Here's the data to back it up: https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/statistics/highlights/t...
China imports about $9 billion in German car parts each year. That's in addition to about $17 billion worth of cars exported from Germany to China each year, making China the 3rd largest export market for German cars.
The trade-offs with trade are a little more complex than that. For example, if foreign steel was super cheap, you could have the people previously working in steel work in construction, and build more buildings. Or if midwestern auto manufacturing jobs were middle-class due to unions, but the economy shifts to services like Amazon, there is no inherent reason why service jobs couldn’t also be unionized.
In principle it’s not that different from automation - you can think of either as a black box you put money in and get product out. If you are playing your other cards right (admittedly a big if) it would be possible to largely benefit from either.
Traditionally they’ve been worried about inflation but they’ve overestimated that most of the past decade (although it’s jumped up recently in response to the massive short term Covid spending). I don’t think the new stuff being proposed, while large, is nearly as high on a yearly basis so hopefully it can hit a non-inflationary sweet spot (although who knows).
One concrete thing I would 100% advocate though, which I guess is an example of a "nuanced" strategy as you alluded to:
Gimp / legislate away white-labelling of foreign products and drop shipping-like businesses. These have had a huge "spam" effect on products and consumer's brand-awareness that it'd be so worth it. It's made people unable to discern quality which is a huge win for places like China that at the bottom-end of the price spectrum simply don't have the quality we expect and would usually want to avoid by virtue of paying more.
* He was deemed a racist for many reasons. One of which was using his leadership and influence to stoke anti-Asian sentiment. You're not debating this point, right? Whataboutism is one thing, but worse when paired with denialism.
* "Politicians who willingly infected people with covid" - Does it bother you that politicians would downplay the safety of American citizens related to an infectious disease to suit their own political ends? Or is this is a criticism you only levy against your political rivals? Do you really want to compare scorecards on Trump vs. his political rivals on public health?
* Ignoring that the vast majority of BLM events were peaceful, which superspreader events are you referring to? They were outside, in the summer, often mobile, with a large share of mask-wearing attendees. I don't see any evidence of any of these events becoming superspreader events.
It’s hard to take seriously the claim that accusations of racism are always made carefully and never used as a cheap partisan attack.
The guy who was against it was a racist because he couldn't articulate anything other than "China bad" and his policies to address China were useless at best and harmful to America at worst. He only wanted to look tough against a made up enemy but refused to change anything at home.
If he was actually serious about competing with China, we would have been talking about Trump's infrastructure bill and had a plan on how to ween us off Chinese high-tech manufacturing (which is the best in the world), but now 4 years later we are scrambling trying to figure out how we will build fabs (one part of the equation) at home. For all the crying about China, he did shockingly little in actually addressing the issue (like almost all the issues he cried about).
Anyone who looks at out current situation and comes to the conclusion we need to bomb China is a racist in my eyes. They are only motivated a fear of a rising eastern power and have no motivation in actually investing stateside to improve American hegemony.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/10/10/steph...