Economically, that is. This article mocking Ol Doc Howie’s junior high school comprehension of economics doesn’t go anywhere nearly far enough in laying the wood on him. The biggest problem with starting a trade war with Asia is not that we’ll increase production costs and lose jobs, it’s that we’re utterly dependent on Chinese and Japanese capital inflows in order to fund our massive debts.
“… only central bank buying of dollars – or, buying U.S. dollar assets, such as Treasury bonds, thus lending money to the Bush administration – has kept the dollar from destruction. In September, for example, while the rest of the world was dumping dollar assets, the Bank of Japan was spending $40 billion to support the dollar. “Without this Herculean effort by Japanese authorities,” Terry Reik of Clapboard Hill Partners continues, “foreign flows would have been an unthinkable negative $35.8 billion. Debt has reached $33 trillion, with annual interest of nearly $2 trillion – even at today’s Eisenhower rates – and it’s growing seven times as fast as the economy itself.”
It’s a bad idea to piss off your creditors when you desperately need to borrow more money from them. Of course, we’ve already begun the process of inflating our way out of it, but in the interest of avoiding total social cataclysm, it would be nice not to have to do it all at once.
I would never vote for Howard Dean but the man is far more of an idiot than George Bush – for whom I also won’t be voting – is at his grammar-bending worst. The man who thinks he knows everything about what he knows nothing is always a danger to himself and others.