More tariffs paid by US consumers

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(06-11-2019, 08:46 PM)Dill Wrote: I think that's a good point and a good question, because you are addressing the structural logic underlying the deficit.   We have a trade deficit in part because we have high wages and can buy more; and poorer countries use cheap labor to make goods to sell us, while they often cannot buy what we produce because their consumers don't make enough money. 

Where US corporations are concerned, the difference in labor cost, realized as profit, does come back to the US, but not as an "import" and mostly to the 1%. And part of the profit is reinvested back where the cheap labor is to be found (not in Ohio).

Services make up more and more of our GDP, and services (housekeeping, nursing, teaching) mostly cannot be offshored or exported. We can't really make the Chinese or whomever buy car repairs or personal training from us. And as Chinese wages rise so they can buy from us, US corporations simply move to other countries, like Indonesia, or wherever the lowest wages are. It seems possible the trade deficit with one country, like China, could be reduced, while the total US trade deficit remains the same, or at least very high.  

In my view, easing trade imbalances could be partially addressed by some profit redistribution in the US, and by examining more closely the economies of countries like Germany, which appears to have kept its auto industry and high wage labor force while running trade surpluses.

When we get done looking at Germany on how to run an economy perhaps we could get some human-rights pointers from Bangladesh. Unless you think it's a good idea to be so reliant on Russia