[jermaustin1]

I get what you are saying, but the U.S. BUYS goods, because we are "too rich" to make them. We SELL services, because other countries are "too poor" to offer them.

When this administration focuses solely on one side of that (Goods vs Services), they miss the forest for the trees. I'm not saying we shouldn't bring back manufacturing, because we should, but we can't pretend that we get the short end of the stick in this trade partnership.

China makes the cheap shit that isn't economical here, and the only way to make it economical here is to pay a tax on the cheap shit we want if it isn't made here, but the crazy thing is we could do a 400% tariff on Chinese imports, and it is still too expensive to buy American for most goods. Not even getting to the point that we don't have the infrastructure here because that also costs money, which would rise the price for American goods even higher.

Does Bill Gates mow his own lawn? No!

Does Donald Trump grill his own Big Mac? No!

Because when you hit a certain "wealth bracket" you stop doing things that are below that and hire them out. We hired China because we were too rich.

[more_corn]

Wait, so is the solution to make ourselves poor?

[jermaustin1]

The solution is to not care that we've hired people to mow our lawns, because we don't want to mow our own lawns (as a society).

But if you do want to mow your own lawn, then do it, just expect that it will cost you more to mow your own lawn than to hire it out.

Replace "lawn mowing" with any other industry of your choice.