China spent around the same amount of money on their stimulus package that we did. By law, 100% of it had to be spent with Chinese companies.
Germany apparently doesn't play by our rules either:Both political parties are in denial about the plain fact that American industry is competing against an industrial system in China radically different from our own. If a company like GE wants to operate in China, the Beijing regime extracts conditions that violate the spirit if not the letter of the World Trade Organization.
Companies are made to take on Chinese partners, to transfer sensitive proprietary technology, and to shift their production and R&D to China. In exchange, they get government subsidies and docile workers. Eventually, much of their production is displaced by their Chinese partners, but in the meantime they make a lot of money.
In the past two decades, company after company concluded that the U.S. government didn't really care if we lost our manufacturing base. The Chinese government was making them an offer they couldn't refuse, so one by one they made a separate peace with Beijing.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-ku ... r=Politics" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;"In 2001, 32 percent of the income of the firms on Standard & Poor's index of the 500 largest publicly traded U.S. companies came from abroad. By 2008, that figure had grown to 48 percent."
This record contrasts dramatically with that of the right's favorite whipping boy -- Western Europe. Germany is gaining jobs at a rapid clip. Its industrialists are committed to producing at home, and just in case they get ideas of making outsourcing a way of life, they have strong unions who negotiate agreements on where production is located.
Germany's labor costs are the highest in the world, but Germany nonetheless runs the world's largest export surplus -- 7 percent of GDP -- while America runs chronic trade deficits.
Bottom line is that our economic problems are structural and those making the rules are not beholden to the countries best interests, nor do they any longer need the american worker. But hey, at least business is booming:
http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?art ... is_booming" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;At a time when small business can't expand because high unemployment and the decline of home values have depressed consumer demand, big business is increasingly committed to expanding its sales and production abroad rather than at home. That's why the current downturn is different from its predecessors: Unlike any recession in American history -- including the Great Depression -- this one has come at a time when America's leading employers can return to profitability without rehiring large numbers of American workers.
'This grim new reality has yet to inform our discussion over how to come back from our mega-recession. The existing debate pits those who believe that the downturn is cyclical and that public spending can restore prosperity, against those who believe that it's structural -- that we have too many carpenters, say, and not enough nurses -- and that we should leave things be while American workers acquire new skills and enter different lines of work. But there's another way to look at the recession: that it's institutional, that it's the cumulative consequence of our leading banks and corporations investing in job-creating enterprises abroad rather than in the U.S. Thus, the disjuncture between the record-high profits of American corporations and the otherwise dismal indices of national economic health. Corporate profits for the third quarter were the highest on record -- $1.659 trillion -- and were 28 percent higher than third-quarter profits one year previous, the highest year-to-year increase on record, beating the old record set in the previous three months.
When the financial crisis hit, America's employers laid off many more workers than did their counterparts in other mature economies, and they haven't rehired them. It's not because the overall economy has contracted more steeply here. Between 2008 and 2009, the U.S. GDP dropped 2.4 percent, compared to 2.6 percent in France and roughly 5 percent in Germany, Japan, and Britain. But U.S. unemployment has increased by approximately 5 percentage points since 2007, compared to an increase of just 1 point in France and Japan and 2 in Britain. In Germany, unemployment has actually dropped a point since the downturn began and now stands a full 2 points lower than ours.
What the hell, let's continue to push for tax and spending cuts while worshipping at the alter of "free trade". I'm sure it will all work out just fine.
