10 Reasons Why Conservatives Should Be Against Unfair Trade With China And 10 Reasons Why Liberals Should Be Against Unfair Trade With China
by ilene - September 4th, 2010 1:39 pm
Michael Snyder makes arguments appealing to both right and left against our free trade relationship with China. Some of these arguments are better than others, but as a whole, he makes good points on each side. - Ilene
10 Reasons Why Conservatives Should Be Against Unfair Trade With China And 10 Reasons Why Liberals Should Be Against Unfair Trade With China
Courtesy of Michael Snyder
There are very few things that the top politicians in both political parties agree on these days, but one of the things that that they do agree on is that free trade with China is a good thing. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have all fully supported our trade relationship with China. In this day and age, virtually anyone who even dares to question how fair our "free trade" is with China is immediately labeled as a "protectionist" and is dismissed as a loon. But when you sit down and really analyze it, there are a whole lot of very good reasons why both conservatives and liberals should be fundamentally against our unfair trade relationship with China. But you won’t hear these reasons being talked about on CNN, MSNBC or Fox News. You won’t hear many members of Congress get up and give speeches about how trade with China is bleeding our economy dry. Both major political parties have completely and totally bought into "the benefits" of globalism and free trade and there isn’t even much of a national debate about our trade policies anymore.
But there should be a national debate. Unfortunately, most conservatives are just going to accept whatever their leaders tell them to believe. Conservatives have been convinced that to be against unfair trade is to be "anti-business" and no conservative ever wants to be anti-business.
Similarly, most liberals blindly follow whatever Obama, Pelosi and Reid tell them to believe. Millions of hard working Democrat voters have lost their jobs due to our nightmarish trade relationship with China, but they are still convinced that Obama is their savior and that they must not ever say anything that he does is wrong.…
A Stimulating Train Wreck
by ilene - August 26th, 2009 9:32 pm
Another terrific article, courtesy of Chris Martenson at Chris Martenson’s blog.
A Stimulating Train Wreck
In this excellent, short-and-sweet report, the case is made that a 3.5% boost to GDP from government stimulus spending alone will hit in the third quarter of 2009.
This means that whatever reading is turned in, you should mentally subtract 3.5% from it, because "growth" resulting from government deficit spending is not real growth at all, it is merely consumption borrowed from the future.
Are you stimulated yet? We hope you are, because we’ve just witnessed the largest economic stimulus in the history of the world. Never before have so many government dollars been thrown at the economy to prevent a depression. When added together, the combined financial, monetary and fiscal stimuli in the US are more than the cost of the two World Wars and “The New Deal” combined.
Stimulus spending worldwide has taken the form of a combination of tax cuts, transfer payments (free money) and infrastructure investments on roads, schools, railroads etc. In the US, the financial and stimulus contributions have been especially impressive in scale.
According to CNN’s bailout tracker, the various US government departments have committed to stimuli worth $11 trillion dollars and have issued cheques totaling $2.8 trillion dollars thus far in 2009.
Neil Barofsky, the Special Investigator General for the TARP program, has estimated that the total cost to the US taxpayer could be as high as $23 trillion.
The vast majority of this stimulus has been directed at the financial sector – a complete waste of money in our opinion, supporting a segment of the economy that never deserved to be bailed out.
Nonetheless, the US taxpayer has spent massive sums, committed to promises worth even more and may ultimately owe debt in the double-digit trillions when all is said and done. Nice of them to spend so generously, wouldn’t you say?
Although the stimulus has been fantastic for the stock market, it has generated very little benefit for “Main Street”. To make matters worse, the effects of the stimulus packages have already started to wear off.
To explain why, we must mention the American Recovery and Reinvestment