Opinion Do you, or would you support a president that you didn't vote for?

[The Hash Slinging Slasher]

Shouldn't this be a rational way of thinking? You don't have to agree with all of the presidents policies, but you should want what's best for your country and want whoever is in office succeed regardless of their party affiliation.

I didn't vote for Bush, but I wanted him to succeed. I voted for Obama, but I didn't like all of his policies and thought there were things he could have handled better. I think Trump is doing a decent Job even though he doesn't act like the most professional person at times. I will vote for him over Biden in November, but will still support Joe if he gets elected.

This is the way it should be. But instead of rooting for the nation, people get so caught up in wanting to see the president crash and burn. I have no doubt that there are plenty of democrats that wouldn’t care what the cost was as long as trump failed. And it was the same way with Obama and the republicans.

 

[leto1776]

I never liked Obama. I thought he ran on a hollow message with no substance. Hated so much of what he did in office. Never once wanted him to fail, though. To want the president to fail is to want America to fail.

 

[Jack V Savage]

This is a classic case of one person trying to persuade people that what they see with their untrammeled vision isn't actually there.

Huh?

US median income hasn't come close to doubling in the 18 years since China joined the WTO, let alone over any 11-year period since then.

The relevance of that is what?

Seems like you're shifting your thinking again. If you want to argue that there was a short-term impact of initially opening up trade with China, that's very reasonable. If you want to argue that we should expect an impact to continue, or that we can reverse it with protectionism, that's a much harder climb. But that's all irrelevant to the point I commented on, which is that a trade deficit is a positive for the country that has it. You're "arguing" for your emotional position that China=bad. But you're actually stating things that have reference to the world outside your head.

Yes, Chinese selling goods to the rest of the world enriches the Chinese government. Do you think the Chinese government would have had the resources to pull off espionage like the OPM and Equifax hacks if all these Chinese people who have been producing hundreds of billions $ worth of goods sold to the US were peasant farmers instead?

China selling goods to the rest of the world enriches them how? Answer: Buy allowing them to buy stuff *from the rest of the world*, i.e., to reverse the trade deficit. It doesn't enrich them by allowing them to buy things domestically. In fact, it *reduces* their ability to do that. Your thinking on the whole issue is seriously muddled.

There's no "silliness" and there was no earlier "misunderstanding" on my part. I'm simply not buying the false bill of goods you're selling. The ship for the grandeur of neoliberalism has sailed.

No, you had expressed a misunderstanding of what a trade deficit means. And you made a bizarre comment about trade with China (completely separate from your claim about a trade deficit) hollowing out communities, which you then retracted (and called a strawman). I don't know what you mean by neoliberalism, so maybe, but you're simply wrong about the significance of a trade deficit, and I don't think your professed concern with American workers is sincere anyway (given that you support political leaders who oppose everything that could be in workers' interests).

 

[Deleted member 159002]

Huh?



The relevance of that is what?

Seems like you're shifting your thinking again. If you want to argue that there was a short-term impact of initially opening up trade with China, that's very reasonable. If you want to argue that we should expect an impact to continue, or that we can reverse it with protectionism, that's a much harder climb. But that's all irrelevant to the point I commented on, which is that a trade deficit is a positive for the country that has it. You're "arguing" for your emotional position that China=bad. But you're actually stating things that have reference to the world outside your head.



China selling goods to the rest of the world enriches them how? Answer: Buy allowing them to buy stuff *from the rest of the world*, i.e., to reverse the trade deficit. It doesn't enrich them by allowing them to buy things domestically. In fact, it *reduces* their ability to do that. Your thinking on the whole issue is seriously muddled.



No, you had expressed a misunderstanding of what a trade deficit means. And you made a bizarre comment about trade with China (completely separate from your claim about a trade deficit) hollowing out communities, which you then retracted (and called a strawman). I don't know what you mean by neoliberalism, so maybe, but you're simply wrong about the significance of a trade deficit, and I don't think your professed concern with American workers is sincere anyway (given that you support political leaders who oppose everything that could be in workers' interests).

You must be using some absurd, ad hoc definitions of "positive" and "advantage" to claim that median income growing 18% less in the first 15 years after China joined the WTO than it did the 15 years up to the year China joined the WTO and Chinese median income more than doubling in the latter period are "positives" and "to our advantage".

 

[genecop]

Pretty sure The Kong Guy would not..

 

[genecop]

I never voted, but in Honor of The Kong Guy, I might register and vote for The Bad Orange Man.

 

[Jack V Savage]

You must be using some absurd, ad hoc definitions of "positive" and "advantage" to claim that median income growing 18% less in the first 15 years after China joined the WTO than it did the 15 years up to the year China joined the WTO and Chinese median income more than doubling in the latter period are "positives" and "to our advantage".

No, the evidence suggests that the benefit for the average person is about $10K per year. Logic suggests that a trade deficit enriches us. Also, logic suggests that to the extent that you're thinking clearly, your interest in American workers is not sincere (try to figure the impact on wages of anti-unionization policies or regressive changes in the tax code--which, BTW, can be called "neoliberalism" also). And if you're looking forward, a past period of depressed wage growth isn't even an issue (given that we'd expect the impact on wages to be an initially lowered baseline established over a short period followed by stronger growth off of that).

 

[Deleted member 159002]

No, the evidence suggests that the benefit for the average person is about $10K per year. Logic suggests that a trade deficit enriches us. Also, logic suggests that to the extent that you're thinking clearly, your interest in American workers is not sincere (try to figure the impact on wages of anti-unionization policies or regressive changes in the tax code--which, BTW, can be called "neoliberalism" also). And if you're looking forward, a past period of depressed wage growth isn't even an issue (given that we'd expect the impact on wages to be an initially lowered baseline established over a short period followed by stronger growth off of that).

"Suggests". In other words, it's impossible to prove and relies on your assumptions. Given the fact that the Chinese have had far greater income increases since China joined the WTO than Americans, while American median income gains have significantly slowed, and China's joining the WTO coincided with a nosedive in American manufacturing jobs, I'm going to say your claim about the US-China trade deficits benefiting the "average [American?] person" about $10,000, is, in the words of George W Bush, "fuzzy math".

When Americans are employed to manufacture goods, those Americans spend their paychecks at businesses owned by other Americans. Does the magic of employing people in the US to do a job and thereby creating demand that other Americans rise up to meet only work when the former are immigrants?

 

[Jack V Savage]

"Suggests". In other words, it's impossible to prove and relies on your assumptions. Given the fact that the Chinese have had far greater income increases since China joined the WTO than Americans, while American median income gains have significantly slowed, and China's joining the WTO coincided with a nosedive in American manufacturing jobs, I'm going to say your claim about the US-China trade deficits benefiting the "average [American?] person" about $10,000, is, in the words of George W Bush, "fuzzy math".

The fact that the average American benefits by about $10K a year from trade with China is a finding, rather than something that you work out logically. A trade deficit by definition means that we're getting more goods and services than we're giving, which means that we're being enriched.

When Americans are employed to manufacture goods, those Americans spend their paychecks at businesses owned by other Americans. Does the magic of employing people in the US to do a job and thereby creating demand that other Americans rise up to meet only work when the former are immigrants?

This is more muddled thinking. You're forgetting that the economy is goods and services.

And you're not addressing the fact that all the impact of trade combined doesn't matter as much as the kinds of regressive policy that politicians you support are enacting.

 

[Renard]

100% supporting a leader you dislike sounds strange to me. It reminds me of the authoritarianism scale, it's a personality scale that measures the degree to which people submit to authority figures and project aggression towards people who defy the rules and authorities. It doesn't necessarily reflect a specific political ideology because individuals who score high on this scale listen to what the ruler and established authorities say specifically, so their behaviour will vary wildly according to their environment. The creators of the concept theorized that authoritarians might be created by overly controlling and domineering parents in childhood. As children the authoritarians repress their anger at the unfair treatment they receive from their parents because it's unsafe to express it. As adults they project this repressed anger the only way they know how: aggression towards people breaking the rules, in what is essentially a re-enactment of their childhood circumstances.

Although it seems like many right-wing authoritarians in the US circumvented their own tendencies to follow authorities by claiming that Obama was an usurper (for instance the secret Muslim allegations). At the end of the day, it seems like you can just mental gymnastics your way out of it if you don't like your "ruler".

 

[Deleted member 159002]

The fact that the average American benefits by about $10K a year from trade with China is a finding, rather than something that you work out logically. A trade deficit by definition means that we're getting more goods and services than we're giving, which means that we're being enriched.



This is more muddled thinking. You're forgetting that the economy is goods and services.

And you're not addressing the fact that all the impact of trade combined doesn't matter as much as the kinds of regressive policy that politicians you support are enacting.

In other words, the "finding" is based on your assumptions.

Your argument that a trade deficit means we're getting more than we're giving with that country and therefore we're being enriched, is sophistry. It makes the assumption that when measuring a person's material well-being, what matters is not how much the average person can buy, but how much more the average person buys from the average person in another country than the average person in the other country buys from the average person in his country. "Last year I lost my job at the factory. Someone in China replaced me. But I'll be buying more from that guy's country than he'll be buying from ours, so even though I lost my middle class livelihood, and he gained one, I'm actually better off than him! And even though the businesses in my community are being shuttered because the factory workers like me who used to regularly patronize them no longer can afford to, their owners are better off too!" Does anyone actually think like that?

Even if one accepted your sophistic trade deficit = enrichment for the people of the country with the deficit, there'd be the fact people are buying these goods with money they don't have.

 

[panamaican]

Shouldn't this be a rational way of thinking? You don't have to agree with all of the presidents policies, but you should want what's best for your country and want whoever is in office succeed regardless of their party affiliation.

I didn't vote for Bush, but I wanted him to succeed. I voted for Obama, but I didn't like all of his policies and thought there were things he could have handled better. I think Trump is doing a decent Job even though he doesn't act like the most professional person at times. I will vote for him over Biden in November, but will still support Joe if he gets elected.

No. You should want the U.S. to succeed. And sometimes that means that the person making the decisions has to be prevented from ruining a good thing.

In the business world, you hire a CEO because you believe that he/she will improve the company for everyone. But if you find out that the CEO's decisions are actually hurting the company, you don't keep supporting that person. You fire them. Because the company's long term success is more important than blindly supporting someone that you hired. We can admit we made a mistake and move on from there.

As they say in other circles - don't throw good money after bad. Cut your losses and move on.