If money was put into production in Mexico instead of trying to squeeze every last cent out of it, China wouldn't have all of the worlds production right now.
Meanwhile Republicans are going on every news channel to declare that this administration's policies are guaranteed to make China the dominant world power.
The reality is, China is not really that concerned with what the US does beyond whether those actions benefit China. They'll complain publicly any time they aren't being treated "fairly" -- which in their doublespeak means favorably -- and then turn around and treat everyone else with explicit unfairness in a fairly public and obvious manner. Don't subscribe to their reaction videos.
The only question that matters is whether the policies are effectively delivering on their professed goals.
The IRA mostly such a brilliant piece of legislation that it is hard to even understand that it made it through the legislature nearly unscathed. Ignore the leftists so far up their own assholes that they'll pretend Joe Manchin taking a small shit in the corner means we should permanently condemn the whole pool. The chips bill is pretty reasonable, albeit quite protectionist. The bipartisan infrastructure bill has its priorities all over the place, but still manages a fair amount of impressive progress (though god help me the amount we are STILL spending on highway expansion is simply incomprehensible. We KNOW it doesn't work).
Whether or not China likes or hates these policies... no one should care who isn't Chinese. It's not our problem. They have an authoritarian government and can change their domestic rules to get on friendlier terms with the rest of the world any time they please, and if they aren't doing so that is their choice to make. They have a right to complain to the WTO. They know better than anyone that the WTO has no real power to change domestic policies, though.
Free trade is a central tenet of neoliberalism, so Biden's protectionist stance toward China is very much not that. Which isn't to say this is socialist or any sort of seismic change to the status quo, but it's not exactly neoliberalism either.
Biden's actual policies and impacts are actually quite good and have nothing to do with neoliberalism.
@umbrella What is neoliberal about what Biden is doing? I actually sort of suspect that you're doing precisely what you claim the NYT is doing, i.e. calling Biden "neoliberalism" because of who he is, instead of anything about what the actual policies are.
IDK, maybe that is unfair and you're saying that because of something I don't know, or out of general jadedness with the Democrats. If it's the second one I can 100% sympathize.
when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.
same thing here, this is not unlike when the US was putting tariffs on japanese electronics, back when they were getting good at it. branding protectionism with his own name ("bidenomics!") only makes sense to me in the context of a campaigning politician trying to make it sound like hes doing something new or revolutionary.
neoliberalism is often associated with policies of economic liberalization, including privatization, deregulation, globalization, free trade, monetarism, austerity, and reductions in government spending in order to increase the role of the private sector in the economy and society
What is any of that about what Biden is doing? You didn’t answer me on that, just repeated the label without explaining details or why it applies, and to me it sounds like the exact opposite.
Or, wait, are you saying that okay yes Biden’s policy is a trillion dollars in the exact opposite direction from neoliberalism, but it doesn’t count, because it’s only an “element” and the overall structure is still neoliberal? I.e. he didn’t seize the means of production, so you can call him a neoliberal no matter what he does, until that happens?
that definition you quoted seems pretty on point with what almost every IS president in my memory has been doing. a little bit of protectionism in a specific industry sector is a drop in the bucket.
when we added socialist elements to capitalism (eg. social security, free healthcare, free education and so on) it didnt stop being capitalism.
This is a very black and white view of things, though. Norway is seen as capitalist, yet 2/3rds of Norway's GDP is driven by its public sector, the government owns 30% of the domestic stock market, they have a massive government wealth fund that makes returns in hundreds of billions of dollars annually which they could singlehandedly fund UBI with, they apply Georgist taxes to natural resources (oil, hydro, aquafarms) to collectivize profits made off public land, 60% union density, 20% of housing is collectively owned (housing coops)...
Like, at what point do we call a country "socialist"?
(Not to call the US socialist, but Bidenomics might lean like 1% in that direction, and that's my point - it's going in a socialist direction if very slowly, and if we can maintain it)
sure, but its also not different enough to warrant a new name like this type of neoliberalism with some protectionism was just invented. you did it 40ish years ago to japan. neoliberals have historically bent their own rules when they felt like they needed to.
Bidenomics is a mixture of things, but key among them is the recognition that MMT is already reality and doubling down on it to fund productive industries. Basically, government debt is not the same as household debt and strategic yet liberal usage of government debt can be very positive for an economy. MMT economists have made some pretty significant 'discoveries' that you can now find in the CORE macroeconomics textbooks in universities all over the world.
How does China have any ground to stand on at the WTO? If they haven’t banned an American company, they’ve certainly stolen its IP. The idea that it’s unfair that the US favors American companies with its EV subsidies is completely laughable. An American company cannot even operate in China without empowering a Chinese partner organization. Get the fuck out.
Fully agreed. And we may have precedent in addition to the moral high ground somehow on this issue -- I was totally unaware that the WTO had ruled in favor of China that American steel and aluminum tariffs weren't allowed, and the US simply told them both to get fucked.
China is also heavily subsidizing their domestic ev cars
And yes, they’ve outright blocked many American- and other western companies. Including social media websites (that don’t comply with their censorship rules)
Exactly the same is true in reverse. Huawei is blocked, they are working hard on TikTok and DJI . zTE I think were also under investigation.
As for subsidies, most big US companies get hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. Plus of course, the only reason there is still a White House on Pennsylvania Avenue is because the banks got a free trillion out of your pocket.
IP is not a universal, objectively good thing. There are plenty of people who disagree with either a) how awful IP law is currently, or b) the mere existence of IP. You don't even have to be a socialist like China supposedly is (although many would call it state capitalist) to be against IP, plenty of social democrats and libertarians are against it.
Intellectual Property is just a more abstract form of private ownership that wealthy people use to take advantage of us. Remember when they refused to give up COVID vaccine IP? They literally can't sacrifice profits even during an insane pandemic that's taking millions of lives. Remember when Canada, Sweden were kind of OK with piracy and then US politicians/lobbyists entered their country to ensure they would be cracking down on piracy? As a European I'm not happy that yet another form of welfare transfers (which piracy de facto is) was taken away just because the US isn't content with being the wealthiest country on the planet - they need to maintain or even grow their obscene wealth.
Honestly, I could not give a rat's ass about China "stealing" IP from literally the country that owns 30% of the world's household wealth. More countries should follow suit so that we can break free from private IP holders delaying human technological and scientific progress.
I'm just pointing a factual error, not trying to engage in a complex debate. IP rights and business practices are a complex topic and I can't care enough to really engage here.
I think they're talking about the Hamas rape allegations.
A big part of the art of bad faith-arguing is the taking one semi-related kernel of truth and inflating it like a balloon one step at a time until its massively outsized implied impact can eclipse the thing you want to disagree with, but which you can't or won't just deal with head-on.
In this case, this person maybe doesn't want to make the attempt to criticize this story directly, so instead they go with:
Some of the allegations of rape in the NYT's reporting were probably wrong (true)
Therefore they shouldn't have published the story (debatable -- literally, there was heated debate about it internally)
Therefore because a couple, but not all, of the accounts they published in that one story turned out to be suspect, the New York Times as a whole and every single thing it publishes is crappy
Therefore this story is crappy and I don't even have to say why I think so; I can just say "rape allegations!" and call back to #1 and all the rest is implied.
I actually do think that the New York Times has a massive pro-Israel anti-Palestine bias and that that colored that particular story, them choosing to report it, and how. But it doesn't mean even that the story was falsified or that Hamas didn't rape anybody, let alone whatever else about the other 99.whatever% of the stories they publish.
A persistent theme in Republican campaigning these past few years has been the effort to portray Democrats in general, and President Biden in particular, as being soft on China — in contrast to Donald Trump’s supposed toughness.
This looks ironic now, since Trump, who had favored a ban, suddenly reversed his position, reportedly around the same time that he had a sit-down with a billionaire who donates to Republican campaigns and has a large stake in the Chinese-controlled company.
Even before his TikTok flip-flop, however, the reality was that while Trump talked a xenophobic line that shaded into racism — for example, trying to relabel Covid-19 as the “Chinese virus” — and imposed showy but ineffective tariffs, he never had a coherent strategy for confronting our biggest rival.
China just filed a complaint with the World Trade Organization about the Inflation Reduction Act, which, despite its name, is at its core an attempt to fight climate change by subsidizing the transition to a low-emission economy.
And it has often engaged in blatantly discriminatory policy — for example, for several years, until 2019, non-Chinese companies were essentially prevented from supplying electric vehicle batteries to Chinese car manufacturers.
As I said, Biden’s China policy is so tough that it makes me, someone who generally favors a rules-based system, nervous, although unlike many economists — who, I’d argue, don’t fully grasp how the world has changed — I do believe it’s the right approach.
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