Quote (Black XistenZ @ Aug 28 2018 07:44pm)
I cant speak about Canada, but yes, before the trade wars broke out, the EU was imposing higher tariffs on american imports than what the americans charged on european imports. our european markets are more heavily protected and more heavily subsidized than the american ones. the ECB is artificially lowering the interest rates in the euro zone, which is almost like "doping" for the german and the dutch export economies in particular.
overall, I consider the distortion created by those points to be rather minor, so I dont really like the skirmishes going on between Trump and the EU, but I can understand the reasoning behind it. Trump's accusations against europe and germany in particular are not made up out of thin air!
What I consider really problematic, however, are the trade practices of the Chinese: huge subsidies and state-debt-funded growth, gigantic export surpluses that have had an adverse effect on the job markets in the rest of the world, theft and disrespect of the intellectual property of western companies, artificially low interest rates put up by the state-dependent instead of independent central bank, heavy entry barriers for western firms onto the chinese market while happily taking advantage of our open markets, and so on.
Trump is absolutely justified in being outraged at those abusive Chinese trade practices and in trying to force the Chinese to adopt more fair trade policies. Whether his approach for achieving this goal is the best one, and whether it will be successful at all, is a different question and remains to be seen.
When it comes to Mexico: Trump is currently making progress in renegotiations of NAFTA - I'd prefer to wait for the end result before assessing his success/failure on this frontline. That NAFTA killed millions of american jobs, as predicted by the critics at the time, is a fact though. So here, again, Trump is at least somewhat justfied in taking measures and adopting a new, more aggressive approach than his predecessors.
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Fender in a nutshell:
"I'll lay out an undercomplex, short-sighted (mis)interpretation of what I perceive your arguments to be, and then I'll write one or two paragraphs about how ignorant, sad, stupid, racist, evil you are for ""thinking"" like that" - do you really consider this obnoxious style of debate of yours to be constructive?
See, I really agree with a lot of this and I think a readjustment of trade balance is absolutely necessary and proper. It's the sort of thing Bernie Sander also argued in favor of. I have a major problem with the approach more than the philosophical reasoning. I think most Americans would agree.
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