Trump recently doubled down on his tariff war with China, but China is in a much better position to win this economic war with the United States.
First, as of October 2018, China owned $1.2-trillion of America’s national debt and the United States has five times the national debt that China does and the U.S. doesn’t own any of China’s debt.
Politico.com reports, “China could fire back by dumping its vast holdings of U.S. government debt. Flooding the market with treasuries would push down US bond prices and cause the yields to spike. That would make it more costly for U.S. companies and consumers to borrow, in turn depressing America’s economic growth.”
Trump cannot do the same thing to China.
Second, China exports $2.41 trillion worth of goods to other countries around the world including the United States, but China exports only $557.9 billion worth of goods to the United States — 23 percent of all Chinese exports sold to the rest of the world. That means China exports $1.8521-trillion in goods to other countries, 77-percent of all Chinese exports are sold to the rest of the world.
Third: China has a workforce of almost 800 million people, but only 150-million work in the manufacturing sector. How many of those workers jobs depend on products sold to the United States?
The answer is, not as many as you might think.
That is because China’s manufacturing sector also makes and sells good in China. In fact, its manufacturing sector’s total value is 96-trillion yuan, according to Interact Analysis, or 14-trillion US dollars. That means after we subtract the $2.41 trillion in goods sold to other countries that leaves $11.59-trillion in goods that are made and sold in China to Chinese consumers. If we crunch the numbers that means only about 4-percent of China’s manufacturing sector jobs depends on sales to the United States. That translates to about 6-million jobs, or 0.0075% of the total number of jobs in China.
“In the long-run, the United States will Lose.”
And does it really matter how many manufacturing jobs in China will be at risk vs lost jobs in the US caused by Trump’s great tariff war with China?
The answer to the last question is no because China’s financial system is different than the one in the United States.
China will repeat what it did after the global financial crises in 2007-08, when twenty million Chinese factory workers lost their jobs. China allowed factory workers nearing the mandatory retirement age ( at the time 60 for men and 55 for female civil servants and 50 for female workers) to retire early and moved most younger workers to state-owned industries and/or infrastructure projects across the country. For instance, to fast track building what has become the largest high-speed rail network in the world today. China will not let that many younger workers remain unemployed for long compared to a Trump administration that will do little or nothing to help Americans find new jobs once they are unemployed thanks to Trump’s ignorance and arrogance.
The result, China’s labor force did not suffer compared to the suddenly unemployed in the United States where millions of families lost their homes. Remember what the U.S. Government did back then? Let me refresh your memory: President G. W. Bush signed TARP and started to give away $700 billion to banks and corporation so they would not go bankrupt and there was no plan for the government to get paid back while millions of working Americans still lost their jobs and houses.
Unlike the United States, in China, most factory workers migrate to the cities to work and come from family homes in rural China that have no rent, no mortgage payment, and no property tax. Few if any Chinese workers in the manufacturing industry will be at risk of losing their homes, becoming homeless and starving like workers in the United States. China’s government also gave/offered workers that lost their jobs during the 2007-08 global financial crises a free train ticket to return to their rural family homes.
According to AXIOS, 11-million U.S. workers are at risk of losing their jobs thanks to Trump’s Great Tariff War with China.
How many American workers are one paycheck away from losing their homes and becoming homeless?
According to Fortune.com, “40% of American households are ‘liquid asset poor,’ meaning that they don’t have enough money put away to make ends meet at the poverty level should their income be suddenly interrupted.”
What does that mean?
Statista.com says, “In 2018, there were about 127.59 million households in the United States. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, a household consists of all the people who occupy a housing unit.”
Crunch the numbers and that means about 131-million Americans (40-percent of the total population) is one paycheck away from poverty and/or homelessness while few if any Chinese will lose their homes and become homeless. They might become poor without much cash but they will still eat and have a roof over their heads. China is not a purist capitalist country like the United States is. China is a hybrid socialist-capitalist country and the socialist element will not let the Chinese people suffer like that — but the socialist hating capitalists that control the United States will.
If China wants to do the United States a favor and help evict Donald Trump from the U.S. White House, all China’s leaders have to do is what they do best, while they let Trump do what he does best, and that is to fail like he has done so many times with one business venture after another. The only reason Trump still has enough money to support his lavish lifestyle is because he laundered money for Russian thugs, and Trump helped his favorite drug trafficker smuggle cocaine into the United States.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of My Splendid Concubine, Crazy is Normal, Running with the Enemy, and The Redemption of Don Juan Casanova.
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You are too biased. You should move on from the loss of Clinton.
Clinton and Bias has nothing to do with what I think about Trump’s Great Tariff War.
My opinion comes from knowledge of China, its history, its culture, and its people, and the fact that Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, a psychopath, a serial liar, a failed businessman, a con-man, and a fraud … among other things. The list of his failures and faults is long, very long.
All his followers have to do is fact check the reality of his life before he decided to run for president of the United States.
The truth is all there documented through decades of Trump’s craziness to constan6tly have the media spotlight on him.