The US government is ending the era of the trade deficits; no longer importing a lot more goods than selling abroad. To be precise: Dictatorships like China and Russia used to buy Western High Tech and sold back primitive goods like oil, gas and everyday items made in slave factories. And Western high-tech items are often assembled in Chinese sweatshops; they are not even real Chinese goods.
Western communists and closet communists are on high alert and warn that average citizens need slave made cheap products from China because Western products are too expensive. The US started to revolutionize industry from the 1870s onwards and more better products became affordable to the people, even complex items such as cars.
The things that really improve our lives mean wealth and those very things can’t come from abroad or don’t need to come from abroad: Owning your own piece of land. China does not make US land. Houses and flats. We don’t need Chinese workers and materials to make houses and flats in America. Owning good cars is important for life quality. We don’t need Chinese (electric) cars, especially when they are made from blueprints that were stolen from the West anyway. A Chinese electric car may be priced under value, meaning the communist dictatorship may be willing to loose money for every single car they sell. What’s the catch? They could do the same with other goods until the competition is dead and then the communists can decide who gets what car and for what degree of loyalty. Even in Eastern Germany you had to wait years to get a horrible flimsy car. Healthcare is essential. We don’t need Chinese doctors and drugs in the US.
We are approaching a possible World War and the US can’t pay for that while subsidizing half the world through trade deficits. In a situation like this, the West needs additional legitimacy and that comes through jobs and the items that people really need. Russia and China may appear very weak in comparison, despite the multi-decade self-advertising campaign about glorious socialism and pseudo-tsarist “Third Rome” gibberish. In the West you will have to decide to be a whiny woke activist or a person who owns things.
Does a late model iPhone or a high-end sneaker or daily Starbucks really make you wealthy? No. Land does, housing, vehicles do. Many things people buy are depreciating forgettable items that enable you only to text other people or protect the soles of your feet. The high-end sneakers are glued together bits of toxic rubber and leather that will look good for a few months. The new iPhone does the same things for you as the iPhone from several generations ago.
The real magic lies in productivity: Use the right kind and amount of resources at the right spot in the right way for the right timeframe and you get more affordable higher quality products for customers. Buying Chinese has many hidden costs: They get to skip learning to create productivity magic and we continue to lose that ability. China spends its profits on their military which makes our defence much more costly. Bait in an animal trap is even cheaper than cheap; it’s free for the animal which approaches it. The animal does not even have to pay any money or barter.
The Democrats and other leftwing parties in the West have wasted so much money and prevented so much industry and growth that people often can’t afford to live. The old Marxist worldview is definitively a lie. Productivity and trade work. That’s why communists keep moving the goalposts until they disappear.
Corporations must survive too so they increase prices and then the leftists call this the evil capitalist world conspiracy. People buy cheaper Chinese imported goods which destabilizes the West even further.
The new tariffs are not the whims and plans of Donald Trump. It’s the Republican Party and its visible and sometimes invisible sister organizations. The rate on Chinese imports is now 125 percent.
China has elevated its tariffs on goods imported from America to 84 percent. It pledged again on Thursday to “fight to the end.”
The price of oil, a pillar of Russia’s economy and war machine, has fallen nearly 15 percent since. The Russian government has allocated the equivalent of nearly $136 billion for defense this year which is laughable compared to what the US spends and what the EU can spend.
Russia’s interest rate is set at 21 percent. Putin still clings to the hope that the so called BRICS countries will stick together and dethrone the dollar and the US payment systems. If India decides against Moscow and Beijing it’s lights out. The US and the EU combined would have almost 1 billion people and up to 50 trillion GDP.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was in Panama this week to remind the Central American nation that Trump is determined to limit Beijing’s influence. 90% of Brazilian soybeans headed to China are shipped through the canal.
It will remain to be seen how much the US population will benefit from the tidal wave of changes to the global economy. There is an aristocratic strain in the GOP which clashes with the idea of the United States.
