China and our cold war and virtual trade war is shaking our markets and causing the prospective Democrat hopefuls to insinuate this situation into their campaigns. However, not one of these candidates has any background in trade, business or even can tout the success of running a kiddie lemonade stand. President Trump, in his election campaign, attempted to awaken our citizenry to the growing economic problem with our trade deficit with China and their unimpeded thievery of our intellectual property. Apparently enough of our electorate sided with his concerns and elected him to do what he has to do to remedy the situation.
In 2018 The U.S. imported a record $539.5 bn in goods from China and in return, we sold the Chinese $120.3 bn. Hence, the dangerous, huge trade deficit between our two countries. This has to stop. When we started trading with China back in the early ’80’s their industries, shipping, labor market and production capacity was in the developing stage. We opened up our markets to them. And they grew. Now, they still refuse to open up their markets to our products. They employ huge tariffs on our goods: Raisins 35%, motorcycles 30%, electronics 30% and cars, 25%. How can we win this battle without a firm position of fairness by China? That’s why this trade issue was one of the prime issues for Trump. He’s the first president to say, “We have a problem here that has to be solved before our nation is plummeted further in debt.” That growing dilemma was why much of our industries opted to leave the country throwing workers out of jobs. The Bushes, Clinton and Obama, all politicians, were soft on China and capitulated, fearing to rock the domestic financial boat. Go through the rust-belt of America, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and Michigan, where factories had empty workers’ parking lots and they get it. We have to stand up to the Chinese and make them accept our products on an equal tariff basis as we do theirs.
President Trump abhors tariffs and is a free trade guy. But it’s hard to have free trade with a country that is stealing, lying and involved in cyber-espionage against us. And they threaten us militarily. He’s banking on them backing down simply because of the fact we buy about four times more from them than they from us. That’s business. Trump may come across to many as a street fighter and to some as a bully but if that’s the way the Chinese dictators see him, he and this nation will emerge the better off for his attempts to finally remedy a chronic situation. The question, of course, is how long will this take. We have to be patient. We have won wars in the past and none of them was without some pain and suffering. But we’re confident, we will emerge victorious in this one.
