The US Politics |OT|

[Bofferbrauer2]

LurkerJ said:

LurkerJ said:

I have to point out that this "debacle" has been largely positive as it allowed American companies to diversify their supply chains out of China. These tariffs are the reason countries like India are stepping up their manufacturing game, allowing China to monopolize industrial production has been terrible for all countries, not just the USA. 

Why would you want to allow one country to withhold all the manufacturing power of our most used devices? That's a recipe for disaster, the whole world was willingly allowing Beijing to become their sole provider of their most used goods because of greed, something had to be done about it.

Maybe now politicians can use covid19 debacle to take a stand against shutting down factories, even if it meant more expensive goods. Automate everything if you must, but to simply be dependent on China, of all countries, for us to live the life that we know is a recipe for disasters. 

You may be okay with that, but the vast majority will choose the cheaper alternative. In other words, choosing not to exploit cheap labor is a death sentence for corporations as their competitors will make use of it.

About the bolded in the first quote: Companies already diversified out of China starting the mid-2000's. With it's growing economic power came higher wages, and for some sectors and companies those just got too high, and started moving elsewhere. India, Indonesia and Brazil got most of those early on, but in the later years several countries in Africa have become more and more interesting, especially Kenia, Ethiopia and Tansania. You can see this very well on their economic growth, and how that growth is shrinking further and further

See how it's shrinking year after year after year since 2010 despite the rest of the world booming after coming out of the recession? That's the effect from companies leaving or divesting from China. And it's even only so high because the country is building entire ghost cities where practically nobody lives. Without all that construction going on China would probably already have been in a recession from all the production leaving the country.

What Trumps tariffs did was only slightly accelerate the trend, not create it. And it failed in it's original goal to bring them back to the US.