they're bacon over!

I know they loin us a lot of money and I don't want to start trotting out boaring puns but China should keep it's snout out of the US, least it gets chopped off.

It just means Orwell was right, and the Communist Pig is a real thing. I just hope we don't trade it for coca-cola..

It's a Red meat now.

Yeah but gammon is tasty.

the shit he follows up with doesn't hold up thought.

the US government (as do many others) has a department for funding private foreign businesses that are US owned or largely US owned.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_Private_Investment_Corpo ration

I remember those commie bastards doing some underhanded things during the cold war, but participating in our free market economy?!?!? That's just beneath contempt!

Which is ironic, because it seems that it's private companies and libertopians accelerating the process towards that kind of thing.

Private companies are accelerating the process because, for all of it's fucked-up social policies, China is currently friendlier towards business than we are. Industry knows when it's not wanted, and in a post-globalized world, will migrate to where it is.

You can blame private companies for acting in their shareholder's best interests. You can blame economic regulators and the whole poorly-managed US Federal corporation for making them want to leave in the first place. Either way, the situation is what it is. History will prove Ron Paul's warning correct, and the august ghost of Deng Xiaoping will pick the corpse of FDR clean.

China lets companies dump mercury directly into kindergartens and pay their workers in beatings. Obviously, we'll just have to follow China's lead if we want to compete.

*If* we want to compete. Of course, we could always stop being sore losers and make compromises - like, keep mercury dumping health regulations in place, but undercut the Chinese bid with juicier tax incentives and more liberal hiring laws. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing package.

We've still got a lot of social capital; I think most companies would rather deal with us than China, if they could avoid it. But the moral gap between our societies is closing and at any rate it won't matter unless we're willing to adapt and progress.



Or... we could just keep doing what neocons like Bush and Obama do, devalue our currency and hand out billions of dollars in welfare checks to a select group of failed industries. That'll drive off both eager new competitors and all the successful (i.e. "unpatriotic") companies that were extorted into footing the bill for our dying oligarchs, but hey, maybe we'll get lucky and someone in Detroit will invent a magical money tree?

So, we should charge corporations LESS than no taxes? Good plan.

So you are in favor of "juicy tax incentives" but against "corporate welfare" which is a term used as analogy for juicy tax incentives?

I really don't even want to think about what "more liberal hiring practices" means when we're speaking in terms of Chinese companies.

It's either mercury or beatings, we can pick!

Or we could try taxing carbon. It would be less economical to make things halfway around the world if the full cost of shipping wasn't foisted off onto Venice and the Maldives.

"But China won't tax carbon! We'll fall behind." I hear you say. So, we tax products from countries that don't tax carbon. We have the largest market in the world, we have leverage. One interesting thing about our codependent relationship with China is that they need us to buy their shit and take their loans as much as we need them to sell us shit.

betabox - The US has some of the highest corporate tax rates in the world; our top tax bracket is actually higher than Sweden's right now. What you may be thinking of is the pervasive story that the richest individuals in the country do not pay taxes, and there is some truth to that - because anyone who is rich enough to be mobile, is rich enough to pack up and move their assets overseas, out of Washington's reach. Ironically, the reason why we don't get much in taxes is *because* our taxes are high; lower tax rates would encourage companies to stop moving overseas and instead pay more taxes domestically. A lower percentage of some money is worth more than a high percentage of no money at all.

Raggamuffin - declining to take more money from successful businesses, and giving money to failed businesses, are not the same things. As for liberal hiring practices, there are many things we can do, some of which I've discussed in previous videos. For example, loosening, or even abolishing, restrictions on immigrant workers. (if outsourcing is inevitable, then it's better for us to have the outsourced workers *here*, where we can provide services to them domestically)

Ashtar - OK, so protectionism. Import tariffs will raise prices domestically and cause an increase in our own cost of living, a cost which will be disproportionately born by the underclasses; domestic millionaires will still be able to afford their caviar and Filipino hookers, carbon tariffs or no. But maybe this is not a big deal? Perhaps you'd argue that the poor must fight battles on our behalf, and if the cost of sticking it to China is throwing our workers under the proverbial bus, then so be it. It could be worse. The working class could always be sacrificed in an *actual* war against China, using all the bombs and tanks and nukes we bought with that tax money; sacrificing them economically is probably more humane.

But you have to remember, America is a juicy market because we have the wealth to pay for the crap we want to buy. We have this wealth because we built things and were able to compete on a global level. Our money didn't just come from nowhere, no matter what outdated fiat prophets may want us to believe! The trouble is, what happens when we stop contributing to the global market? What happens when all *we* do is consume? It's an unsustainable system. China will get sick of us, and it'll start selling to places that want it's business.

And beatings? How will *beating* companies help us to undercut China's bid for them? We're metaphorically beating our businesses left and right, but it doesn't work, because they know they don't have to sit around and take our abuse.

All I fucking want to do is eat some tasty ass pork without getting a loan.

The rapidly rising global population will have more of an effect on pork prices than this buyout. Meat production is obscenely resource intensive. There's no way it will be able to keep pace with demand. I can see it eventually becoming a delicacy that only the wealthy can afford.

Meat has been an expensive luxury for most of human history, and even today, it's relatively scarce outside of the First World. The average American eats about ten times as much meat as the average sub-Saharan Africa; the Chinese, roughly half that.

Of course, all this could be fixed with GMO TEST-TUBE MEAT, but organic luxury ranching is a highly profitable industry with great lobbyists, an easy anti-science sell, and the full support of the wealthiest segment of the American population, so "delicacy reserved for the Trader Joe's set and up" is probably where we're headed.

I'm sure the Free Market will sort itself out. There's no way a collective-minded eastern society can hope to succeed at our superior western capitalist system. Remember Japans laughable attempts at building cars and electronics back in the 60s? We showed them who's boss.