JAY AMBROSE: China helps U.S. economy
Scripps Howard News Service
Published: October 14, 2003, 10:06:00 AM PDT
(SH) - Yes, China ought to quit playing games with its currency and get out of the protectionist business, but the thought that China's imports constitute a threat to the U.S. economy is hokum.
What those imports mainly do is make millions of Americans richer.
How so? Well, analysts tell us, they keep prices down, and, when prices are low, people can buy what they need and walk away with more money in their pockets than if the prices are high. Not all economics is difficult, and this concept surely isn't. The politicians yelping about cracking down on those imports need to answer why they want to make Americans poorer. If they say the imports are costing jobs, we come to a more complicated concept, but just fractionally so.
It's true that the trade with China or any other partner can cause some businesses to fail, but resources then are more likely to go into businesses that have a competitive advantage in international commerce. The net number of jobs actually increases. Try to freeze the economy, and you hurt far more people than if you permit a dynamism that can carry you to something like what we have today, an economy that in historic terms and relative to virtually any other land is truly a wonder to behold.
China has become an issue of late because there is in fact a trade imbalance, and the U.S. economy has been a step or two slow. President Bush, who earlier had dispatched his treasury secretary to talk with the Chinese, will be meeting this week at an economic conference with the Chinese president, Hu Jintao. The barking you hear in the background? That's the members of Congress threatening to raise U.S. tariffs.
It's certainly true that the United States would be better off if China were not being so laggard in the department of self-reform. More U.S. exports to China would help create more jobs here; China has pledged to become less protectionist, and it ought to follow through. But we would be worse off, not better off, if we disrupted the trade that now exists. The U.S. economy is beginning to pick up its speed right now, and the sort of thing that could slow us down is trade intervention.
Jay Ambrose, the director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard Newspapers, can be reached at AmbroseJ@shns.com
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