Trump is vowing to fix a problem that hasn’t existed for a decade
The economic history of the last 40 years can be summed up in four words: “before China” and “after China.”
Before China opened up, the world's center of economic gravity was on the Atlantic. After China did, that started migrating toward the Pacific. Before China embarked on its market reforms, its average standard of living was 2.5 percent of ours. After China did, that rose to 28 percent (and counting). And before China established permanent trade relations with us, we had 17 million manufacturing jobs. After China did, that fell rather rapidly to around 14 million.
That last part has become politically radioactive in the age of President Trump. Indeed, he took to Twitter Thursday to deliver a pair of particularly aggressivemissives about his upcoming tete-a-tete with Chinese premier Xi Jinping — their first since an election in which Trump used China as something of a political piñata — to declare that the U.S. trade deficit with them is intolerable, and, in what has become a semiregular threat to start a trade war, that U.S. companies should be ready to look “at other alternatives.”
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