A scary thought for you coffee drinkers.

[BarryBobPosthole]

What has happened to make you think China is ‘out of control’ and ‘so big I’m not sure there is anything we can do’. It was almost $300B in 2008. (its $495B now) We heard zip nada zero zilch from any Republicans on this issue in 2008, nor did we hear of it until 2016. Now all the sudden its a raging problem.
The trade deficit is an issue but it can’t be fixed with tariffs. We face the same issues with the huge differences in labor costs across the emerging third world countries, like the Czech Republic and the Pi, and India. How many jbs are outsourced there? I can tell you tens of thousands are being moved offshore in telecom. Hundreds of thousands in IT.

BKB

[Penguin]

.... it can’t be fixed with tariffs.
BKB

I change that Posty: "It can't be fixed with only tariffs."

And I'd add that it cannot be fixed at all without them. But a lot depends upon what you mean by the word fixed. If we mean put things back together to the way things went for the last few decades where millions sat by while their livelihoods were shipped overseas, the stability of a whole lot more was put in jeopardy by the importation of millions for indentured servitude, all the while an elite reaped the benefits of this lopsided system? That ain't gonna happen brother.

Those of us with a bird's eye view of US heavy industry watched horrified at what was happening. We warned that once you strip mined this economy it was dead in the water. That replacing it with Wall Street cons and financial fever dreams and bubble economics would result in a violent backlash. We were laughed at and ignored. Now that we were proven correct the guilty parties who pushed this lunacy want a mulligan. They want a do-over.

Good luck with that.

And if you mean "fixed" as in going back to the days of US industrial might where one breadwinner could provide for a normal sized family? A world where decent healthcare and employment and a solid future for your kids was in the cards? Where about 5% of the world population in the US continue to use about 25% of the world's energy in order to prop up our standard of living at the cost of everyone else? Well that ain't gonna happen either. There is a price to be paid for throwing out a system where men literally fought and died to force change upon unwilling elites. And a price to be paid for trading it all for the tender mercies of the so-call "free market". There is also the problem of timing... this ain't the US where citizens took control of their own destiny and this ain't the world in which that action took place.

Right now this nation is dominated by rackets. Health-care, education, housing, banking, etc, etc, etc. And don't get me started on how much we spend on defense and what we have decided to accomplish with that investment. Right now the parasitical nature of all of these rackets has weakened us to the point of collapse. And no, we aren't going to fix most of that by enforcing trade fairness on China. But until we start attacking these centers of graft and corruption (which includes the way the rich have gotten richer by hurting productive sectors of the economy) we cannot even start repairing the damage.

I rarely do this, but I am going to put up a link to a post that I think captures my opinion on how we have handled out relationship with China. I think it captures the unvarnished truth as seen by someone with unique insight into Asian culture and its people: http://scholars-stage.blogspot.com/2...king-dead.html

Will