Saturday 29 October 2016

What the China Trade Warriors Get Wrong - WSJ

Free trade is good for the US and the world, not bad. Unemployment in the US is more due to productivity and technology gains than much to do with international trade.
And China is not the bogey-country Trump makes it out to be.
Still it's clear that dislocations of the working classes, the long-term unemployment that is becoming endemic, need better solutions from both parties. I'd expect a Democratic president to do better on that front.
When talking about trade, both presidential candidates have been marching voters down a dead-end street. Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton claim larger imports or trade deficits are associated with weaker economic growth, which is the opposite of the U.S. experience. Before peddling risky solutions to a misunderstood problem—such as threatening huge tariffs on countries or U.S. companies—the candidates might first take more care to understand, define and explain what they are hoping to fix.
What the China Trade Warriors Get Wrong, Wall Street Journal.