In Part 2, we discovered that China’s unemployment rate among rural Chinese working in manufacturing reached 16.4% in early 2009 (while unemployment in the United States was only 9.3%), and from Forbes on October 18, 2012 we learn: “Manufacturing jobs stand poised for a rebound as jobs get reshored from China — creating 2.5 million to 5 million U.S. jobs in manufacturing and support jobs. Worries about a severe job skills gap are largely misreported according to results from a Boston Consulting Group (BCG) analysis – part of the firm’s ongoing series entitled Made in America, Again.”
In comparison, unemployment in the United States stands at 7.8% today. In another comparison, during 2007 – 2009 while China lost 23 million manufacturing jobs, the United States lost only 2 million in that job sector. Source: bls.gov
With numbers like these, would someone explain how China is stealing manufacturing jobs from the US?
In addition, the average credit card debt per household in the US (I’m not talking about the Federal national debt) is about $16,000 while total U.S. Consumer debt was $2.43 trillion as of May 2011.
The History of Economic Booms and Busts
US Mortgage Debt is more than $14 trillion and 40% of Americans have no retirement savings while 25% have no personal savings. In fact, 38% of American adults have no emergency funds to fall back on.
However, in China the average household saves almost 30% of its annual income. The average business saves about 45% of net profits and the government has a surplus savings rate of more than 50% of tax revenues instead of the US that has a national debt more than 100% of GDP–more than $16 trillion. The US has been spending more than a trillion dollars a year that it doesn’t have while China saves half of its tax revenues and invests in infrastructure and in other countries such as the US. Source: VoxEU.org
Does that sound as if China is a threat to the US and is stealing manufacturing jobs from America? Many in the US are self centered and do not consider that China trades with the world–not just America. In 2011, China exported about $1.6 trillion in goods to other countries while importing about $1.4 trillion. At the same time, China bought about $104 billion in goods from the US. Source: US-China.org
In addition, outside the US, the world sees China differently. The Pew Global Attitudes Project surveys thousands of people in 59 countries. For 2012 China had a 94% favorable rating while the United States had 40%.
The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis
Back to Abraham Lincoln, who said, “You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.”
We will discover what that means today in the last post in this series.
Continued on November 1, 2012 in Scapegoating China … Part 4 or return to Part 2
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.
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