Posts Tagged ‘foreign trade’

Why is the American media misinforming the American people about the worsening US-China trade deficit? The graph below shows the actual trade deficit, with a 12 month moving average:

Read more by Howard Richman at IdealTaxes.com

Last month, PolitiFact selected its “Lie of the Year.” Given PolitiFact’s dubious record of singling out Republicans for lying far more often than Democrats, you probably could have guessed the winner of this particular sweepstakes was a Mitt Romney campaign ad:

It was a lie told in the critical state of Ohio in the final days of a close campaign — that Jeep was moving its U.S. production to China. It originated with a conservative blogger, who twisted an accurate news story into a falsehood. Then it picked up steam when the Drudge Report ran with it. Even though Jeep’s parent company gave a quick and clear denial, Mitt Romney repeated it and his campaign turned it into a TV ad.

And they stood by the claim, even as the media and the public expressed collective outrage against something so obviously false.

Read more By MARK HEMINGWAY at weeklystandard.com

President Obama told a September 26 rally at Kent State University in Ohio, “I want to see us export more jobs.” Then he caught himself and continued, “Export more products — excuse me. I was channeling my opponent for a second.” According to Freud, such slips of the tongue reveal true intentions that a person may be trying to hide, sometimes even from himself. Does Obama actually want to export American jobs?

Obama was misrepresenting Romney’s position. If Romney is elected, he intends to address China’s trade cheating. Philip Ruckers in the Washington Post, October 13, 2011 quotes Gov. Romney as saying, “If you cheat, there’s a huge advantage. Fortunately in most of our lives, we find a way to stop the cheaters. . . we haven’t done that with regards to trade. China, in particular, has realized the extraordinary advantage to cheating.”

In fact, impartial observers are concluding that Romney, not Obama, will bring back exported American jobs.

Read more by Howard Richman, Raymond Richman, and Jesse Richman at American Thinker

Concern over economic competition from China has been a theme of the U.S. race for the White House, with President Barack Obama defending his record and Republican challenger Mitt Romney promising tougher tactics.

Here is a comparison of Romney and Obama’s positions on China and other trade issues:

Read more at foxbusiness.com

More big U.S. companies are reincorporating abroad despite a 2004 federal law that sought to curb the practice. One big reason: Taxes.

Companies cite various reasons for moving, including expanding their operations and their geographic reach. But tax bills remain a primary concern. A few cite worries that U.S. taxes will rise in the future, especially if Washington revamps the tax code next year to shrink the federal budget deficit.

Read more by John D. McKinnon from The Wall Street Journal, posted at Yahoo Finance

The notion that computers eat jobs is worthy of a 1950s professor of economics. Fifty-six thousand manufacturing facilities have closed in the U.S. since 2001. The jobs in those plants were not lost due to computers.

During an economic cycle, manufacturing expands worldwide to meet demand. Factories are located in countries where manufacturing is most cost efficient. Computers aren’t the problem, nor do they have the negative impact that Free Trade has had on manufacturing in our country.

Read more by Brian O’Shaughnessy, chairman, Revere Copper Products at RomeSentinel.com

Obama’s College Classmate: ‘The Obama Scandal Is at Columbia’

I am President Obama’s classmate at Columbia University, Class of ’83. I am also one of the most accurate Las Vegas oddsmakers and prognosticators. Accurate enough that I was awarded my own star on the Las Vegas Walk of Stars. And I smell something rotten in Denmark. Obama has a big skeleton in his closet. It’s his college records. Call it “gut instinct” but my gut is almost always right. Obama has a secret hidden at Columbia- and it’s a bad one that threatens to bring down his presidency. Gut instinct is how I’ve made my living for 29 years since graduating Columbia.

Read more by Wayne Allyn Root at TheBlaze.com

What is Barack Obama hiding?

From repealing and replacing Obamacare to slashing burdensome federal red tape, a Romney Presidency will be anything but more of the same. The first 100 days of a Romney Presidency will be the first 100 days toward getting America back on track and reversing the damages of the last three and a half years. Mitt Romney has the plans to turn our country around and the experience to get the job done.

Read more at MittRomney.com

It’s déjà vu all over again! GM again caves to Chinese pressure. In September it was the electric car. In April it was the Cadillac.

The Chinese government made its latest move in December. That’s when The Guardian reported that the Chinese government raised its already high 25% tariff upon American-made vehicles, concerned that increasing numbers of big-engine cars were being purchased by Chinese consumers:

General Motors faces the greatest impact, almost 22% extra on some sports utility vehicles (SUVs) and other cars with engine capacities above 2.5 litres. Chrysler faces a 15% penalty, while a 2% levy will be imposed on BMW, whose US plants make many of the cars it exports to China.

Existing taxes and duties already push up the cost of US imports by 25%, and the new levies make it even more expensive for Chinese consumers to buy American.

Now we learn what they were after.

Read more by Howard Richman & Raymond Richman at AmericanThinker.com

Barack Obama campaigned four years ago assailing President George W. Bush for wage losses suffered by the middle class. More than three years into Obama’s own presidency, those declines have only deepened.

The rebound from the worst recession since the 1930s has generated relatively few of the moderately skilled jobs that once supported the middle class, tightening the financial squeeze on many Americans, even those who are employed.

“It started long before Obama, but he hasn’t done anything,” said John Forsyth, 58, a railroad-car inspector and political independent from Lebanon, Ohio. “He kept pushing this change, change, change, and he hasn’t done anything.”

Underlying the erosion of the middle class, defined by some economists as the middle 60 percent of income earners, are trends that stretch back decades, including competition from lower-wage workers overseas and technological advances that allow factories and offices to produce more with less labor.

Read more By Mike Dorning at Bloomberg.com

Harvard historian and best-selling author Niall Ferguson’s latest book, “Civilization: The West and the Rest,” presents this compelling historical thesis:

At the beginning in the 15th century, the West developed six powerful new concepts that the Rest lacked: competition, science, rule of law, consumerism, modern medicine, and the work ethic … that allowed the West to leap ahead of the Rest, opening global trade routes, exploiting newly discovered scientific laws, evolving a system of representative government, more than doubling life expectancy, unleashing the Industrial Revolution, and embracing a dynamic work ethic.

Ferguson asks: Has the days of Western predominance reached an end not because of clashes with rival civilizations, but simply because the Rest have now downloaded the six “killer apps” we once monopolized while the West has literally lost faith in itself?

Read more by Ellis Washington at WND.com

The Chinese government increased trade tensions with the Obama administration Wednesday evening by unexpectedly imposing antidumping and antisubsidy tariffs on imports of sport utility vehicles and midsize and large cars from the United States.

The new tariffs, totaling up to nearly 22 percent of the import prices, will probably have a mainly symbolic function, rather than reducing the already skimpy sales of such vehicles in China. Other tariffs and taxes already in place have limited sales of American imports by helping raise their retail prices by about three times what the same cars and S.U.V.’s sell for in the United States.

–SNIP– Because of the high Chinese tariffs and taxes already in place, the vehicles are sold only in the thousands or even hundreds in China, and only to the most affluent. (A Jeep Grand Cherokee that begins at $27,490 at dealerships in the United States costs $85,000 or more in China.)

Read more By KEITH BRADSHER at the NY Times

Everybody has an opinion about trade with China, and here is mine: let’s trade ‘em Ben Bernanke for Fu Ying. Throw in a minor league pitcher if we have to – President Obama comes immediately to mind.

Fu Ying is China’s Vice Foreign Minister, who Friday announced that China would not use its foreign exchange reserves (i.e. dollars) to rescue other countries (i.e. Europe). She explained that “foreign reserves are akin to savings” and not to be squandered by governments. Whoa.

While the U.S. and European central bankers have all promised to infuse defunct European governments with as much cash as it takes for them to become even more defunct, Ms. Fu has decided to “follow market economy principles” instead, which she listed as “safety, liquidity, and proper profitability.” Yes, the “P” word!

Her explanation in China Daily reads like the Daily Paul. She does not believe that Europe can be saved by bankers; she does not believe economic decisions should be driven by political considerations; she does not believe that foreign investments should be made to gain power and leverage over another nation’s affairs. She does not see debt as a pathway to prosperity. Have mercy.

Ms. Fu makes the gibberish spewed by Fed Chairman Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Geithner sound like…gibberish. Our money men lobby the Chinese to strengthen their Yuan to assist us in weakening our dollar, and then we call them currency manipulators when they refuse to play along. We lecture China about lack of transparency while Bernanke is pumping unknown trillions into the western banking cartel in secret.

Read more by Tim Nerenz at Moment of Clarity

Did you know that an average of 23 manufacturing facilities were shut down every single day in the United States last year? As World War II ended, the United States emerged as the greatest industrial power that the world has ever seen. But now America’s industrial might is being gutted like a fish and both political parties seem totally unconcerned. Yes, we will always need trading relationships that are fair and balanced with other countries that have economic systems that are similar to our own. However, the truth is that most of our trading relationships are neither “fair” nor balanced. For example, China manipulates currency rates so that Chinese products are much cheaper than they should be, they brazenly steal our technology and we let them get away with it, they deeply subsidize their most important industries and they exploit their citizens by allowing them to be paid slave labor wages. How in the world does that resemble the “free market” at work? Predatory nations such as China do everything that they can to distort the free market. So why in the world would any rational economist ever recommend that we should keep trading with other countries that are cheating us blind? After you read the facts in this article about the gutting of America’s industrial might, hopefully you will get very angry. We need the American people to start getting very upset about these very important issues.

Read more at The Economic Collapse Blog

I went to a dealership last weekend to check out an All-American muscle car, but it didn’t turn out to be all-American at all. As listed on the window sticker, the domestic content was only 55 percent. The transmission, one of the most important components on the vehicle - especially for a performance machine - was manufactured in China. On the same day, I dropped into a hardware store to pick up a box of nails, and they were all made in the People’s Republic, too. After a long day of trying to avoid purchasing products made by the communist Chinese, I settled down at home to eat a refreshing fruit cup. When I flipped the plastic container over to check out the nutritional information, there it was in black and white and all capital letters: PRODUCT OF CHINA. The reds had invaded my refrigerator.

It doesn’t matter what you want; almost every consumer product on U.S. store shelves is made overseas, especially in China. It doesn’t matter how much you want to find it; almost nothing you need is made in the USA. From expensive manufactured equipment to swank plasma TVs to the simplest munchies for a kid’s lunchbox, that “Product of China” label is stamped on it all. Try taking the China Test for a month or two - maybe even a year. Any time you buy anything, flip it over and read the label to see if it was made in the Middle Kingdom. The results of a thorough China Test can be startling: Americans are dependent on the Maoist state for the necessities of life. Obviously, this dynamic cannot work forever. Eventually, a nation needs to produce something it can sell to have the revenue to consume anything - and America is making less all the time.

From a review by Brett M. Decker in The Washington Times