Bessent said the temporary reductions would effectively reduce the level of U.S. tariffs still in place on Chinese goods to about 30%, while China was reducing its levies on American imports to 10%.
Why couldn't the US just destroy itself?! Don't make the rational move! JDPON DON I believed in you!
I hate the way the bourgeois media talks, lacking literally even an atom of concern or respect for workers, the environment or the life/flesh of living things. It's all numbers and profits, national spats and numbers. 80 of the Amazon's deforested area reduced to merely a few billion dollars of exports.
Fair enough. That is a victory worth celebrating because the 9/11 planner (aka comrade George "Dubya" Bush) was successful in accelerating American decline by 20 years.
At least it's a step up from
The existence of a Palestinian state or people is anti-semetic
Americans also don't have any military victories to celebrate. Both in the sense that the keep loosing wars, and in the sense that even when they win wars, they end up creating such hellish outcomes that the ruling class prefers to bury the shit under the sand.
Firstly, America is not nazi Germany 2.0, nazi Germany was America 2.0.
Secondly, Who will declare war on America?
China? They already are preparing for WW3 scenarios and Trump's statements do nothing to change the timeline of preparations
Russia? They are already at (proxy) war with the US
Iran or North korea? They have enough defensive capabilities to have a good chance of defeating a US invasion (which appears to be a matter of when not if). But no real offensive capabilities against the US (discounting US satelites).
India or NATO minus the US? Their ideological conviction would lead them to siding with American fascism rather than against it. Like, why would they invade the heartland of world-historical fascism when they themselves are fascist?
We just gonna sit around and let Nazi Germany 2.0 happen?
~~Modern america doesn't a tenth the (relative to the rest of the world) military or economic power that Nazi Germany did. And that's because~~ other countries haven't been sitting on their asses all this time. They've been struggling for decades to create the multipolar world.
This is a real big update to my simulation and reworks the entire logic of it. Though doing so allows me to investigate even more stuff. Check out the post on the old sim if you haven't seen it.
At this point, the sim has become so complex, I don't think I can explain it in as much depth as the previous one.
So I'll keep it simple and show you my assumptions, results, and code. There are 10 sectors in the economy this time (so the visualization has changed)
As always, "economic reproduction" is the condition where nobody in the economy gains or looses money by the end of the production period.
The code and pictures are in the comments.
Also, I'd like /u/Sebrof and /u/pancake@lemmygrad.ml to see this post.
Assumptions:
My next model will try to model these things to see if the relationship between labor prices and economic reproduction still holds
The logic of this model is inverted to the last one. In the previous model, we started with a net output (sold to consumers) then calculated how much gross output would be needed (sold to consumers and to factories) to maintain this. This time, I randomly generate a gross output then compute a net output.
I randomly generate 100,000 economies, each with its own technological level (the 10x10 A matrix), a set of prices (10x1 column vector), and employment in industries (10x1 vector). I assume everyone is employed. Also, this time, there is only 1 price vector per economy.
For each economy, I randomly generate a "basket of consumption", which is the amount of products that its people will consume. I scale the basket so that it could be produced by half the labor of the economy, and keep the basket constant for all time.
This time, there is foreign trade. If the economy produces more of a product than what is required for the basket, that's exports. Otherwise it imports.
I simulate 100 time steps for each economy. Every time step, the sectors of the economy will update their prices and employment. There were many possible rules for choosing how these updates happened. I made it so that the sectors hire workers in proportion to how much money they have (divided by how much it costs to hire workers). Prices are scaled down as a sector grows (due to competition)
Then I compute all the financial data (like revenues, wages, incomes, costs, trade imbalances, profits, etc) and plot it.
The important accounting identities are:
National income = Wages + trade balance
National income = Revenues of industry - Costs of industry (not including wages)
This is not true. The tariff war is a prime opportunity for China to develop its own "internal circulation", aka domestic consumer base (the CPC's own terminology and stated goal) and to increase consumption/development in the global south. The US "consumer base" and "wealth" for imports is really just the American heavenly tribute that it extracts from the world. The US gets commodities on debt that it has no intention of ever paying back, while the rest of the world is forced to trade US debt with each other if they want to do business.
The loosening of tariffs is a missed opportunity. The Chinese government could have continued to maintain pressure on the US. And while it's true that this would have caused damage to export oriented businesses in China, China has a planned economy and certainly could print money to support these export oriented businesses. It could bouy its export industries by providing loans in Yuan to developing countries, so they can purchase Chinese products. The latter policy would pair well with China's earlier decision to remove all tariffs on low-income countries (a much welcome move). Both China and the global south could then trade goods with each other using Yuan or alternative currencies.
The only good part about this move is that it gives Chinese policy makers more time to consider consider their options and take things slowly. However, this time is fundamentally limited, as the American imperialists are becoming increasingly impatient and belligerent.