Note the lack of comments on this page.
The Fwee Twade Twaddle is still strong in the minds of the people on FR.
This is the same conclusion I came to years ago: lowering tariffs on developing countries while maintaining ridiculously high tax rates on your own country was insane - it literally hands all the price advantage to the foreign country. THEY don’t pay US income taxes, WE do.
Why would anyone in their right mind do that?
They wouldn’t. That people who implemented that crap knew it would happen. They wanted it to be that way - to break the Unions, to drive Americans down to the same wage and working conditions as China or India.
The middlemen - the “Globalist” corporations - would profit heavily because their income is booked in tax havens - Ireland, for example. The tax holiday Trump rammed through brought trillions back to the US. But it’s only temporary.
As the article mentions, it was assumed that eventually everyone’s economies would level out. But the Chinese figured out a way around that: intentionally hold down the value of their currency. The normal mechanism is to allow currency appreciation to normalize trade. They defeated that to maintain their advantage. As the article correctly says, it’s a fascist country: not a true “Communist” country. It has mixed state/private ownership with state intervention to prop up favored industries.
So the current American situation is utterly nuts. It’s a gun pointed at our own heads. A national excise tax is the most sensible thing, because it not only taxes foreign products at the same rate, but does not penalize income. You’re free to spend or save what you earn, no penalty.
Trump understands all this. Anyone in a competitive economy would. So you have to ask...why was it like this?
Answer: because people who DON’T like Americans or America did it to us.
The Bush family said it was to “reduce tensions with China and others” who were our enemies by allowing them to develop and trade with us. That’s nice, but it’s a political, not an economic goal. And in the end, one that backfired: the Chinese are far more of threat now then when they were a run down country of screeching Kamala’s screwing each other.
We have started down the road to recovery. But until we repeal the idiotic 19th century revenge taxes - put in place by the Socialist Democrats of the 1920s, in the 1930s - and replace them with sensible excise taxes that both protect production here as well as fund government, we will still have the same problems, and be on a slow boat to economic destruction.
You are on the money.
There is one other factor: containing communism. The U.S. took the hit to keep trade going between the remaining free countries after WWII to make communism less appealing in war devastated Europe.
Today, the policy subsidizes “communist” China.