pandabear wrote:
(to the USA, that is).
I received my income tax forms, and somewhere inside it explains that about 10 percent of our nation's federal budget comes from borrowing (and I think that the bulk of it comes from China).
That has all the looks of a massive foreign aid program.
The Chinese keep lending us money to keep our government afloat, even while our government cuts domestic interest rates, which not only minimizes returns on lending to our government, but also causes the exchange rate for US dollars to fall. Thus, loans from China wind up being more gifts than loans, or the Chinese would start to demand being paid back in a hard currency, such as the Euro.
On top of that, you would have a hard time finding anything to buy that wasn't manufactured in China. Fifteen years ago, you would often find articles of clothing that had been assembled in places like Bangla Desh or Honduras. Not any more, as far as I can tell.
And, even with our plummeting value of the US dollar, things made in China are getting better and cheaper all the time. Prices of oil and food (which China doesn't export) are going up, but computers and digital cameras (which come from China) are always coming down in price in the US market, as their quality gets phenomenally better.
The Chinese are absolutely keeping our government and economy from collapsing, preventing us from suffering from inflation, and providing us with quite a lot of things that we are just too lazy to produce for ourselves.
Plus, the Chinese don't interfere with our foreign policies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
On the one hand, Hip Hip Hooray! for China.
On the other hand, what could they possibly be up to?
That's simple. The Chinese want to help America, because they need us to continue buying all of their manufactured products. The Chinese manufacture more electronics, toys, clothings, etc. than any other country in the world. Americans need to continue purchasing these items, so it's in China's best interest to keep us afloat. Without China, America would have been bankrupt a long time ago. America's no longer the strongest country in the world anymore. We're just middlemen trying to survive and save face.
26 Jan 2008, 2:16 am
