Mainstream View on Trade Dangerously Wrong – Ep. 376

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Ridiculous Rhetoric in Tariffs
One of the drivers behind the increasing cost of living is going to be the tariffs.  The rhetoric here is really ridiculous.  Talking heads on the mainstream media say, "We've got China by the balls..." "We're going to make them feel some pain..." "They're going to give in..."  We're going to force them to play fair because they have so much to lose..."
We Have More to Lose and China Has More to Gain
The reason that the Chinese stock market is suffering more than the American stock market is because investors are clueless. They believe all the nonsense that China is going to lose the trade war and America is going to win. It couldn't be further from the truth. We have a lot more to lose, in fact China has a lot to gain, if they would only figure it out. Why have the Chinese for so long been willing to subsidize the U.S. economy? That is what they have been doing.  They have been artificially suppressing the standard of living of their own people so they can prop up the standard of living in America. They have been denying their own citizens the production they otherwise would have been entitled to by diverting that production to exports.
Economists Made Same Faulty Analysis After WWII
This is the same type of argument that economists made, and I pointed this out on my first book, Crash Proof: The Second World War was nearing an end.  There were economists who were worried  that the end of the war would bring about a recession because there would be lots of unemployment. All of the factories that were producing military products wouldn't have anything to make anymore. And all the soldiers and factory workers would be unemployed. Everybody was worried that there would be a big economic downturn.
U.S. Postwar Economy Boomed Because the Government Dramatically Cut Spending
Fortunately nobody took the advice of those economists.  We ended the war anyway and rather than an economic downturn, we had an economic boom. In fact, you hear all these economists today who like to say that WWII got us out of the Great Depression. That's not correct. Yes, the GDP went up during the war because of all the military production, but if you look at the standard of living of American citizens during the war, compared to that of the post-war era, it was when the war ended that the economy boomed. Why?  Because the government dramatically cut spending.