China

>”It’s economically productive for the 1% to maintain a trade relationship with China. The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship...”

So true, since its inception with GHW, its execution and realization through Clinton and then once fully engaged the timid, supplicant responses from GW and BO, China has contributed to the stagnation of the blue collar worker on America with the full complicity of Democrats, Republicans and most of Industry and even unions who didn’t oppose their cozy politicians. They all only saw starry dollar signs...

That’s where we are now. People have had enough. That’s why they put up with the guy no one likes because he’s willing to sever that codependent relationship.

Now, if you ask any pol running for the nomination who the greatest threat to America is... it’s not going to be China...

The article focuses on human rights abuses which I think is a cogent criticism of China-US trade.

On the economics issue though, readers should know he disagrees with economists, who nearly universally agree that trade with China benefits Americans as a whole, with the caveat that there are concentrated losses in certain populations. Economists are highly certain on this, with uncharacteristically few people responding "uncertain" on the survey [0]. You can go through the other surveys on the IGM Forum to see what more common distributions looks like.

[0] http://www.igmchicago.org/surveys/china-us-trade

> On the economics issue though, readers should know he disagrees with economists, who nearly universally agree that trade with China benefits Americans as a whole, with the caveat that there are concentrated losses in certain populations.

The thing is: economists are hardly unbiased and neutral. Their theories are far from scientific truth, and typically embed significant political content.

For instance: "benefit" can be a highly political term. How do "economists" define it and is that the definition we should be using?

This is an interesting article on the subject:

https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/22/economists-globalizatio...

> ECONOMISTS ON THE RUN

> Paul Krugman and other mainstream trade experts are now admitting that they were wrong about globalization: It hurt American workers far more than they thought it would. Did America’s free market economists help put a protectionist demagogue in the White House?

There are winners and losers in every decision, and I've already acknowledged there are concentrated losses among certain populations. It hurt certain sectors of manufacturing, yes, but as you can see pulling back from trade hurts a different set of American workers[0][1], and may not even be benefiting the manufacturing sector[2]. Manufacturing is not a simple "I make things or you make things", with free trade it's a cooperative process and protectionism affects inputs to manufacturing as well[3].

Without belaboring the argument which I'm sure everyone's seen before, I would like to re-focus on the point of my comment: The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics. You can give counter examples yes, but overall trade has been a benefit to Americans, especially for lower-income Americans who rely on low cost goods. We can say with our engineering jobs that we're willing to bear the cost of protectionism, but we don't really bear that cost in the first place.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-costs-...

[1] https://fee.org/articles/tariffs-hurt-the-poorest-the-most/

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/07/the-costs-...

[3] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trade-steel/in-michig...

> There are winners and losers in every decision, and I've already acknowledged there are concentrated losses among certain populations.

Decisions are political, and these decisions have been, more or less, presented to the losers as a fait accompli by the winners. It is good and right that such a decision be challenged, and that it potentially be moderated or rolled back entirely.

These decisions also have had important effects outside of the areas typically focused on by "economists" that need to be taken into account.

> The idea that "The financial incentives don’t help any Americans, and in fact, most of us are hurt by this relationship" is counter to everything we know about economics.

The thing is, it's not inaccurate to say economics is a political ideology. We should speak about it honestly: as politics and not science. So it's more accurate to say that idea is "counter to everything we know about [my?] political ideology."

Posting links to blogs from explicitly libertarian think tanks that quote chapter and verse does little to convince me economics is something other than politics by another name.

The scientific side of economics is the description of the properties and behavior of economics systems. The political side is what we should do with this information. I think I and the sources I've cited have kept largely to the former, and I'm the only one in the comment chain to at least throw up a graph. Call it what you want, but we should be able to make observations on systems. At the very least it's a step up from say, pointing out that a source comes from libertarians.

> The scientific side of economics is the description of the properties and behavior of economics systems. The political side is what we should do with this information.

No, sorry. It's not that clean cut. Your links had economists stating things like "America’s low-income households benefit the most from free trade and having access to cheap imports." But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement (even ignoring the fact that statement was made though an organization advocating for a particular political policy).

If economics was not political, economists would merely say things like "All else being equal, if our models are correct, increased tariffs will lead to increased domestic prices of international trade goods. However, all else is not equal, so we cannot comment if tariffs are good policy or not."

> "America’s low-income households benefit the most from free trade and having access to cheap imports."

This is a description of a property or behavior of a system.

> But defining good as having access to cheaper goods is an intensely political statement

This would be apolitical in all but the most semantic of arguments. "Buying the things I want to buy" is assumed to be a good thing by the vast majority of people.