3 ms·

The way to ensure that these profits are "redistributed" back to the people of the host country is to eliminate free trade. If the items you sell in America mus

The way to ensure that these profits are "redistributed" back to the people of the host country is to eliminate free trade. If the items you sell in America must be produced by an American workforce, then the money is pumping back into the economy as Republicans always claim. If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose. Trump is proposing that we put a cost-prohibitive tariff on foreign-built goods so that Americans will only buy them if there is truly no decent American competitor. Sanders and Trump are approximating the same root cause here -- corporate greed is depriving the American worker. They're just extracting the value that belongs to the American worker at a different point of the transaction. It's debatable which is superior, but Trump's approach is more compliant with conventional American laissez-faire capitalism.

sooheon 10y ago
Eliminating free trade is precisely the wrong direction to go, in my opinion. > "If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose." You can't only look at one side of the equation. American grown soybeans and American manufactured aircraft are being bought in China, and billions of dollars worth of their hard earned yen are being "shipped out" to America. The point of free trade is for everyone to specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in, because this will expand the production frontier overall. Putting cost prohibitive tariffs on goods the Chinese are better at producing (let's just say commodity electronics) may prop up US commodity electronics makers. But we would be subsidizing inefficiency. And if the Chinese put similar tariffs on American exports like commercial aircraft in return, everybody loses. Yes, you can just eliminate free trade, but the point of free trade is to grow the pie. You just have to cut it fairly after it's grown.

sooheon 10y ago

Eliminating free trade is precisely the wrong direction to go, in my opinion. > "If the money is being taken from Americans at the point-of-sale and then shipped out to China, Americans lose." You can't only look at one side of the equation. American grown soybeans and American manufactured aircraft are being bought in China, and billions of dollars worth of their hard earned yen are being "shipped out" to America. The point of free trade is for everyone to specialize in what they have a comparative advantage in, because this will expand the production frontier overall. Putting cost prohibitive tariffs on goods the Chinese are better at producing (let's just say commodity electronics) may prop up US commodity electronics makers. But we would be subsidizing inefficiency. And if the Chinese put similar tariffs on American exports like commercial aircraft in return, everybody loses. Yes, you can just eliminate free trade, but the point of free trade is to grow the pie. You just have to cut it fairly after it's grown.