JamesSneed :
venym :
FYI - This trade war has been going on for years, Trump is just the first President to fight back. Is it fair that goods we send to China are subject to tariffs, however those they send here are not? This only promotes US companies to build plants in China to produce goods; creating jobs in China, not the US.
Your Trump is the first one statement and there has always been a trade war are contradictory statements and you know it. There has been no trade war until now.
We have used China for cheap goods and as a dumping ground for spent electronics for decades now. They have used the US to take manufacturing jobs away and to steal intellectual property. The manufacturing is not coming back until the average household incomes in the US and China are remotely close which is not happening anytime soon(so goods from said manufacturing is close in cost). The jobs that are being lost now are knowledge jobs like IT, that really should be the focus not the contrived Trade war that the US has no hope of winning.
We import $478 billion vs exporting $115 billion to China. Every percent China taxes via tariffs on exports is over 4 to 1 to the US due to this discrepancy, that is if they do across the board tariffs. A compromise is needed or China will down our economy and since the Chinese economy is a command economy they will be just fine as the trade war continues. We are three decade late to this war and since we sent a vast majority of our manufacturing to China over those years really need to think twice.
The insourcing (H1B, H2Bs) and outsourcing of labor has eviscerated the middle-class, BY DESIGN. In fact, throughout all of human history, the mere concept of a "middle-class" is new. For the rest of the world, it's a have/have-not society. A near feudal system, and America is headed towards a neo-feudal (globalists) system as well. What better way to control the populous than to have people vote for you out of fear of "benefits" being taken away than out of feeling empowered to control said government?
The End-Game in this is China devaluing the Yuan in order to keep jobs in China. The last thing the CCP wants is civil unrest from massive unemployment. So, most likely, the devaluation of the Yuan will be countered by the tariffs China imposes on the US. Meaning, a near draw.
My personal theory is that Trump is engaging China like Reagan did to collapse the Soviet Union - via causing their economies to implode. It's a factual statement to say the US economy is in a far better shape than China's. It's well known they've cooked the books for a very long time now, and their debt to GDP ratio is "very bad".