… meanwhile we have negative growth. Isn’t it time we start taxing stuff from countries like India and China to even out this massive trade deficit? It is unfair that in American and Europe we have strict environmental policies and (some not all) take care of their people. Not so in China or India, so why should we encourage their growth if their polluting and destroying the Earth? Not to mention wicked overpopulation in India and the fact they’re destroying every last bit of woodland refuge.
Mexico too? Mexico has logged to death the area where Monarch butterflies overwinter, and they may actually destroy this vital butterfly from the planet.
I think North America and Europe needs to say we will not deal with countries that do not adhere to the same environmental and humanitarian principles as we do. After all, it has been out money that fueled their growth…
I actually expect a lot more economic sanctions from Obama than we saw under Bush. China and India both benefited more than most people realize from Bush’s administration. I’m hopeful we’ll see some change. We should not be supporting the policies you mention, and that goes for Mexico too, and any other nations doing similar things.
However, a complete cutoff or extreme import taxes may be a bit much. China in particular is making progress on human rights. I think Bush was right to praise and reward that. So there is a delicate balance that has to be straddled here.
Well, Caterpillar announced 20,000 job cuts yesterday and part of their reason was the drop in demand from China, which implies things are slowing down there, even if they may not have dropped into a negative like we have.
I won’t address the question in the post title except to note that China’s GDP reporting is from a totalitarian regime who had been known to exaggerate growth numbers in the past.
Now as far as tariffs, firstly in a lot of cases they wouldn’t be allowed anymore because of trade agreements and treaties but we really don’t want them to be canceled. I could point to bodies of economic research that could possibly convince you but you would just as well be served by putting some key words into Google about free trade, tariffs and if you want to see some good stuff put the word depression by any of those.
Now for the environmental stuff. Remember that they don’t mess up the environment because they love living in a toxic swamp. It’s because YOU as an American have a NIMBY attitude about the environmental consequences of manufacturing but you still want the stuff they make.
If you want to solve this problem your best bets are:
Consume less. Do you really need those plastic garden gnomes?
Buy used. Do all your kids toys and clothes have to be new?
Demand good employer and environmental practices from the manufacturers of things you do need to buy and buy new.
Donate a little bit to charity with the money you save from the above steps, especially a charity that provides either loans to people in poverty or education to people in poor countries. After all these people are working in factories for 16 hours a day for the most part because their alternative work is subsistence farming or even begging or starvation.
Well the concern was that the workers are not treated well, if we cut down consumption there’s a good chance that their lives will be even worse at least in the short run. Step 4 is to help you get over any residual post consumer guilt.
China will have one big, looming problem that seems to go unreported. The Chinese government estimates that they have about 300 million smokers in China, but there are a few world health organizations who say that number will double in another 5 years.
China won’t be able to deal with this health problem the way that evidence suggests they’ll deal with their Alzheimer’s problem (those are just AMA backroom whispers, so no evidence I can supply). They’ll have a huge need for massive, state-wide healthcare on a level Americans cannot even fathom…and there’s little evidence they’re doing much to prepare for it.
No one has mentioned this, but China calculates its GDP growth differently than Western countries. It reports annual growth over the previous year rather than growth in the quarter at an annualized rate. If you actually calculate it as we do, their growth rate is negligible or negative.
A somewhat related anecdote (though not India or China), but evidently Dubai is seeing a big slowdown too. A friend who does business there says that 6 months ago there was a ton of new construction–cranes moving at all hours of the day putting up new skyscrapers. But he’s noticed recently that all of the construction has stopped. All the cranes and half-built buildings are still there, but none of them are moving or progressing.
When he talks to governmental directors and planners they’re all still talking about their incredible growth, and how Dubai’s GDP will double by 2015, but he’s really skeptical.
Lifetime medical costs are actually lower for smokers than they are for non-smokers. Smokers have higher health care costs while they are alive, but their shorter lifespan more than makes up for the difference.
Lifetime? Yes. Smokers live shorter lives. That statistic doesn’t say what you want it to, though.
To get the accurate vs. cost, you need to take the time of death by non-accidental or willful cause of a smoker, take their age at time of death, and compare the healthcare cost of the five years leading to that death compared to the average healthcare cost of a nonsmoker at similar age during that five years. It isn’t that there’ll be this wave of smokers in China who’ll have the cancer show up in their lives and then after 5-10 years they’ll be done with it. This is a healthcare problem that will be hitting them for decades, because the number of smokers in the country keeps rising, not declining.
For years citizens in the US have wrung their hands about what will happen when the huge medical bills of the Baby Boomer generation come home to roost as that demographic enters old age and needs elder care. China has that exact problem, only times a million. Yes, their government will be able to cull a percentage of that number, if rumors are correct…but that still leaves them with a massive healthcare cost headache looming on the horizon.
Actually, most economists say it’s been Chinese money that’s fueled American growth–the Chinese save (~50% of their income, although part of that is due to a non-functional healthcare system; you need to have money for medical emergencies) while Americans spend. And spend. And borrow money (from the Chinese, in the form of t-bills) to spend some more. This is to some extent a mutually beneficial relationship; Americans benefit from a lower cost of living (read: Wal-Mart, although that’s just one example–the computer you’re reading this on was most likely made in China, and probably cost you less than $600) and China modernizes its agrarian society.
And as much as you’d like a repeat of the Smoot-Hawley act, I’m pretty confident that Obama is not looking for Great Depression Part Deux. We’re all in this together, including the Chinese, the Indians and even the Texans. Protectionism means a lower standard of living for everybody.
P.S. What would you like India to do about their “wicked overpopulation”, by the way? One-child policy, i.e. China?
What pokerman says. No money to spend equals no higher healthcare cost. Also, I would imagine that if you get cancer in China, I would think the government would presume that its your problem, not theirs. What the government may do for the public good is to increase tariffs and launch some public campaigns against smoking. I seriously doubt they are going to throw money at any individuals for healthcare.
You keep talking about healthcare as if you expected China to actually provide expensive end-of-life care for many millions of lung cancer patients from the working class… but it’s much more likely that the state will simply let them die quickly in some cheap hospital.
By the way, nearly everyone was smoking in the economic boom years in America and later Europe around the middle of the 20th century. Didn’t seem to hurt much, did it? Smoking itself is not an economic problem, it does not negatively affect productivity for most of the smoker’s working life; and dealing with the consequences of smoking can be as cheap or expensive as the national healthcare facilities allow.
Good point, however we actually need jobs to buy those cheap goods. Did we really need Dell, Microsoft, Apple and a thousand other companies need build/move their tech, manufacturing and call centers to China, Indida, Costa Rica? I’d rather have them be here and know people had jobs in which they’d have a chance of purchasing the devices. I know so many people (many on this board who have lost their jobs due to this migration. How does it help them?
India? Mandatory birth control and a 1 child policy. India has decimated their forested areas and it spells doom for the whole region to turn lush areas into a dirt-bed and kill off every spare fish and meat-bearing critter around.
Yeah… that’s kinda offensive. Not to mention, well, ignorant of the damage the one child policy has done to the Chinese. I can think of ways to discourage population growth that don’t make me want to gag, though.
Like what? All I can think of is to raise the cost of living so much that people can’t afford to have children. That’s also a terrible solution though, because responsible people will be miserable and irresponsible people will have kids anyway and there will be lots more poverty.
Really, how do you control a population other than to say “Stop having children” ?
EDIT: I just thought of a way. Provide lots of fun things for people to do at all ages that can’t be done with kids. In my dream world, people around the world say “Man if I have a kid I wouldn’t have time to go to my local UN Fun Land every night and party! I have so much fun there, I can’t live without it!”
First, stop thinking about “controlling” a population. You all are giving me the willies. We’re talking about human beans, not roaches.
Education, literacy, and access to affordable/free birth control are time honored solutions to helping people lower birth rates. Or be creative about it - pay families not to have kids. There must be some behavioral economic twist that would help, I’m sure. But draconian measures like the one child policy are unnecessary. And concern about overpopulation in the third world from an environmental perspective is probably overblown - the carbon footprint of the single child of an American middle class family is an order of magnitude higher than that of a huge family in India.
Don’t do us all a disservice and pretend the one child policy has been a success. It’s been an abject failure, whether you look at it from a moral or sociological point of view, or simply practical terms.
Mandatory birth control? Seriously? You know who else was into that? Nazis, that’s who! /thread
