The US is having trouble building its navy partially because it doesn’t have enough skilled people. It takes 8 years to get people fully up to speed, and it is having trouble keeping its aging workforce on the job.
“American farmers exported more than 26 million metric tons of soybeans to China annually during Biden’s term. Trump’s deal with China would cover less than half that amount
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Since 2017, America has exported more than 22 million metric tons of soybeans to China in every year except two. Those years? The first was 2018, when China cut off purchases of American soybeans in response to Trump’s tariffs targeting American imports of Chinese goods. The second was this year, when China did the same thing in response to another set of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration.”
China is using its stranglehold on rare earth minerals to wage economic warfare against the world. If a company wants such materials from somewhere else, they will be more expensive, and those companies’ products will no longer be competitive.
Although stealth delays radar detection, its more important role is making stealth planes hard to target with weapons. The wide bands of radars that can detect the planes are not able to locate them accurately enough to target them with weapons. No stealth is invincible, so mission planning is also key.
When countries like China focus on heavily investing, initially it works well because they invest in productive things and this grows their economy. However, later, they run out of that many productive things to invest in, in which case they are robbing their citizens of consumption and outcompeting other countries’ manufacturing, but not gaining much actual new productive benefits. This leads to debt.
Bilateral tariffs like Trump is doing don’t work. The U.S. has a huge deficit because it consumes more than it exports. A global tariff could work by making goods more expensive and incentivizing people to consume, now relatively cheaper, domestic products. Bilateral tariffs just mean Americans will import cheap goods from country C and D instead of the heavily tariffed countries A and B.
Getting foreigners to invest in the U.S. hurts the U.S.. The U.S. has plenty of capital to invest and doesn’t need more. Additional investment means driving up the dollar, making U.S. goods less competitive internationally, and hurting U.S. exports.
China has debt to support investment. The U.S. has debt to support consumption. The system is out of whack and needs adjustment.
Calling a political opponent a communist is silly. Not even the Soviet Union or China called themselves communist. They called themselves socialist. Communism is when the productive surplus is controlled by the workers themselves. The government owning a business and deciding what to do with a surplus is just a government elite controlling the surplus instead of an owner or manager elite. Communism would be not a government elite or capitalist elite controlling the surplus, but the workers controlling the surplus. The socialist governments were supposed to be a transition phase to true communism. The closest things to this might be cooperatives where the workers also own the business, although those are done within a larger capitalist system.