If anything, if the dollar tanks, it would probably help the working poor relatively to the rest of the population because it would make light industrial activity in the US more competitive, which where non-service low qualification jobs are. They would either suffer less or even benefit from the repatriation of those jobs in the US.
And that includes the petrol used to transport California produce to Chicago, St Louis and Minneapolis.
Again, I think the two of you are dead wrong about how this plays out.
As for the middle class in America, I could care less if they get taken down a peg or two, they've got it coming. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
My original point is not that it would harmless for the US. The point is that it would hurt China a lot more, probably to the point of completely crashing its economy. And, IMHO, if China moved, the political situation in the US is such that it would snowball very quickly and the response would be extremely brutal.
Which is why those Chinese declarations are fairly spooky. Kabuki? Miscalculation? Weird in any case.
We just disagree on who. Fai de bèn a Bertrand, te lou rendra en cagant
In English, that's the IR speak for the difference between people who believe that the rules of things like the WTO are permanent in broad terms, versus realists who seem them as fundamentally variable institutions rather than something structural
Domestically, I think that the problem is that the proposition that markets exist in social contexts that generate social protection when economic activity tries to dismbed itself harming the human aspects of life is given terrible form. The rising cost of Chinese goods in American markets, leads to millions of urban workers being forced out. Unable to subsist off the land as before the great transformation, their efforts to restoret the human character of life take root in religous and cultural fundamentalism.
The Chinese Communist Party either channels this anger into the creation of a virulent nationalism, or falls to those who will. And the horrors of the 20th century live once more. Falun Gong, Christians, Homosexuals, and other groups are made scapegoats, are discriminated against, and then genocide.
It's a question of whether China merely implodes or takes East Asia with it.
Now the happy version of this supposes that enough social capital exists in the Chinese state unions and other elements of civil society to faciliate a social democratic response. And I'll give my consent to any government that does not deny a man a living wage-Billy Bragg
