through the certainty that they'd lose the war are wars PREVENTED by military capability.
True, having military capability will also cause your own government to engage in adventurist military campaigns because they think they can win the wars so why not.
That is true.
But then you also have to factor the possibility you could LOSE a war. Consider that price.
When you logically weigh the pros and cons, having a strong military is obviously superior to having a weak military.
Pros: Suppress hostile behavior from rivals. You win when hostilities happen.
Cons: Sometimes you'll have a dickbag government that will go to war when it shouldn't have gone to war.
Another good measure here is looking at what rivals would like you to do.
If you have some enemy power that would like nothing more than bathing in the blood of your people or whatever... what is their desire... going 180 degrees from that is often not far off wrong. I'm not saying just reflexively do that but naturally don't do exactly what they want. Unilaterally disarming yourself is what any hostile enemy power would love their opposition to do. Don't do it.
Here is my rule of thumb when it comes to military weapons etc... If I went to war personally, would I want that on my side or not?
If AI systems can save soldiers lives... which in this notional situation would be mine... I'm going to go with "yes, please".
If AI systems can help me achieve mission goals of killing my enemy etc... I'm going to say yes.
If we went with most of the logic of the anti AI robot crowd why would we have ICBMs, cruise missiles, high altitude laser guided bombs, artillary... In none of these cases are you looking into the eye of the enemy. You're pressing a button and people die.
We're not getting rid of this stuff.
The AI combat systems are going to happen. All you're going to decide here is whether you have them first or if you have to catch up as your people suffer.
But if Google doesn't want to participate? Cool. Plenty more where they came from. The people working for General Atomics are quite happy to make this stuff and are making it right now.
This is something out of a bad movie and they're actually doing it.
Go through the stages of grief at realizing you said something stupid... no denial... no anger... just accept it and we need not talking about it again.
You're not even processing the concept or assessing why things are one way vs another or why they have to be anyway or weighing the pros and cons of various concepts or looking at examples.
You're just saying "this is the way we do things so it must be that way."
Its not even an actual opinion. You're just mindlessly accepting things. Actually think about it next time.
The US is an exceptional context. The US is a large market, has vast domestic resources, has one of the most diverse economies in the world... I can go on. It is easily capable of being an exception given the long list of things that makes the US unusual.
As to cherry picking, no to the contrary I'm not ignoring the history. I'm taking the entire trade situation the US had prior to WW1 into consideration. You're outright ignoring it and pretending that only the current status quo is effective. This ignores the history of what led to the current status quo and why it was set up this way.
We set up the free trade system to support Cold War policy. You're ignoring that. That's worse than cherry picking which is not what I'm doing. You're doing something WORSE than what you're falsely accusing me of doing.
As to "fair trade" I don't think there is any way to actually manage something like that in any kind of objective sense. Its just going to be a negotiation. If you want to pay me MORE for whatever reason then I'll take that money and say thanks. If you want to pay me LESS for some reason then I'm going to try and find ways to increase what you're paying me.
Your "fair trade" concept would either require a rich party that didn't mind sacrificing its profit margin for some reason or an economic system that didn't care about money.
As you will... it seems like virtue signaling and empty lost causes to me.
You're right. The US did switch to the income tax via the World Wars. But that was only as a means to fund the military.
Again, prior to WW1, it was tariffs.
And they were still a very big part of government revenue through the time between WW1 and WW2.
Tariffs are not great income sources when international trade shuts down due to world wars. And the expense of WW spending exceeded what that revenue could pay for in any reasonable time span.
Regardless, the US economy was very productive, had very robust trade, and a relatively higher standard of living than its competitors whilst funding itself through tariffs.
As a separate issue, the Free Trade concept was promoted as an aspect of cold war policy.
The point being that absent the cold war, the free trade concept lacks a geopolitical purpose.
What was the point of the cold war? If there is a war, then there is an objective... something you are fighting over.
The US won in that it ultimately stopped the USSR from controlling global trade, global politics, and global culture. Where as the US has been dramatically more influential. Keep in mind, the Soviets had an interest in spreading their ideology to the world.
They failed.
And the US was dramatically more successful.
So the US did win. The US set the mold for most of the major structures in international policy throughout the world. The Soviets had very little input in the end. That is total failure.
I don't think you know much about the US labor statistics or how our subsidies function. We have housing assitance, health assistance, food assistance, etc. If you look at the statistics on the American homeless population you'll also find that it doesn't correlate with joblessness. For example, the US homeless population really started to go up in the 1980s and 1990s. This doesn't correlate with rising unemployment. It instead correlates with "de-institutionalization".
In the 1950s the US had roughly 500,000 people in mental institutes. Today, we have something like 70,000 despite double the population.
You can see similar correlations in the US prison population and evaluations of homeless people and prisoners shows a very high correlation of serious mental illness.
Seems like a nothing concession from China as best I've been able to find.
If China has a 25 percent tariff on US automobiles and outright forbids US beef... don't you think its a bit hypocritical to complain about the US imposing some tariffs as well?
This is how trade works. THIS for THAT. If the Chinese are giving the US a trade deal it doesn't like... then negotiations are reasonable. Why must either party accept a trade deal it doesn't like? The US has been complaining about chinese trade practices for years. Its been an ongoing thing from BOTH political parties.
Many like to just blame the evil Trump for this... never mind that Obama, Hillary, etc complained about it as well. That pacific trade pact that Trump killed was specifically marketed as a means to control chinese trade misdeeds. And Obama was pushing it... Hillary was pushing it... So... it seems like everyone agrees that china has to be slapped on trade. Which major player besides china itself disagrees? Because the entire american political establishment agrees. I'm sure the EU agrees as well since I've seen some German companies complain about Chinese tech theft.
Who is in your corner here, bub? Because whilst I see a lot of people trying to spin this to make their political opposition look bad, whenever they're in power they agree with the position effectively anyway... which merely calls into question their integrity when they say otherwise out of power.
Get over it. Its a real issue. Go through the stages of grief and arrive at acceptance... you're at denial right now so I expect you're going to try "anger" next... Save your breath... just go through bargaining, depression, and finally just take it. It is what it is. Accept it.
Who's auditing who is and is not adult? Who judges and on what authority?
The Soviet Union had a guy banging his shoe on the podium... still a super power.
Various countries have outright fist fights that break out in their legistatures... does that mean they don't get a seat at the table?
I can go on.
By what standard is the US deficient and compared to whom?
Chinese have a totalitarian autocracy. Does that make them adults? They literally kill people that disagree with them politically in their country. Its standard practice.
Who are you judging me against here, sport? The Swiss? Remind me when anyone cared what they thought.
Cellphones... where is the CPU made? Where is the ram and solid state storage made? Where is the circuit board made?
What china is doing mostly in these relationships is receiving a kit from various places and assembling it.
As to mexico... look at Michigan... they can build the entire car in state to say nothing of the country. China generally can't say the same thing as regards many of these products. They source from foreign third parties. And generally speaking the IP in any case is owned by foreign third parties... like the US.
You can look at global market share for these things if it helps you. Apple all by itself has 20% of the global market share. Samsung also has 20%. All the chinese companies combined have something like 20% of the cellphone market... MAYBE. It looked more like 10% to me for all them together but let us say I'm missing something and its double that. Apple has them at least matched all by themselves.
Beyond that, the double edged sword of not taking brands seriously means China has no brands that anyone cares about. They don't value patents or brands. And as a result they don't invest in them and they don't have patents or brands anyone cares about. These are systemic disadvantages.
The US has stronger brand name recognition in BANANAS than the chinese have in literally anything. If push goes to shove in a trade war, its going to be a slaughter.
Assuming a 100% termination of those exports and no alternative market to sell those goods anywhere in the world... which isn't very likely since some of those goods are of premium quality and would shove other suppliers out of the market before they would go unsold at their listed price...
You're looking at 7% of total US exports... and that's including both goods and services as you listed right there. US exports are about 2.4 Trillion a year. So... 164 billion / 2.4 Trillion = 7%
That would be unpleasant for the US.
The US's imports represents roughly 25% of China's total exports.
Now the argument here is that the US will have a hard time finding a market for in many cases... premium agricultural products which China buys from the US largely as a luxury and the US will not be able to source electronics assembly partners outside of China.
This doesn't make any sense.
I'm not arguing the Chinese don't have options. I'm just saying that objectively the US is in a better position. Ironically you suggested it was "I" that was ignoring the numbers.
You're saying 7 percent is larger than 25 percent. Why don't you actually compare the numbers. Because you demonstrably didn't do that.
Time will tell. As to china wanting to negotiate, really? What were they willing to offer to redress the US's grievances? What materially were they offering? Because we have a list here of things the US has been complaining about for well over a decade.
This doesn't change my initial point or criticism of you post.
You're suggesting that China can more robustly politically weather economic and political consequences than the US. So the US will cave because it cannot sustain even moderate damage where as China by this argument can ignore extreme damage by comparison without losing stability.
There are multiple problems with this argument.
First, China's ability to damage the US is in practice very limited. Their putting tariffs on their minor US imports is unlikely to impact the US economy measurably. Thus the damage to the US economy that is "not" propaganda will be negligible.
Second, to the extent the US economy "IS" damaged by this trade war it will be almost entirely self inflicted in that the damage will come by disrupting IMPORTS of chinese goods into the US. This at best can only be a very temporary inconvenience to US industry because there are many alternatives to China. There are an entire world of nations that have it in their interest to offer themselves as that alternative. They are currently and were previously marketing themselves as just that for... well always. What is more, what remains in china will not be stopped... merely subjected to a higher tariff which will marginally increase the cost. Wise corporations will diversify production and prioritize chinese production to the international market whilst prioritizing non-chinese manufacture to the US market. Thus efficiently addressing the bottleneck is actually pretty easy. THey don't need to produce enough outside of china to replace all production to the global market they sell to. They only need to replace the portion that is shipped to the US. This is a fraction of total production from the American Multi-Nationals that supply most US consumer demand. Point is, the "actual" damage is trivial if it manifests at all.
Third, China is hardly free from political instability. There are many factions within China that are increasingly challenging the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party maintains legacy institutional control and the oaths of the army. But the basis of their power at this point is largely founded on long term generational improvement in living standards. If that is disrupted then political instability is actually very likely.
Forth, there is serious discontent in the US political system with the long running status quo as regards trade. It has been a recurring point of contention at least since the Reagan administration and has the potential to unite typically democrat voting unions with tariff supporting republicans. Saying it has to go one way or the other on that ignores the polling statistics that have been surprising many establishment political parties in the US. Again, you want to talk reality and not propaganda... that is reality. The empirical evidence of these sentiments and that they're catching established political relationships by surprise is public record.
Fifth, the tales of representative republics being weak willed and blood shy is a tale as old as the republic itself. Every autocracy has made this criticism of representative republics and democracies from their inception. And yet, autocracies lose all the time to republics. There is a reason why republics are in international political ascendancy and autocracies which were once the only type of government are relatively waning. Trade wars are wars of attrition. The US has deeper pockets, deeper resources to draw upon, more options, a dramatically more diverse economy, and an incomparably more favorable geopolitical relationship with the world. Betting on China in this context is a sucker's bet.
Which is why autocracies always win against representative republics...
Oh wait, they actually tend to lose.
Seriously, play devil's advocate with the argument. Historically representative democracies tend to perform very favorably against autocracies. They have significant economic advantages over time and are dramatically more resilient than their detractors would suggest given that when push comes to shove... they tend to win.
The last two hundred years give a wealth of examples here. I'm actually sort of baffled as to why you wouldn't see that.
There really isn't anything the US gets from China that it can't get from another market. Its cheap plastic crap or packaged electronic goods from China... In the case of the plastic stuff we can get that from almost anywhere. In the case of the packaged electronic goods, they don't have to be packaged in China... we can shift assembly out of China. There was a fairly large cellphone assembly operation in Texas for example that was assembling Moto X's (Generation 1). Its really a tempest in a tea pot. People try to make out like if we don't maintain the status quo with this it will mean the end of our economy. Never mind that our economy didn't use Chinese assembly or sourcing to this extent 10 years ago. Some how we didn't die a firely death. Its all mindless hyperbole and chicken-littlism.
The US has strategic advantages and the rest of the Global market will be chomping at the bit to eat China's lunch. Its hardly like there isn't enough surplus industrial capacity around the world to soak up the difference.
Its a buyer's market out there. China sells as much and to as many players as they can. They are not limited by their ability but by the market's demand. If China loses the US as a market or has that trade restricted they cannot replace that trade with other markets because the global market is already saturated. Where as the US can easily source from other providers because just like China, most international exporters are limited by demand. If US companies come to other markets and say "we need to source from you instead" we'll have no lack of other markets more than happy to take China's place.
It doesn't matter. I wasn't talking about trade imbalances being silly or not. I was saying that China has greater economic exposure to restricted trade with the US than does the US with China. You can disagree with whether we should care about trade imbalances or not but indifferent to that if trade war happens china cannot help but be at greater economic risk.
Those countries are negotiating and are not adopting a hostile geopolitical posture.
South Korea and Japan have already agreed to alter aspects of their trade policy to avoid tariffs. So... what say you about that?
Your argument is that China is a scapegoat for trade issues throughout east asia.
To this, I have said that those other countries in East Asia have already caved to US requests for better trade deals and indifferent to that are not adopting hostile geopolitical policies.
I previously owned a US assembled Moto X that was made in Texas. It cost the same as any other smart phone. China isn't actually "making" the core components of most of the tech. They're mostly assembling. And that assembly costs are fairly incidental. Again, we had a Motorola cell phone assembly plant in Texas not long ago. The costs are marginal.
Do you want to do any kind of analysis on your argument? Are you actually curious as to whether what you're saying has any merit what so ever? Because I'm happy enough to go into detail on this one to enlighten you if you want.
Completely irrelevant... the tariff will do that as well and a trade war would still impact china more than the US.
It is a buyer's market. China is already selling to as many markets as it can.
IF china loses the US as a market or has that market limited China cannot replace the US market elsewhere because China is already saturating the Global market with their products.
However, the US can very easily source their needs from other countries or even domestically because there is a surplus of production and a deficit of consumption. As such the US can resource their needs from other markets at almost no cost where as China cannot replace US consumption by selling to other markets.
The point remains, China is at a disadvantage and should negotiate.
They have very little leverage and it is in their interest to cave. Being proud and refusing to negotiate is frequently stupid. This is business. The US has superior leverage, China has no ability to resist that simply by talking tough.
Slashdot Mirror
Look, this is the future of warfare. Drag your heels on that one as much as you like and find yourself in the same position as the old fleet admirals that felt big battle ships were the way to go.
Airplane and carrier killed the battleship. Its done. Its an inferior weapons platform. If you had a choice going into war between having a bunch of battleships or a bunch of carriers with planes, trained pilots etc... you're going for the carriers or you're going to lose horribly.
same deal with the AI systems. If you go into war, which do you want?
Do you want to die?
One of the problem with the anti AI stuff is it tends to draw from the anti war political movements.
Keep in mind, I'm not advocating war. War is terrible etc.
But war also happens and is sometimes required. Disarming or debilitating yourself so that when it happens you'll be crippled is not how you preserve peace. You preserve peace by being a clearly formidable power such that generally no one is dumb enough to challenge you. All the wars stopped through the certainty that they'd lose the war are wars PREVENTED by military capability.
True, having military capability will also cause your own government to engage in adventurist military campaigns because they think they can win the wars so why not.
That is true.
But then you also have to factor the possibility you could LOSE a war. Consider that price.
When you logically weigh the pros and cons, having a strong military is obviously superior to having a weak military.
Pros:
Suppress hostile behavior from rivals.
You win when hostilities happen.
Cons:
Sometimes you'll have a dickbag government that will go to war when it shouldn't have gone to war.
Another good measure here is looking at what rivals would like you to do.
If you have some enemy power that would like nothing more than bathing in the blood of your people or whatever... what is their desire... going 180 degrees from that is often not far off wrong. I'm not saying just reflexively do that but naturally don't do exactly what they want. Unilaterally disarming yourself is what any hostile enemy power would love their opposition to do. Don't do it.
Here is my rule of thumb when it comes to military weapons etc... If I went to war personally, would I want that on my side or not?
If AI systems can save soldiers lives... which in this notional situation would be mine... I'm going to go with "yes, please".
If AI systems can help me achieve mission goals of killing my enemy etc... I'm going to say yes.
If we went with most of the logic of the anti AI robot crowd why would we have ICBMs, cruise missiles, high altitude laser guided bombs, artillary... In none of these cases are you looking into the eye of the enemy. You're pressing a button and people die.
We're not getting rid of this stuff.
The AI combat systems are going to happen. All you're going to decide here is whether you have them first or if you have to catch up as your people suffer.
But if Google doesn't want to participate? Cool. Plenty more where they came from. The people working for General Atomics are quite happy to make this stuff and are making it right now.
Behold the Predator C Avenger:
https://youtu.be/v0dHKWjXn-E?t...
This is a dumb argument. The robots are coming. Have your philosophical freak out over it if you like but its going to happen anyway.
Given that you have to prove your affiliation to the communist party to donate to sperm banks in China, that day has not even remotely come.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ne...
This kind of hysterical chicken littlism out of you guys is... cowardly. What kind of a nation could people like you produce?
You'd be intimidated by anything.
Just take a page out of old B movies, realize you're a the streaking woman, and slap yourself.
Here you're going to have the unjustifed gall to presume to be offended. Never mind that you just suggested the US is more ideological than China.
Sperm banks.
And because I'm sure you're going to lack the integrity to concede the point and suggest I'm just giving one example that doesn't matter:
https://www.independent.co.uk/...
This is something out of a bad movie and they're actually doing it.
Go through the stages of grief at realizing you said something stupid... no denial... no anger... just accept it and we need not talking about it again.
Your argument is a "status quo" argument.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You're not even processing the concept or assessing why things are one way vs another or why they have to be anyway or weighing the pros and cons of various concepts or looking at examples.
You're just saying "this is the way we do things so it must be that way."
Its not even an actual opinion. You're just mindlessly accepting things. Actually think about it next time.
Its a myth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The US is an exceptional context. The US is a large market, has vast domestic resources, has one of the most diverse economies in the world... I can go on. It is easily capable of being an exception given the long list of things that makes the US unusual.
As to cherry picking, no to the contrary I'm not ignoring the history. I'm taking the entire trade situation the US had prior to WW1 into consideration. You're outright ignoring it and pretending that only the current status quo is effective. This ignores the history of what led to the current status quo and why it was set up this way.
We set up the free trade system to support Cold War policy. You're ignoring that. That's worse than cherry picking which is not what I'm doing. You're doing something WORSE than what you're falsely accusing me of doing.
As to "fair trade" I don't think there is any way to actually manage something like that in any kind of objective sense. Its just going to be a negotiation. If you want to pay me MORE for whatever reason then I'll take that money and say thanks. If you want to pay me LESS for some reason then I'm going to try and find ways to increase what you're paying me.
Your "fair trade" concept would either require a rich party that didn't mind sacrificing its profit margin for some reason or an economic system that didn't care about money.
As you will... it seems like virtue signaling and empty lost causes to me.
You're right. The US did switch to the income tax via the World Wars. But that was only as a means to fund the military.
Again, prior to WW1, it was tariffs.
And they were still a very big part of government revenue through the time between WW1 and WW2.
Tariffs are not great income sources when international trade shuts down due to world wars. And the expense of WW spending exceeded what that revenue could pay for in any reasonable time span.
Regardless, the US economy was very productive, had very robust trade, and a relatively higher standard of living than its competitors whilst funding itself through tariffs.
As a separate issue, the Free Trade concept was promoted as an aspect of cold war policy.
The point being that absent the cold war, the free trade concept lacks a geopolitical purpose.
US income taxes were instituted to pay for war spending. Prior to the WWs it was tariffs.
As a separate issue...
Free Trade was instituted and promoted to support US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Income tax and free trade are different points.
Income tax was to pay for wars.
Free trade was to promote US foreign policy during the Cold War.
Prior to those conditions the US used tariffs, had high economic success... so... now that that is cleared up.
Questions or comments?
Never heard of CAP apparently.
What was the point of the cold war? If there is a war, then there is an objective... something you are fighting over.
The US won in that it ultimately stopped the USSR from controlling global trade, global politics, and global culture. Where as the US has been dramatically more influential. Keep in mind, the Soviets had an interest in spreading their ideology to the world.
They failed.
And the US was dramatically more successful.
So the US did win. The US set the mold for most of the major structures in international policy throughout the world. The Soviets had very little input in the end. That is total failure.
I don't think you know much about the US labor statistics or how our subsidies function. We have housing assitance, health assistance, food assistance, etc. If you look at the statistics on the American homeless population you'll also find that it doesn't correlate with joblessness. For example, the US homeless population really started to go up in the 1980s and 1990s. This doesn't correlate with rising unemployment. It instead correlates with "de-institutionalization".
In the 1950s the US had roughly 500,000 people in mental institutes. Today, we have something like 70,000 despite double the population.
You can see similar correlations in the US prison population and evaluations of homeless people and prisoners shows a very high correlation of serious mental illness.
can I get a citation?
I found this:
https://www.zerohedge.com/news...
Seems like a nothing concession from China as best I've been able to find.
If China has a 25 percent tariff on US automobiles and outright forbids US beef... don't you think its a bit hypocritical to complain about the US imposing some tariffs as well?
This is how trade works. THIS for THAT. If the Chinese are giving the US a trade deal it doesn't like... then negotiations are reasonable. Why must either party accept a trade deal it doesn't like? The US has been complaining about chinese trade practices for years. Its been an ongoing thing from BOTH political parties.
Many like to just blame the evil Trump for this... never mind that Obama, Hillary, etc complained about it as well. That pacific trade pact that Trump killed was specifically marketed as a means to control chinese trade misdeeds. And Obama was pushing it... Hillary was pushing it... So... it seems like everyone agrees that china has to be slapped on trade. Which major player besides china itself disagrees? Because the entire american political establishment agrees. I'm sure the EU agrees as well since I've seen some German companies complain about Chinese tech theft.
Who is in your corner here, bub? Because whilst I see a lot of people trying to spin this to make their political opposition look bad, whenever they're in power they agree with the position effectively anyway... which merely calls into question their integrity when they say otherwise out of power.
Get over it. Its a real issue. Go through the stages of grief and arrive at acceptance... you're at denial right now so I expect you're going to try "anger" next... Save your breath... just go through bargaining, depression, and finally just take it. It is what it is. Accept it.
Who's auditing who is and is not adult? Who judges and on what authority?
The Soviet Union had a guy banging his shoe on the podium... still a super power.
Various countries have outright fist fights that break out in their legistatures... does that mean they don't get a seat at the table?
I can go on.
By what standard is the US deficient and compared to whom?
Chinese have a totalitarian autocracy. Does that make them adults? They literally kill people that disagree with them politically in their country. Its standard practice.
Who are you judging me against here, sport? The Swiss? Remind me when anyone cared what they thought.
Cellphones... where is the CPU made? Where is the ram and solid state storage made? Where is the circuit board made?
What china is doing mostly in these relationships is receiving a kit from various places and assembling it.
As to mexico... look at Michigan... they can build the entire car in state to say nothing of the country. China generally can't say the same thing as regards many of these products. They source from foreign third parties. And generally speaking the IP in any case is owned by foreign third parties... like the US.
You can look at global market share for these things if it helps you. Apple all by itself has 20% of the global market share. Samsung also has 20%. All the chinese companies combined have something like 20% of the cellphone market... MAYBE. It looked more like 10% to me for all them together but let us say I'm missing something and its double that. Apple has them at least matched all by themselves.
Beyond that, the double edged sword of not taking brands seriously means China has no brands that anyone cares about. They don't value patents or brands. And as a result they don't invest in them and they don't have patents or brands anyone cares about. These are systemic disadvantages.
The US has stronger brand name recognition in BANANAS than the chinese have in literally anything. If push goes to shove in a trade war, its going to be a slaughter.
Assuming a 100% termination of those exports and no alternative market to sell those goods anywhere in the world... which isn't very likely since some of those goods are of premium quality and would shove other suppliers out of the market before they would go unsold at their listed price...
You're looking at 7% of total US exports... and that's including both goods and services as you listed right there. US exports are about 2.4 Trillion a year. So... 164 billion / 2.4 Trillion = 7%
That would be unpleasant for the US.
The US's imports represents roughly 25% of China's total exports.
Now the argument here is that the US will have a hard time finding a market for in many cases... premium agricultural products which China buys from the US largely as a luxury and the US will not be able to source electronics assembly partners outside of China.
This doesn't make any sense.
I'm not arguing the Chinese don't have options. I'm just saying that objectively the US is in a better position. Ironically you suggested it was "I" that was ignoring the numbers.
You're saying 7 percent is larger than 25 percent. Why don't you actually compare the numbers. Because you demonstrably didn't do that.
Time will tell. As to china wanting to negotiate, really? What were they willing to offer to redress the US's grievances? What materially were they offering? Because we have a list here of things the US has been complaining about for well over a decade.
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
This sort of shit is typical. Is china "actually" going to do anything about this sort of thing?
Or this:
https://variety.com/2017/film/...
or this:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/6...
These are not "EVIL TRUMP" sources here, chum. The guardian... Variety... CBS News...
I can do this all day. What did the happy harmless did nothing wrong chinese offering? I'm dying to know "actually" what you're referring to here.
*gets popcorn*
how is anything I'm saying hypocritical? Try to make the argument. Double dog dare you.
Time will tell. There are also powerful interest that benefit from tariffs.
This doesn't change my initial point or criticism of you post.
You're suggesting that China can more robustly politically weather economic and political consequences than the US. So the US will cave because it cannot sustain even moderate damage where as China by this argument can ignore extreme damage by comparison without losing stability.
There are multiple problems with this argument.
First, China's ability to damage the US is in practice very limited. Their putting tariffs on their minor US imports is unlikely to impact the US economy measurably. Thus the damage to the US economy that is "not" propaganda will be negligible.
Second, to the extent the US economy "IS" damaged by this trade war it will be almost entirely self inflicted in that the damage will come by disrupting IMPORTS of chinese goods into the US. This at best can only be a very temporary inconvenience to US industry because there are many alternatives to China. There are an entire world of nations that have it in their interest to offer themselves as that alternative. They are currently and were previously marketing themselves as just that for... well always. What is more, what remains in china will not be stopped... merely subjected to a higher tariff which will marginally increase the cost. Wise corporations will diversify production and prioritize chinese production to the international market whilst prioritizing non-chinese manufacture to the US market. Thus efficiently addressing the bottleneck is actually pretty easy. THey don't need to produce enough outside of china to replace all production to the global market they sell to. They only need to replace the portion that is shipped to the US. This is a fraction of total production from the American Multi-Nationals that supply most US consumer demand. Point is, the "actual" damage is trivial if it manifests at all.
Third, China is hardly free from political instability. There are many factions within China that are increasingly challenging the primacy of the Chinese Communist Party. The Communist Party maintains legacy institutional control and the oaths of the army. But the basis of their power at this point is largely founded on long term generational improvement in living standards. If that is disrupted then political instability is actually very likely.
Forth, there is serious discontent in the US political system with the long running status quo as regards trade. It has been a recurring point of contention at least since the Reagan administration and has the potential to unite typically democrat voting unions with tariff supporting republicans. Saying it has to go one way or the other on that ignores the polling statistics that have been surprising many establishment political parties in the US. Again, you want to talk reality and not propaganda... that is reality. The empirical evidence of these sentiments and that they're catching established political relationships by surprise is public record.
Fifth, the tales of representative republics being weak willed and blood shy is a tale as old as the republic itself. Every autocracy has made this criticism of representative republics and democracies from their inception. And yet, autocracies lose all the time to republics. There is a reason why republics are in international political ascendancy and autocracies which were once the only type of government are relatively waning. Trade wars are wars of attrition. The US has deeper pockets, deeper resources to draw upon, more options, a dramatically more diverse economy, and an incomparably more favorable geopolitical relationship with the world. Betting on China in this context is a sucker's bet.
Which is why autocracies always win against representative republics...
Oh wait, they actually tend to lose.
Seriously, play devil's advocate with the argument. Historically representative democracies tend to perform very favorably against autocracies. They have significant economic advantages over time and are dramatically more resilient than their detractors would suggest given that when push comes to shove... they tend to win.
The last two hundred years give a wealth of examples here. I'm actually sort of baffled as to why you wouldn't see that.
There really isn't anything the US gets from China that it can't get from another market. Its cheap plastic crap or packaged electronic goods from China... In the case of the plastic stuff we can get that from almost anywhere. In the case of the packaged electronic goods, they don't have to be packaged in China... we can shift assembly out of China. There was a fairly large cellphone assembly operation in Texas for example that was assembling Moto X's (Generation 1). Its really a tempest in a tea pot. People try to make out like if we don't maintain the status quo with this it will mean the end of our economy. Never mind that our economy didn't use Chinese assembly or sourcing to this extent 10 years ago. Some how we didn't die a firely death. Its all mindless hyperbole and chicken-littlism.
The US has strategic advantages and the rest of the Global market will be chomping at the bit to eat China's lunch. Its hardly like there isn't enough surplus industrial capacity around the world to soak up the difference.
Its a buyer's market out there. China sells as much and to as many players as they can. They are not limited by their ability but by the market's demand. If China loses the US as a market or has that trade restricted they cannot replace that trade with other markets because the global market is already saturated. Where as the US can easily source from other providers because just like China, most international exporters are limited by demand. If US companies come to other markets and say "we need to source from you instead" we'll have no lack of other markets more than happy to take China's place.
Things move all the time. We have massive automotive plants in Georgia for example despite legacy investments in Michigan.
Nothing will move on a dime. But over decades, anything can change.
It doesn't matter. I wasn't talking about trade imbalances being silly or not. I was saying that China has greater economic exposure to restricted trade with the US than does the US with China. You can disagree with whether we should care about trade imbalances or not but indifferent to that if trade war happens china cannot help but be at greater economic risk.
Those countries are negotiating and are not adopting a hostile geopolitical posture.
South Korea and Japan have already agreed to alter aspects of their trade policy to avoid tariffs. So... what say you about that?
Your argument is that China is a scapegoat for trade issues throughout east asia.
To this, I have said that those other countries in East Asia have already caved to US requests for better trade deals and indifferent to that are not adopting hostile geopolitical policies.
So... there you go.
I previously owned a US assembled Moto X that was made in Texas. It cost the same as any other smart phone. China isn't actually "making" the core components of most of the tech. They're mostly assembling. And that assembly costs are fairly incidental. Again, we had a Motorola cell phone assembly plant in Texas not long ago. The costs are marginal.
Do you want to do any kind of analysis on your argument? Are you actually curious as to whether what you're saying has any merit what so ever? Because I'm happy enough to go into detail on this one to enlighten you if you want.
Completely irrelevant... the tariff will do that as well and a trade war would still impact china more than the US.
It is a buyer's market. China is already selling to as many markets as it can.
IF china loses the US as a market or has that market limited China cannot replace the US market elsewhere because China is already saturating the Global market with their products.
However, the US can very easily source their needs from other countries or even domestically because there is a surplus of production and a deficit of consumption. As such the US can resource their needs from other markets at almost no cost where as China cannot replace US consumption by selling to other markets.
The point remains, China is at a disadvantage and should negotiate.
They have very little leverage and it is in their interest to cave. Being proud and refusing to negotiate is frequently stupid. This is business. The US has superior leverage, China has no ability to resist that simply by talking tough.