> This economic war is accelerating.
This is the result of at least fifty years of incompetence from US political "leadership". This isn't about democrats or republicans. They have all been ignored their duty to look after national interests. Instead, they continue to play dumb-as-can be political games for self and party as opposed to acting with people and nation as objectives.
The most current example of this is the, again, dumb-as-can-be infrastructure spending proposal.
I dare anyone to make a list of ten companies who have chosen to locate their operations somewhere other than the US due to issues with our roads and bridges. Just ten. That's not much to ask, is it?
One would not spend this kind of money to "bring back" one company. No. You would want dozens. Well, name ten. Just ten.
You can't. You can't because the entire premise is dumb-as-can-be false. NOBODY is going to relocate or make a massive investments in the US because we spend trillions of dollars on redoing perfectly good roads, bridges and government buildings. Nobody.
This is unbelievably dumb at a time when we need to be incredibly smart.
Here's a list of 397 cities in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...
I dare anyone to find ten companies who chose not to operate in the US because they could not find good roads and bridges in any one of these cities.
Frankly, I can't even think of a single company, much less ten. We are being told we need to spend unimaginable amounts of money on roads and bridges. Put simply, it's complete bullshit and it is the kind of decision someone makes to lose, not to win.
What do we need to spend money on?
My guess is that #1 has got to be education. The problem with this is that it is a long term investment. This decision should have been made twenty years ago. It takes that long for results to produce economic returns.
The Chinese were sending their kids to US universities twenty years ago. They are all running companies in China right now. While this was going on our educators focused on race, class and ideological warfare. While China is trying to be as entrepreneurial as possible our educators focused on producing brain-dead socialists, a great example of which is representative Ocasio-Cortez, probably the best example of just how far off the mark US education has gone. As someone who actually lived in the kind of thing this moron is pushing I cannot believe she was not laughed off the stage within microseconds of coming to the scene, much less reach the level she has.
If you are the product of the kind of brainwashing the US educational system has delivered over the last couple of decades you will disagree with this. Of course. However, that does not make the fantasies you believe true. Anyone who has lived and has been educated outside of this distortion field cannot believe the nonsense US some young adults actually believe. Things like supporting socialism and wearing a t-shirt with Che Guevara (a mass murderer) as a sign of who-knows-what, are baffling to anyone who was not subject to ideological elements in US education.
This is the first time I have, in the decades I have lived in the US, heard a major leader on the left (in this case, Biden) finally speak the truth on communism and socialism:
https://youtu.be/eL2ThTOaHXg?t=18
Will our educators now stop with the nonsense?
Instead of burning cash on roads we need to put businesses on those roads. Industry. We need to dump billions into industries such as electronics and semiconductors. Heck, we need to dump billions into ever single industry, because they are ALL GONE.
Try to buy US-made wire, screws or connectors for example. Some, sure, however, the overwhelming majority of everything that goes into consumer, commercial, industrial and military products is made in China.
How is that a formula for success? At all? We are setting up to spend trillions rebuilding roads and bridges. This will not attract or compel even a single company to bring a non-trivial amount of jobs to the US. And, while we are busy spending money we don't have on absolute bullshit, Chine is going to continue to invest money as fast as they can on what really matters. They will invest on and subsidize any business or business segment that can deliver true long term competitive advantages for their nation and people.
We will wake up, ten years later, with a bunch of nice new roads and bridges and twice the unemployment. On top of that, this year, so far, we have let over a MILLION people come through the southern border.
https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/us-border-arrests-top...
At this run rate it is likely that this year alone that number will top a couple million. If we continue at this pace you are looking at five to eight million in four years.
BY DEFINITION and as a matter of cold-hard facts, 100% of these people are unemployed.
And, again, as a matter of cold-hard facts, we are NOT magically producing two million additional jobs per year to fully employ them.
And so, we have a situation where China is bound to take even more jobs out of the US while we invest in the wrong things and actively import millions of unemployed.
Despite what this might sound like, this isn't political at all. This is as common sense as things can get. If you give me the opportunity to damage a competitor by taking away business (China taking away jobs), driving them deeper into debt (waste money rebuilding roads and bridges) and increasing their baseline costs (importing millions of unemployed). Well, that's a dream. That's a competitive dream.
If your competitors insist on self destructing you take every possible opportunity to push them over the cliff. That's what China is doing. Not because they are evil. No. It's because we are stupid and we are doing it to ourselves.
Looking at it with detachment, from the perspective of a competitor, it's almost too easy. We have been consistently stupid for fifty years. What did people think would happen? You don't win a basketball game by giving your opponents free turnovers. You win by scoring more than they do and controlling the ball as much as possible. We have been giving it away for fifty years, and, just like in a baseball game, there comes a point beyond which reversing the score is simply impossible. If we don't demand more from our politicians the writing is on the wall, it has been there for all to see for quite some time.