I say "Republican Economics" because it's the status-quo Republicans who make the most noise about this, although the Dems do so too, it's more of a back-burner issue. If I recall, all Republican candidates, except Paul, Huntsman, and Johnson (now Libertarian) spouted this nonsense.

The issue I am getting to is this tosh about how China is a currency manipulator, and how it is hurting the American middle-class (we hear the same bullshit in Britain, too).

I even remember Romney stating that he might impose a tax on China to counter-balance their currency manipulation. If you get rid of the political double speak, he effectively said "I want to help the middle class by making it more expensive to buy a lot of the products that they need to purchase".

And the crowd loved it (this is during the early GOP debates), they ate it up.

It was around that time, btw, that I gave up hope of anything good coming out of the 2012 Presidential election. We're seeing some good stuff in the Congressionals, and, hopefully, State elections... Presidential, and the rest of Congress will be utter tripe, again.

China's using macroeconomic tools to make sure their exports are over-competitive, so it would be no especially big deal to make them less competitive, although levying a tariff in that vein would likely go against WTO rules, unless they could successfully argue before the WTO that China's currency manipulations are fundamentally anti-competitive. The issue is, they likely can't just tell China to stop, because the method China uses to inflate their currency is mass acquisition of foreign assets: financing the Western debt machine.

Currency manipulation only really matters because most western nations are ruled by morons with no economic vision ...

We spend thousands of dollars a year for over a decade educating children in a system developed at the dawn of the industrial revolution to work in an economy where they're interchangeable cogs that are no "better" than uneducated workers in the third world.

I want you to consider the future for a minute:

http://www.solidoodle.com/

Within 10 years we will live in a world where manufacturing can be done on a micro scale, and you will be able to take your ideas to market with very little overhead. How many children educated in the current system would have the technical, engineering and/or design skills to compete in that market?

If the Chinese Government wants to impoverish their people in order to provide us with goods at lower cost, then I'm all for it (I'm actually not, but for the point of this thread, I am). I see no need for us to then start impoverishing our people to put a few industries on an equal playing field.

Those 3D printers fascinate me, though I still find it hard to imagine them having a profound effect, long term... then again, I could just be a luddite on this particular piece of technology.

Of course, Western nations are still run by morons who don't even understand the more traditional school of thoughts. Currency manipulation always leads to currency collapse - those Washington hawks should be celebrating manipulation!

I thought about this after i went to work, but China gets the added benefit of not having their currency be properly tradable unlike most currencies (one, you can't forward exchange the Renminbi, and they have limitations on the Forex market), so its not as damaging for them

I don't really know what the future holds, but I really don't think we're educating children to take advantage of that future ...

The 3D printers are just one of hundreds of technologies I see that bring a lot of the benefits of industrialization to individuals or small businesses. To be successful in the future economy we will need creative, independent and hardworking individuals; three traits the school system doesn't encourage.

If anything i thought the charges were that the school system fostered too much creativity and other "soft-touch" subjects, not focusing enough on hard subjects outside of Math

Two thoughts ...

Creativity doesn't have to be limited to soft subjects (after all creativity using science or engineering is called invention), and I'm not convinced that the soft subjects are really even encouraging creativity effectively. I'm not enough of an expert to know how we improve our education system for the future economy, I'm just aware that we're doing a pretty poor job today.

Once again I could be wrong but I suspect that for every "Steve Jobs" or "Mark Zuckerberg" we have today there were (probably) 100,000 children entering the education system that had the potential to become just as successful as they were but were let down by the system. If even 1% of those children became successful we wouldn't have to worry about whether China manipulated their currency.

Aren't all currencies being manipulated all the time?

And yet the world keeps turning