Hacker News Reader

Comment by cramer4next | Hacker News Reader

America makes nothing anymore and consumes everything. The only thing disruptive is America redesigning the supply chain for onshoring. They can barely make a pair of shoes or even make make underwear. America is poorer because of dems and their close relationships with chinese. They'd sell their own mothers to make a buck.

Canada specifically is unbalenced trade partner. "The U.S. runs a trade deficit with Canada—totaling approximately $27.3 billion to $48.3 billion annually"*

* SRC: https://usafacts.org/answers/what-is-the-value-of-us-trade/c...

The same way the dems block BYD from the U.S. market. That alone would finally bring the masses to electric vehicles. I'd be first in line for two them.

View on HN

You seem like you've never heard the arguments against your position. To say America doesn't make anything is patently false. We have one of the most sophisticated manufacturing sectors in the world. Its just focused on complex machines that make other machines, aircraft, and medical devices.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/straight-from-source-legacy-m...

https://www.zeiss.com/metrology/us/explore/topics/top-10-man...

To blame democrats is wildly untrue. Nixon normalized relations with China, Regan let broad liberalization and deregulation and union busting specifically targeting manufacturing, democrats were resisting all the way but kept losing elections until Clinton adopted many of these policies. And I do think it's clear that letting China into the wto without demanding more reforms was a mistake.

But obama was actively strengthening the solar, ev, and rare earth mining sectors (with republicans screaming that he was interfering with the free market by picking winners and losers, now we have a president taking equity stakes in intel and a percentage of sales of nvidia chips while running personal businesses out of the whitehouse and china has totally captured the solar and electric manufacturing sectors that we could have and should have won) and strengthening intellectual property protections against China with the transpacific partnership that Trump destroyed. That agreement would have done more to silo China and stop the IP theft than anything else.

Your understanding of trade is wrong. Canada is not an unbalanced trading partner, the flow of goods back and forth result in finished products like cars and tractors that are sold around the world for a profit so even if I were to concede that we spend more money in their market than they do in ours, which I am not, that activity facilities broad profitable economic activity. If we import $100m of lumber to build homes and they import $0 that doesn't mean trade is imbalanced. It means we bought a product and used it to build $800 million worth of homes for a $300m profit. Further youd have to look at the cost of alternative sources of lumber if it cost $200 million for domestic lumber then we saved $100 million that could be used to fund other economic activity.

Your argument regarding BYD is contradictory. You can either have trade barriers to preserve manufacturing or free trade that allows global competition at risk of putting your domestic manufacturing out of business you cant have both. That's why our TVs are Samsung and LG and TCL instead of zineth and RCA. Most countries try to preserve at least some automotive manufacturing because it's essential in war to have that specific manufacturing capacity.

I grew up in NC and saw textiles and furniture manufacturing leave hollowing out entire cities. Your analysis is wrong and the facts and causes don't match your position

Reply on news.ycombinator.com