(January 21, 2019 at 10:06 am)Jehanne Wrote:(January 21, 2019 at 9:55 am)Yonadav Wrote: I don't know where you read that, but the Chinese economy contracted in December and January. The Chinese have made overtures with the Trump administration about increasing their purchases of American products to the tune of one trillion dollars that would wipe out the trade deficit over the next several years. The deal is widely regarded as too good to be true, and the Chinese are not really trusted to honor such an agreement.
Their economy is growing, just not as fast as it once did:
China's economic growth slowest since 1990 amid trade war with US
Still, is their President in danger of not being reelected? And, how about Trump's base:
US farms are going bankrupt at an alarming rate.
The link that you provided for China's economic growth doesn't work. Comparing to 1990 is a bit weird. That is well before China's entry into the WTO and is at a time when ninety percent of the Chinese subsisted on two dollars a day or less. Regardless, information about the contraction of China's economy in December and January abounds.
It is difficult to discuss the farmers, because American farmers are always used as a political sacred cow. They are the human shields that are used by Big Business every time Big Business doesn't get to dictate foreign policy. It is hard to fight any kind of a war without casualties, and farmers are always the first casualties in a trade war. But that doesn't mean that we have to have an endless policy of appeasement in a terribly unequal trade arrangement with a party that engages in unethical business practices, human rights abuses, and environmental abuses. It is our fault that we have allowed such an unequal trade arrangement for so long and have made the farmers dependent on it. We have been subsidizing the farmers, and one of the big problems with the government shutdown is that farmers are maybe not going to get their subsidies in time to help them. At the end of the day, farmers are a tiny percentage of our population, and we can't have our entire economy held hostage to their interests. Farmers have been real troopers so far. Most of them know that we can't have our whole economy held hostage to their interests. They knew that a trade confrontation with China would eventually be necessary. They knew it was going to hurt.
We do not inherit the world from our parents. We borrow it from our children.
