This article is about how the US is turning its back on free trade, which has actually made the US very rich.
Trump wants to get trade deficits with other countries to zero, but the author of this article says “there is no inherent reason why these numbers [trade surpluses and deficits] should be zero”.
As the author explains, “different countries are better at making different products, and have different natural and human resources”. One country might grow lots of food, and another might have large iron ore deposits. These differences can create trade surpluses and deficits between countries, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing.
But as the author says: “according to the White House, the act of selling more goods to the US than the US sells to you, is by definition ‘cheating’ and is deserving of a tariff that is calculated to correct that imbalance”.
drumpf sees the word “deficit” and thinks it’s bad, and that’s literally the entire reason for this whole dumbass trade war. He’s just a fucking moron.
Good point.
US with a population of 300 million with a high GDP per capita trades with a country of 1 million with low GDP per capita.
The country of 1 million can sell 300 million cheap spoon to US.
But US will only be able to sell 1 million fork to that country. There is no way that country can buy 300 million fork to create a balance. The imbalance is natural and is not cheating.
Unless all the countries US trades with are equally wealthy and equal population (same amount of money and same amount of people or same concumption capacity), there will be imbalances.
There are other things to look at, too, like does a country in the equator need winter jackets? Assume US is the largest producer of winter jackets, and if they try to sell them, winter jacket it will lead to imbalances too. nobody will buy them. A country that is mostly buddhist/hindu will probably not import any beef from US.
Put differently, with over 200 countries in the world, only an imbecile would think that a bilateral balance of trade of zero between each pair is either possible or desirable.
To show how backward Trump’s thinking is, David Ricardo, who died in the early 1820s, developed the theory of comparative advantage to explain why ideas like Trump’s make no sense, and how everyone can be better off by specialization.
But I don’t think Trump cares. He was put in to crash the US (and if possible the global) economy, as well as to destroy US soft power and its military alliances.
Get out of here with that shitty AI generated summary. It’s terrible.
I wrote the summary myself, I didn’t use AI for it.
Sounds like something a robot would say …
Maybe I wrote it in a matter-of-fact way. It’s just a long article so I thought I’d explain the gist of it.
I was just joking btw, you don’t sound like a robot at all.
Ah okay. It looks like some people believe the summary is AI-generated though because six people (at the time of me writing this) have upvoted the comment claiming the summary is AI-generated. I really did write it myself though.