How foreigners view US-initiated trade war
chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2018-07-20 14:30
pnp(Expat in China)
Trump does not understand economics, does not understand that a trade deficit is not a loss to the US; many Americans benefit from cheaper goods from China and other countries.
Worse still, he is living in the past; he doesn't understand that today's manufacturing is dependent on the global supply chain where the components of a product come from many countries, not just from China. China's contribution to making Apple's iphone is but a small portion of the overall input, the rest comes from US, S Korea etc. Trump takes the final value of the Apple iphone into calculating the trade deficit, when a better and fairer approach would be the exclude the cost input of the other countries; then the trade deficit with China figure would be much less, and more manageable. In trying to protect the jobs of a few thousand supporters he is prepared to raise the cost of products that affect all Americans, particularly the poorer ones who need cheap products, and even plunge the world into a needless trade war in which there is no winner! That is the price Americans pay when they put this clown in the White House!