Outsourcing for Chinese Sugar Daddies

American corporations finance Chinese sugar daddies...but first, a little background.

Taking Aim at the Wrong Deficit (by Dean Baker and Jared Bernstein) -- "Lowering the budget deficit right now will lead to slower growth. But reducing the trade deficit would have the opposite effect. Not only that, but by increasing growth and getting more people back to work in higher-than-average value-added jobs, a lower trade deficit would itself help to reduce the budget deficit. Running a trade deficit means that income generated in the United States is being spent elsewhere. In that situation, labor demand — jobs to produce imported goods — shifts from here to there."

Austerity and Stupidity -- "The recent Eurozone crisis has shown that austerity measures are self-defeating. They produce severe recessionary consequences which – at least in the short term – tend to increase public debt, as a ratio to GDP. This assessment is confirmed by econometric analysis showing that budgetary adjustments have been more recessionary than expected."

From Bob Hall --

"This morning, concerned citizens complained to me about other concerned citizens -- mostly that yesterday Washingtonians voted against GMO labeling. It made me think about disclosures in general. If "Made in China" labels said: "Purchasing This Product Supports Your Competitors and Adversaries Who Deprive and Defeat Your Family and Friends", would more Americans be able to connect the dots?

From AEON Magazine: An enormous amount of off-book money sloshes around Chinese business and officialdom, and some of it runs into handbags. As well as paying for her apartment and buying her gifts, Shanshan's "uncle" (sugar daddy) provided her with a living allowance of about 20,000 yuan ($3,260) a month. This was about the average for Beijing --- in smaller towns, 10,000 yuan might be acceptable, or even 5,000. At the top end, a mistress might receive 10,000 yuan in spending money every day.

"If you're an official, you have to have a mistress, or at least a girlfriend. Otherwise you're not a real man. I used to have this friend who was a fake mistress. She was best friends with a gay guy -- not a 'duck' [male prostitute], just a normal gay guy -- who was an official's boyfriend. So the official would pay her to come out with him and pretend to be his mistress."

Bob Hall, "All this and more, with every Chinese product you buy. . . ."

Millions of (what could have been) good-paying American jobs were outsourced by American companies to China to use cheaper labor to fatten the wallets of CEOs.

American companies, such as Apple and Nike, use contract manufactures in places like China -- not just for lower wages and lower taxes, but also to avoid environmental laws in the US.

New York Times: China’s Dirty Air - "Air pollution has reached appalling levels in China, the world’s biggest carbon emitter. But we all knew this was coming and should not be surprised...The Chinese economy has grown spectacularly by following models of advanced economies...China has thought of pollution as a necessary cost of becoming an advanced economy."

An economy that has already surpassed Japan as the world's 2nd largest, and is predicted to surpass the US, becoming #1.

From the Washington Post, via a Fed study:

"The Great Recession may have crushed America’s economic potential. Our national economic potential is now a whopping 7 percent below where it was heading at the pre-2007 trajectory. What seems to be happening, they argue, is that people who lost their jobs in the recession have now been out of work for years, leading their skills to atrophy and them to become less attached to the workforce. As those workers’ productive capacity diminishes, so does the total potential of the U.S. economy. The authors argue that while the “natural” rate of unemployment — the proportion of joblessness in a fully healthy economy — has likely risen due to the recession, that effect should be dissipating. “We see the evidence of recent years as suggesting that the natural rate of unemployment may have moved up between ½ and 1½ percentage points since the onset of the recent recession."

Also, from another study, Effects of Rising Imports on US Workers:

"Workers bear substantial costs as a result of the "shock" of rising import competition. In the past two decades, China's manufacturing exports have grown dramatically, and U.S. imports from China have surged. While there are many reports of plant closures and employment declines in sectors where import competition from China and elsewhere has been strongest, there was little research of the long-run effect on workers." (Read More...)

Buy a Chinese product today and support a Chinese labor camp and help finance a Chinese sugar daddy. (Apple included. Read: America's Outsourcers to be Reclassified as Manufacturers).

The US trade balance with China is (choose a year):

2013 | 2012 | 2011 | 2010 | 2009 | 2008 | 2007 | 2006 | 2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999 | 1998 | 1997 | 1996 | 1995 | 1994 | 1993 | 1992 | 1991 | 1990 | 1989 | 1988 | 1987 | 1986 | 1985 |

* Google "Bud Meyers China" for more....also, read up on Obama's free trade agreement (TPP).