As the trade deficit continues to widen and President Donald Trump ramps up his rhetoric on China, one thing is for certain: the data points show that the United States is the loser in this trade war.
There is no coming out on top when the tariffs, which are paid in whole by American consumers and businesses, are a financial burden and additional tax on your own. According to a report by Reason, investment in American businesses has fallen sharply since the start of the trade war, and American exports are way down too.
https://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/u-s-loses-big-in-trade-war-imports-rose-exports-slashed_01162019
The gap between how much America exports to China and how much it imports from the Asian nation grew to $30.2 billion in July, up from $30.1 billion the previous month, according to Commerce Department figures. But there are three more data points of importance that prove the United States is losing the trade war.
The widening gap was due to a decrease in the value of American exports, Bloomberg reported. The trade deficit has been a problem for Trump and one of the main reasons he started the trade war. Trump has used America’s trade deficit as a key justification for his trade policies, and he has repeatedly promised that tariffs on China would reduce that deficit. But as predicted, when one uses central planning and government intervention to mess with the free market, things get worse. Economists generally agree that trade deficits don’t matter, as free trade is more important for a stable economy. This is the same reason that you wouldn’t worry about running a “deficit” with a grocery store, Reason stated.
Trump’s tariffs are having an impact, but not in positive ways for the United States. During the first six months of 2018, U.S. exports to China fell by 18 percent relative to the same period last year. Imports from China slipped by 12 percent. Both sides are doing less trading, but the trade deficit persists.
Three other data points are showing the trade war as an abject failure too:
- Business Investments Plummeted
According to the Commerce Department, investment in American businesses has fallen off sharply since the start of Trump’s trade war in mid-2018.
This is a sign that businesses are holding off on hiring and expanding in the face of uncertainty and higher costs.
2. Loss of Goods-Producing Jobs
Trump has also tried to justify his bellicose trade policies by citing the importance of American manufacturing jobs. Not only is the manufacturing sector officially in a recession, but the job losses will have a ripple effect across the landscape of the American economy.
As a perfect encapsulation of where the economy is right now, after a gangbuster 2018, job growth year-over-year in goods is just about where it is for services. Goods has seen a dramatic slowdown, while services has held up better. pic.twitter.com/WvTcdGLjMB
— Martha Gimbel (@marthagimbel) August 2, 2019
- Loser for The Treasury
The trade war has been a net loss for the treasury. Sure, there are the billions of tariff dollars paid by American consumers and businesses, but the amount paid to farmers to offset the damage done to them is higher.
It’s time to remove the partisan political blinders that keep people supporting the horrible trade war policies and open our eyes to what’s really happening. The U.S. is losing this trade war and the American consumer is the biggest loser of all.
More government intervention will not fix the problem. Central planning has only made things worse, and it’s past time we realize exactly what’s happening.
You don’t think China is hurting? They are teetering.
China has been getting over like a fat rat for decades.
Make them feel the pain. I gives a fock about a commie.
America First, suckas!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I’ll trade you zips some rice for some of that steel core 7.62!
It’s all digital and not real money anyways. Sure it’s ‘real’, sort of. If the money is in stocks, it’s speculation and return guarantees are just all hype. At any moment even the major players can just take an unexpected nose dive. Don’t fall for the corporate news rhetoric on this one, we’ve always been in a ‘trade war’ and ‘currency war’ with china, ever since the gold window shut down and we de coupled from a backed currency to pure fiat. We’ve been losing the trade war for so long, people just thought our baseline was something good or manageable. All Trump has done is recaptured a small portion of the loss, and not even close to a substantial amount. It’s all doom and gloom in economics, so who’s shorting the market today? Free trade as we know it is not what the founding fathers predicted and as far as taking economic hits to get china off our backs, the more the merrier, not worried what so ever. The hardest hit entities will be those whom annuitize debt and play the unfunded derivitives games, those guys are freaking out, which is why they have all these news stories about it all of the sudden, to flex some political pressure. If there is one thing you can count on with big lenders and international banksters, it’s that vested interests are always prioritized. What’s wrong with price correction and lower prices? Nothing really. All this doom and gloom will merely mean Americans will enjoy some long needed relief from high prices and might just miraculously get to tap into some liquidation pricing along the way. That’s bad for billionaires though, so expect more of the same news story to convince the masses that it’s important to continue to prop up their economy, missing the big picture of where exactly we little people fit into that. If you were into a roth silver or gold instead of a 401k or some wall street speculation, you would see this as good news… And most of that farm subsidy went to the big ag guys, whom continue to crush small scale farmers anyways, by purchasing organic, we’re not in support of those types of farmers anyways.
So who is even slightly surprised this is happening? China can source anything it buys from somewhere other than the US. It’s hard for the impoverished poor and declining middle class in the US to avoid the cheap Walmart crap to get the job done. China is in the drivers seat because of production costs.
Doom gloom.
I thought our money was supposed to be useless.
But everyone else has de-valued their money so American export products dramatically increase in price.
Tariffs are indeed a tax as ONLY Congress can approve a Tariff or in this case delegate it to the President. Congress, a Democrat congress has allowed this to happen to our economy.
In my opinion Tariffs are a bad thing, but Tariffs are only for imported things. Perhaps Americans will start to step up and provide “stuff”.
Why does a Chinese ship cost so much less than an American one? Democrat union workers? Why does an Asian Indian with an identical University degree to mine live in the same country as me, but survive on a salary of thousands less?
Lifestyle expectations?
America has a problem called Democrats.
I’ve chosen to quit playing, concentrate on
making what I have left in the days of my life
safe and comfortable.
That may sound selfish, but I’ve given
up on Democrats, and no longer GAS
about them and their problems.
Ehhh just kick back and have ya some coconut/pineapple wine, you’ll feel much better! In fact that sounds damm good, I might try making some and while I’m at it some shine out of it too! If I can get it down I bet it would fetch 35 a quart. Wine would be easy to make…. Get ya a 5 gallon food grade bucket with lid and rinse it out good with boiling water (to sterilize it). Add 4 gallons of 50/50 mix pineapple/coconut juice(or milk). Get the temp to about 90-95 degrees and add 1 packet of Red Star “Premier Rouge” yeast (best for fruit wines). Drill a 1/8 inch hole in the lid and snap it on. After about 7-8 days siphon it off (leaving the gunk in the bottom) into another 5 gallon sterilized bucket and snap the lid on (with 1/8 hole in the top). After about 6 days take the lid off and stir in 1.5 Tablespoons of bentonite clay and 1 teaspoon sodium metabisulphite and put the lid back on. After 2 days siphon the wine out (leaving the crud on the bottom) and bottle it in sterile jars or bottles. You can sterilize bottles/jars easy by baking them in the oven at 220 degrees for 15 minutes. Ginger and Mary Ann will love you for it! 😉
If you aren’t going to drink it all in 6 months you will need to preserve it by adding 1 teaspoon of potasium sorbate.
Oooops, I forgot to say add 10lbs. of cane sugar to the first bucket before you add yeast.
That is the basic recipe for any fruit based wine. Use your excess apples, pears, etc. filter out pulp with some cheese cloth. If you use berries it turns out better if you freeze them first. You can put cut up pieces of fruit instead of juice too just boil the pieces in water, let cool, add water and all to the fermenting bucket (this process yeilds less wine of course and you will need to strain it well).
There is no trade war going on.
No lack of shit coming from China. Amazon and majority of retailers are doing great or record business. The only failures are the companies that put liberalism first, like their companies are run by chieras without sex parts, bright green butch hair.
You’ll have to come up with an even more unbelievable tale.
Bert, it’s the PRICES of the stuff. Still not convinced? Ask your wife when she gets back from Walmart.
Americans are being been bled out.
“You can ignore reality but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.” – -Ayn Rand
China has all the advantages for these reasons:
1) Manufacturing advantage. They have all the factories.
2) They make all the tech stuff that runs the modern economy.
3) China has all the money.
4) China has the markets. They already are everywhere else and have deals.
5) They have already bought all the resources they need.
6) China is now an innovator and makes its own things from scratch.
7) People in the rest of the world have different expectations, and are most concerned with making money, not being gay, having green hair, being a butch dyke, buying guns etc.
8) China does surveillance like nobody else.
Frank Thoughts, you are absolutely correct. If I can add a 9th reason, their own consumer market is rapidly growing. The standard of living for the vast majority of Chinese is rapidly rising.
Funny cartoon! At least we have some fun.
Math is great, but it distracts us from the ‘Real Trade War Story’. The Trade War is part of a design; a “design to reduce us under absolute Despotism”.
Yes and we have been losing the trade war ever since China was given most favored trade nation status . and then NAFTA really screwed the USA producing Making Middle class. At least President Trump is attempting to do something . You writing stupid articles solves nothing.
That’s a great cartoon, “Take that, China!”
If it’s not something that China usually grows, in bulk, they will put anything they want in the seed packet. There seems to be a culture, where (inferior) substitutions are acceptable, in a business deal.
Anything toxic goes into the plastics and metal trinkets and gypsum boards and ‘unbranded’ knockoffs, where cabbages and chickens are preserved in formaldehyde, and there is cardboard and gutter grease in the dumplings.
Besides go-slows and currency manipulation, I felt that insultingly-lax quality is a form of sabotage. I wondered whether their slave labor is supposed to be sabotaging China or America, and if Falun Gong winds up in the dog’s duck jerky treats.
I think, I might actually like the traditional sectors in China, which are hated by it’s communist govt — a high culture since the time of Polo. It’s refugees are far more alert to civil rights abuses, than the average, American schlub.
That being said, I think, their export subsidies pay by the unit, without any quality controls. Why do they need industrial spies, without quality controls, which don’t effectively reproduce the tech. Anything can be under the casing.
Don’t sell-off our infrastructure or natural resources for that, plz ftlog.