You are making the tariff black and white and suggesting it exists or doesn’t. I would put tariffs on car transmissions, abs breaking systems, etc. Implement the tariff over a few years because businesses have made plans.
Let me ask you this. If the yuan has no value why are we trading with them in the first place?
If you agree it must have some value, what is your solution to currency manipulation? You can’t just do nothing.
And you are isolating the problem. How much are you willing to pay for people who cannot find a decent job? Don’t you think we’ve had enough of Obamacare and Medicaid expansion? Would it not be more cost effective to have people working those jobs? Tariffs will help that. It isn’t a silver bullet. We should also lower the number of immigrants coming here to work until we get our own economic and fiscal house in order.
Because we are giving them U.S. dollars and they are giving us cheap manufactured products. I can assure you that no major U.S. corporation accepts yuan as currency for the things they produce here in the U.S. and sell over there in China.
If you agree it must have some value, what is your solution to currency manipulation? You can’t just do nothing.
Why not? If I were in the business of producing something and selling it for $10 apiece, and some dude in the next town was offering the same product in exchange for a dozen acorns, then I'm going out and harvesting oak trees for a living.
And you are isolating the problem. How much are you willing to pay for people who cannot find a decent job? Don’t you think we’ve had enough of Obamacare and Medicaid expansion? Would it not be more cost effective to have people working those jobs? Tariffs will help that. It isn’t a silver bullet. We should also lower the number of immigrants coming here to work until we get our own economic and fiscal house in order.
You're assuming that increasing the cost of imported goods will result in tangible employment growth here. I hate to break it to you, but that really isn't the case at all. Over the last few years we've seen a sizeable relocation of manufacturing operations right back here to the U.S. (for a number or reasons, including cheap, reliable energy). This hasn't had a huge impact on employment in the manufacturing sector because U.S. manufacturing operations tend to be highly automated. In fact, I'd make the case that the number of manufacturing jobs lost to overseas competition in the last 40-50 years is dwarfed by the number of jobs that have been lost to automation and technology.
There's no simple answer to this, but as someone who has more than 60 people working for me I can tell you this: Our world has gotten so advanced that human beings are the most expensive aspect of running a business ... and they are usually the least reliable and least productive, too.
Most of those jobs don't exist here anymore. Over half of all imports from China are consumer electronics, furniture, clothing, toys, and plastic goods. Those industries are all but extinct in the U.S. and have been for some time.
Here are some of the biggest Free Traitor™ lies:
Fact: Manufacturing for the most part is not labor intensive, it is actually only a small cost driver in the retail price of any object. Labor averages between 5-8% of the retail price if made in the USA and 2-4% made in the third world. So the $10 Chinese pliers would cost $10.80, at most, if made in the USA. Not earth shattering.
The favorite trick of the Fee Traitor™ is to throw textiles in your face. Textiles manufacturing is an outlier, with labor making up a large part of the retail cost. But textiles will always be the example given in retort.
Fact: The difference and "savings" is passed on to the stock holder not the consumer. I've gotten most of the Free Republic Free Traitor™ to admit to that but some still cling to the myth.
Fact: This is reprehensible and deserves no rebuttal.
Fact: this unforced de industrialization is putting future Americans at risk in countless ways, including the ability to sustain our forces in a huge conflict, wars of attrition, with major world powers.