Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts
Showing posts with label United States. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Beto, Your Courage Is In Running



Beto O'Rourke presidential campaign staff, 2020
Beto O'Rourke names Texas staff for presidential campaign
Beto for America
O’Rourke bolsters senior staff with 5 hires

5 factors that could determine the strength of Beto O’Rourke’s campaign for governor The former congressman must keep elements of his 2018 campaign against Sen. Ted Cruz, while fixing mess made in 2020 presidential effort.



Beto O’Rourke hires 4 for national communications team

https://betoorourke.com/

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Location: Middletown, NY 10940, USA

Saturday, November 06, 2021

Reorganize The US Senate

DC and Puerto Rico ought to become states.

All 52 states should get a minimum one Senator each. After that, it should be based on population for a total of 200 Senators. So it would be roughly one Senator for about two million or less Americans. That would give California something like 20 Senatorial districts.

It would help to have open primaries. So the two top vote getters might both belong to the same party. And then they go compete in the general election. That should also be true for the House races. Open primaries would kill gerrymandering.



As for president, might as well directly vote. Get rid of the electoral college.
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Friday, September 17, 2021

Bin Laden's Fantasy, Trump's Reality

It was Osama Bin Laden's fantasy to hit the Capitol. One airplane was supposed to strike the Capitol building. He did not think that would bring down the US government. He knew enough not to think that. Any more than hitting the World Trade Center brought down Wall Street. But he meant to make a symbolic strike. He failed. 

Donald Trump succeeded. He did manage to strike the Capitol in a way that was beyond Bin Laden's fantasy. Trump managed to strike fear into the hearts of every lawmaker in that building. 

Bin Laden paid for it with his life. Trump is planning to run for president again. 

What Trump did he did very openly. Everything is recorded in video, second by second, minute by minute. He planned the strike. He implored the crowd to go do what they did. He was not hiding in a cave when he did that. He was addressing a crowd a stone's throw away from the White House. 

That makes Donald Trump a domestic terrorist. A terrorist is going to run for President Of The United States in 2024. And he can do that because he is white? 

Democracy is one person one vote. That is the promise. But you have one of only two parties existing in the country making a full effort to take voting rights away from people who are not likely to vote for them. The democratic way would have been to try to reach out to them and convince them to vote Republican. But that is not in the plan. Instead, disenfranchise. 

If America is a democracy, it is an unraveling one. 






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Thursday, July 22, 2021

In The News (20)

More than two thirds of India may have Covid antibodies, new survey shows evidence the virus may have spread far more widely than official figures suggest. ........ Our immune systems develop antibodies either induced by vaccination, or in response to infection. The majority of survey participants, 62%, had not received a vaccine ......... "More than half of the children (6 to 17 years old) were sero-positive, and sero-prevalence was similar in rural and urban areas," he said -- but "states, districts and areas without antibodies run the risk of infection waves," meaning about 400 million people will still be vulnerable if a third wave hits. .......... Active immunity, meaning protection against a disease, is often measured by the presence of antibodies -- proteins in the blood, made by the immune system to help fight infections, acquired either through prior infection or vaccination. ........ only 6.35% of India's 1.38 billion population has been fully vaccinated ........ "I would like to emphasize today that at hill stations and in markets, the large crowds who are not wearing masks or following protocols is an issue of great concern," said Prime Minister Narendra Modi last week, after photos emerged of tourists flouting Covid protocols in vacation destination towns. "This is not right." ............... the real toll of cases and deaths are likely much higher than reported, pointing to the discrepancy between official figures and the sero-surveys. .......... So far, India has reported about 31.2 million confirmed cases, according to Johns Hopkins University -- less than 3% of its total population, and drastically lower than the proportion of survey respondents showing antibodies. ..........

the number of excess deaths reported during India's pandemic could be up to ten times the official death toll

........... Between 3.4 and 4.9 million estimated excess deaths were reported in India between January 2020 and June 2021 ..... compared to the Indian health ministry's reported death toll of approximately 400,000. ............. the first wave of the pandemic was "more lethal than is popularly believed," and that their estimates show a higher number of excess deaths reported during the first wave than the second. ........

"True deaths are likely to be in the several millions not hundreds of thousands, making this arguably India's worst human tragedy since partition and independence."





Amateur Astronomer Discovers New Moon Orbiting Jupiter “I’m proud to say that this is the first planetary moon discovered by an amateur astronomer!”

The Expanded Child Tax Credit Is Here. Here's What You Need To Know The expanded child tax credit is only for 2021. A budget deal announced by the Senate Budget Committee on Tuesday would extend it. President Biden has also proposed an extension under his American Families Plan but faces opposition in Congress. Not a single Republican voted for the American Rescue Plan, and some have criticized the expanded child tax credit........ "What I am hopeful for is that the power and the magnitude of what these checks mean for so many Americans is going to force the hand of politicians to make this permanent"



Will ‘the Great Wealth Transfer’ Trigger a Millennial Civil War? As this younger generation ages into its prime voting years — and boomers steadily age out of the electorate — the intergenerational “balance of power” will shift. ........ “such a shift in the balance of power could include a harsher inheritance tax regime, less income protection for pensioners, more property taxes, along with greater income and corporates taxes … and all-round more redistributive policies.” ......... over the next quarter century, roughly 45 million U.S. households will collectively bequeath $68.4 trillion to their heirs. This transfer will constitute the largest redistribution of wealth in human history. Generation X stands to inherit 57 percent of that $68.4 trillion; millennials will collect the bulk of the rest. ......... millennials are “questioning” individuals who value “experience,” while zoomers are “communaholics” who prize “uniqueness” ......... A person born in the late 1980s was raised on distinct media, cultural products, and economic assumptions from someone born in the early 1950s. ..........

Millennials gave Joe Biden about 60 percent of their ballots in 2020, while voters over 45 gave him only 48 percent.

..........

Poor, proto-socialist, tenuously housed — this is the generation that Deutsche Bank fears. It is also the one whose ascent the left eagerly awaits.

............ Our country’s exceptionally cruel brand of capitalism lived on bought-off boomers. It would not survive the rise of a debt-ridden generation with little taste for Fox News. ......... the boomers can’t take their appreciated assets with them, and capital is already trickling down family trees.

By the time AOC turns 50, millennials will be “the richest generation in human history.”

............. more than half of the estates bequeathed over the next three decades will go to low or middle-income households ......... it raises the possibility that intergenerational warfare will give way to intragenerational class conflict. ............ About half of millennials are invested in the stock market. Those with significant savings have seen their wealth multiply over the past three years: the S&P 500 advanced 31.5 percent in 2019, 18.4 percent in 2020, and about 17.8 percent through the first five and a half months of 2021. ............ the racial divide in millennial wealth is singularly gaping. White millennials lag white boomers in wealth accumulation by just 5 percent. Black millennials, meanwhile, own 52 percent less wealth than previous generations of Black Americans had accrued by their age......... Wealthy, white millennials will claim a massively disproportionate share of the impending inheritances and intergenerational gifts. And as familial wealth is transferred, and millennials’ “earned” assets appreciate, the generation’s internal class divisions are liable to become more invidious than those of its predecessors. ............ Advances in automation are expected to increase returns to capital and lower labor’s share of income. ................. Climate change also threatens to bring routine water shortages to many parts of the country, thereby periodically condemning ordinary millennials to a nigh-preindustrial living standard ......... Of course, it is possible that policy changes will avert our descent into a neo-feudal dystopia. ........ a manufactured housing shortage: There are 3.8 million more willing buyers than available homes in the U.S. today. .........

a house bought in 2021 won’t be a sound store of wealth unless U.S. home prices remain exorbitant in perpetuity

........... zoning restrictions that have kept housing artificially scarce ....... some other “angry millennial” renters have organized campaigns to eliminate exclusionary zoning and promote housing abundance. ............... it is also plausible that the twilight of the boomers will bring a new dawn for class politics, as the hegemony of social liberalism among the millennial generation lowers the salience of cultural issues, while the ever-compounding wealth gap forces questions of capital ownership back onto the American political agenda, for the first time in more than a century.



In Nearly All Other Democracies, This Is Not Normal the Constitution’s requirement that House members serve for only two-year terms. ....... The two-year House term has profound consequences for how effectively American government can perform — and too many of them are negative. A longer, four-year term would facilitate Congress’s ability to once again effectively address major issues that Americans care most about. ......... In nearly all other democracies, parliaments are in power for four to five years. ......... in most democracies, candidates do not have to fund-raise all the time to run; governments typically provide public financing to the political parties.

The two-year term, combined with primary elections and the constant need to raise funds individually, generates exceptional turbulence and short-term focus in our politics.

.......... The Federalist Papers then had to devote a good deal of energy fending off the demand for annual elections. .......... If you think American politics is not chaotic enough, imagine if the Constitution had adopted annual House elections.



America Needs to Break Up Its Biggest States From its beginning, the United States was built to expand. Article IV, Section 3 of the Constitution grants Congress the power to create states. Starting with the Vermont Republic in 1791, as America grew, the country’s roster of states expanded as well. ........ But since the addition of Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, America hasn’t increased the number of states, and unless some future president winds up buying Greenland, the United States is unlikely to expand territorially. ........... Since 1960, the country has added over 150 million people through a combination of immigration and natural population increase. Yet we haven’t upped our state count. .......... America needs new states to improve the internal governance of the states and the country. We need new states — and the place to start is to carve them out of the largest states that already exist........... on its own, Los Angeles County would be the 10th-largest state in the union. The four largest states by population now make up roughly one-third of the population of the entire United States — more than the smallest 34 put together. ...........

Those four largest states have only eight senators, while the 34 smallest states have a supermajority of 68.

.............. On issues like environmental regulation and education policy, these behemoths can shape or frustrate national policy by their unilateral actions in ways that smaller states cannot easily dissent from. Their key industries and interest groups, meanwhile, wield disproportionate influence in the national and state capitals. ..............

Kentucky was created out of territory that originally belonged to Virginia, as was Tennessee from North Carolina territory and Maine from the territory of Massachusetts.

.......... creating states from a state that already exists would merely require the state legislature to vote to split up and for Congress to assent. ...........

carving the four megastates into three or more states each

............ If, as part of a larger national reorganization, New York City were to become a city-state — as Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen are in Germany ......... Inasmuch as New York City needs partners to coordinate with, the most important ones are in New Jersey and Connecticut, not in Buffalo and Rochester — so splitting up New York State could give new momentum to proposals for regional governance across state lines. ......... California could even plausibly be broken into as many as five states, if the Bay Area and Los Angeles were hived off to become city-states, which they are certainly populous enough to be. ............. Maine and Missouri were admitted in 1820 and 1821 to preserve the national balance between free and slave states. .......... it could be powerfully symbolic if, for example, members of the Seneca, Oneida, Mohawk and other nations of the old Iroquois Confederacy played a central public role in defining a state covering their old territory. ....... The genius of our federal system is that it provides a framework for a multiplicity of communities, with different interests and values, to live together as part of a single country. .......... Breaking up can be hard to do, but sometimes, it’s the best way to ultimately come together.



Snap Out of It, America! The country expanded its borders, abolished slavery, broadened the franchise; waves of immigrants reshaped and revised America’s character; the government added and dropped functions, amending the Constitution to fit the times. It was a restless experiment. ........... For more than 150 years, the United States had no official national anthem. “The Star-Spangled Banner” shuffled among “Hail, Columbia” and “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee)”; the design of the flag shifted with the states and with fashion. ........... The country that passed Prohibition and created Social Security now spends decades dithering over how large a role the government should play in health care.

The country that went to the moon shrinks at the challenges presented by climate change.

.......... hard partisanship makes it difficult to create coalitions for sweeping changes. Wars, which once smashed through gridlock, no longer lead to collective action.

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Wednesday, November 04, 2020

The Polls Were Off Again

Biden was supposed to have had a 10 point lead nationally. That was a recipe for a landslide. Instead, one day later, we are looking at a nailbiter. The polls were off again. Looks like they are not designed to reach the core of Trump voters. 

The bigger news, though, is that the country is as divided as ever, and the Covid catastrophe does not seem to have budged the country much. It is the same old, same old. America has the political equivalent of a lifestyle disease. 

Biden will squeak through, but there is no landslide. 



America Is Eerily Retracing Rome’s Steps to a Fall. Will It Turn Around Before It’s Too Late? Two thousand years ago, the famous Republic had a chance to reject a dangerous populist. It failed, and the rest is history.

Can Biden Still Win? Can Trump Still Win? Yes. Here Are the Remaining Paths. The president was able to close off several avenues to an early Biden win, but the former vice president still has a number of options.

What’s Left in the Seven States That Will Decide the Race Though they’re still too close to call, there are some indications of which way things might go...... If Mr. Biden did carry Georgia, along with the other states mentioned so far, he’d win more than 300 electoral votes. 

Democrats Battle for Senate Control as They Maintain Grip on House Majority The two parties grappled for advantage in the fight for the Senate majority as Democrats aimed to add to their majority in the House. ....... That left both sides closely watching Maine, North Carolina and Georgia, where partial returns showed exceedingly tight races between Republican incumbents and their Democratic challengers........... At least one Senate race taking place in Georgia, an unexpectedly competitive battleground this year, was headed for a winner-takes-all January runoff that could decide the balance of the Senate only weeks before Inauguration Day if Tuesday’s contests did not. The state’s other race could also end up in a runoff, but it was too early to be certain.......  while strategists in both parties had said a second blue wave could wash out 10 to 20 Republicans, by Wednesday morning, returns indicated that no such sweep had materialized ..... Worried about Mr. Trump’s chances, though, many Republicans closed their campaigns with warnings to voters of the risks posed by putting the White House and Congress under full Democratic control.........  If Democrats were able to grab control of the House, Senate and White House at once for the first time since 2010, they could abolish the legislative filibuster — the last major vestige of minority rights in the Senate — and push through an ambitious slate of bills on voting rights, gun safety, policing and prescription drug prices. They would most likely reserve much of their political capital for expanding the Affordable Care Act and raising taxes on the wealthy to offset that and other new programs.........  Facing a Senate led by Mr. McConnell, Mr. Biden could even have an uphill battle winning its approval to fill his cabinet, and he would certainly face opposition to liberal nominees to the federal courts. 

2020 Should Be the Last Time We Vote Like This Turnout was inspiring, but our voting system is badly flawed....... Set against so many less important transactions in American life — ordering a complicated coffee from a national chain, or finding the best sushi place in a town you’ve never visited before — the simple act of casting a ballot is laughably antiquated. ....... In many countries, elections are administered by nonpartisan agencies that set rules for the entire nation. In the United States, elections are often run by elected officials — Republican or Democratic secretaries of state, for instance — and rules about who gets to vote and how they do so differ from state to state.

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Saturday, July 25, 2020

Syria Has Come To America

Cartoon via Mike Luckovich

Posted by Robert Reich on Saturday, July 25, 2020
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Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Biden Should Pick Abrams



Biden has been wise to declare early that his pick will be a woman. Good thing. About time. But who? Michelle Obama? Elizabeth Warren? Stacey Abrams? Kamala Harris? Who? Amy?

To think out loud the name of Michelle Obama was a respectful thing to do, but he was not serious. Barack Obama pulled the strings around South Carolia and after and a deflated balloon rose to the skies. So a nod makes sense.

But Michelle is symbolism. She is not a political animal.

Elizabeth Warren does represent the Bernie wing of the party. And the need to build a bridge to that wing is premier. And considering how south the economy is ready to go, the Dems might as well end up with 60 seats in the Senate. And you will need workhorses like Elizabeth Warren in the Senate to build ambitious legislation.

Elizabeth Warren is good where she is. She is needed there. She should be Majority Leader. Or at least a Senator with seniority.

Kamala Harris might be too cheerful to be Vice President. Let her be Attorney General. California is already in the bag.

Andrew Yang should be Secretary of Labor with a mandate to bring about a Universal Basic Income.

Pete should be Secretary of Urban Affairs. He has been Mayor of a blighted city in the Rust Belt. And his symbolism is large.

Tulsi Gabbard would make for a wonderful Ambassador to the UN.

That leaves only one good option: Stacey. She should be VP.

That is how Biden thanks the voters that resurrected him. He was a dead horse until South Carolina.

With Stacey Abrahms on the ticket, Biden carries Georgia.

Let me be clear. Biden will win with or without Stacey. Biden will carry all the swing states, with or without Stacey. But Biden will not win Georgia without Stacey Abrams on the ticket. With Stacey Abrams on the ticket, Biden will carry 40 states in the Fall. It will be a clean sweep.

Should he be lucky enough to end up with 60 Senators, he could remake America and the world. Green New Deal can happen under Biden-Abrams.

The curious thing is, with Bernie on the ticket, the Dems could have lost in November, recession or no recession. But a Biden presidency could actually deliver something like Medicar For All, or at least a strong public option.

In the meantime, we have President Tweety.



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Wednesday, April 01, 2020

The Virus And The Politicians



Something that is the Great Depression and World War II combined is going to be a tall task for anybody, let alone mediocre politicians elected to high office, but the scale and rapidity of the spread of this pandemic, now virtually gone to all countries and spreading fast still has particularly exposed deficiencies in leadership, both of individuals and political systems. This is no argument against democracy, for South Korea seems to have done pretty well so far. It is said the genius of the US constitution is that even an idiot can run the country. I never fully bought into that.

But those who doubted Trump's ability to deliver from the get-go now find themselves uncomfortably with front seats to the unfolding tragedy. And Trump is not alone. There is this guy in Brazil basically inciting riots. He is a Trump clone. Modi's three weeks closing down of the country was not a bad idea, but the implementation was so shoddy, there was no implementation, there was just an announcement; as if the demonetization disaster was not enough. India finds itself with crowds of people moving around reminding many of a similar phenomenon during partition. Instead of being inside homes, people are clogging the roads.

The NYC Mayor has been missing in action while he takes to the cameras like he were some opposition leader demanding action. NYC has become Italy and it still is not seeing lockdown.

It is always easier when you are not actually running a country. Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown went on record asking to set up a world government from scratch. That is the most sense any politician has made during this pandemic so far. Gordon Brown should rally as many former heads of state as possible to the idea and make it happen.

Angela Merkel is a chemist by training. And it showed.

Both China and South Korea, and also Hong Kong and Singapore, all with diverse political systems, have done a pretty good job.

Coronavirus News (22)
Coronavirus News (21)
Working Remotely Permanently To Solve Global Warming
The Police: Don't Stand So Close To Me
AOC Is Joshua?
Coronavirus News (20)
Make Believe
Coronavirus News (19)
Imagine FDR Delegating World War II To Governors

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Monday, January 20, 2020

Why Trump Ought To Be Impeached



I would like to leave the nuances of Ukraine to the elected politicians on Capitol Hill -- they get paid well enough -- and at some level I recognize that the Kentuckian McConnell -- and to think I spent five and a half years in Kentucky -- will manage to repeat the partisanship exhibited by his party in the lower chamber where Nancy Pelosi single-handedly architected the process, but I still harbor the fantasy that Trump might get impeached for reasons bigger than Ukraine, and even Russia.

The president should be elected democratically, which means one person one vote. He was never elected. In the majority of countries, if you can collect three million votes, you can become president. He was way short.

The low unemployment numbers widely advertised are a sham. The actual numbers are at least twice as large. Post-2008 America has seen an epidemic of lower-paying jobs.

The stock markets are another sham. Companies are buying their own stocks. That is company money paying for the rise in share price to the benefit of the top share-owning executives. Productive investments are not being made. Buying your own stocks is eating potato chips.

Donald Trump rightly pointed out the massive loss of manufacturing jobs, but he did not have a solution then, he does not have a solution now. The losses are structural. This is more like the loss of agricultural jobs at the onset of the first and second industrial revolutions powered by steam and electricity. Universal health, universal education, and universal basic income will build the foundation for real solutions to create the knowledge and service jobs of tomorrow. Here is looking at you Bernie and Andrew Yang.

The guy is everything you feared old white men were: racist and sexist. And he lies like nobody in the public sphere. He is a post-truther who needs to be ditched.

But the number one reason in the climate. The clock is ticking. Four more years of the leading villain country behind climate change doing nothing is 12 years minus four years left to fight climate catastrophe. There is a cliff ahead. Send him to Australia for some education. He is fit to study abroad.

There is also World War III. We don't want World War III.

His getting impeached will open up the possibility of someone like Ted Cruz grabbing the Republican nomination. I have plenty of policy disagreements with Ted Cruz. But at least he is not foul-mouthed. He has basic decency. He is textbook conservative. Legitimate disagreements become possible. Genuine conservatives are not fact-free. And when you face facts, you move from climate denial to offering conservative solutions to climate change, which might rely more on tech entrepreneurs delivering faster on cleantech advances. I can live with that.

And America does not need more dynasties. America does not need to get triggered.

US Impeachment Sausage Drama: Quantum Politics?
The Dollar, Weaponized
Taiwan's Medicare For All
Trade War Temporary Truce: Phase 1
Africa's Moment To Shine
The Impeachment Slog
Trump's Iran Speech
Trump: Morally Lost And Confused?
Impeachment Maneuvers Expose America

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Sunday, January 19, 2020

US Impeachment Sausage Drama: Quantum Politics?

Quantum physics was initially rejected by eminent physicists like Einstein because it appeared subjective. What you see depends on how you are looking at it. There was no objective reality.

Is Trump guilty? Not guilty? Depends on who is looking. This is new territory. What we have is quantum politics.



Mitch McConnell may win the impeachment and lose the Senate
Is Mike Pence preparing to resign, assume the presidency, or both?
House Democrats may call new impeachment witnesses if Senate doesn't
Cruz: Hearing from witnesses could extend Senate trial to up to 8 weeks
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Tuesday, January 14, 2020

Trade War Temporary Truce: Phase 1

As part of the deal, the United States agreed to cancel the 15-percent tariffs that had been scheduled to take effect on December 15 on $160 billion worth of Chinese goods, and to halve an earlier set of tariffs on another $120 billion worth of goods. In exchange, China agreed to increase its purchase of U.S. products by $200 billion in the next two years. ....... To reach the next phase will require each side to determine what fundamental concessions it might be willing to offer the other. ........

Trump’s 25 percent tariffs on $250 billion of Chinese imports will remain, as will China’s retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods.

..... Washington presented several Chinese pledges as concessions to U.S. concerns about Beijing’s trade practices. But these promised measures are either vague or extensions of policies already in place. Indeed, China had initiated most, if not all, of these measures—including steps to reform foreign ownership limits, currency exchange policies, and intellectual property protections—well before the trade war began. ........ As early as 2017, China had begun lifting foreign ownership restrictions—limitations that prevented foreigners from having controlling interests or, in some cases, any interest at all in firms operating in China—in many industries, ranging from financial services to the automotive sector, with the aim of removing all limits in a few years. In financial services, including banking, securities, asset management, and insurance, majority foreign ownership was allowed for the first time in June 2018, and ownership limits (now at 51 percent) are set to be completely removed in 2020. Ironically, the pace of change might have been faster if not for the trade war, which forced China to withhold some reforms. ......... Since 1994, China’s central bank has usually intervened to prop up the yuan, not to weaken it. ....... Regarding intellectual property, China has significantly tightened rules and enforcement in recent years. Beijing set up specialized intellectual property courts in three major cities in 2014 and intermediate-level tribunals in 17 provinces in 2017. In the last four years, China’s Supreme Court has issued guidelines and policies on the judicial protection of intellectual property rights. These have strengthened the courts’ jurisdiction over intellectual property infringement cases and provided a framework for damages. The Supreme Court inaugurated its own permanent intellectual property court on January 1, 2019. ........... China’s total intellectual property payments to foreigners have grown on average 20 percent per year since 2000, far outpacing the median growth rate of 9.5 percent across all countries, according to a study by Shang-jin Wei, a professor at Columbia University. The improved regime of intellectual property protection helps explain why China attracts more foreign direct investment than any other country except the United States.......... The trade war has so far failed to achieve Washington’s stated objectives—namely, to bring manufacturing jobs back to the United States and narrow the country’s trade deficit.

By September 2019, U.S. manufacturing had sunk to a more than ten-year low, and it has continued to weaken since. The U.S. trade deficit with the rest of the world has ballooned from $544 billion in 2016 to $691 billion in the 12 months ending in October.

.......... Tariffs on Chinese goods have backfired, in that U.S. consumers have paid almost their entire cost ....... China’s export prices to the United States have not really changed since the trade war began. .......

There are, of course, no winners in this trade war, and to think otherwise is delusional.

........ The longer the trade war drags on, the more damage both countries and the world economy will sustain. Already, global supply chains are disrupted. More consequential will be the oft-talked-about “decoupling” of U.S. and Chinese technological systems. Technology companies used to boast that “the world is our market.” No longer. ............

the ten largest U.S. semiconductor companies earn a combined revenue in China ($79.3 billion) nearly three times their sales in the United States ($28.1 billion)

. All of these firms are now forecasting significantly lower sales to China........ With Phase II negotiations ahead, a wide gap still separates the two sides on major issues, and the prospect of serious compromise remains distant. ......... Neither side has provided concrete details on what it hopes to achieve in the next round of negotiations. But China’s main objectives are unequivocal. Beijing wants Washington to remove all the tariffs imposed since the trade war began, and it will be prepared to reciprocate in kind. It wants the United States to drop its sanctions on Chinese technology firms such as Huawei, and to relax restrictions on Chinese investments in the United States. ......... The ultimate goal of the next stage of negotiations for both sides should be very clear: to reach an equitable deal that lowers barriers to trade and investment.

If both countries follow the same rule-based system, freer trade lowers consumer prices, promotes competition, improves efficiency, stimulates innovation, and ultimately leads to greater economic growth.

In the service of this aim, each country must determine what its real objectives are and prepare to make important concessions. ........... The United States must decide whether what it really wants is access to the Chinese market and better prices for U.S. consumers, or whether it simply wants to contain China’s rise at all costs. Washington cannot have it both ways. The former aim could ultimately lead to a trade deal, but the latter never will. ........

For its part, Beijing must finally decide what to do with the most pernicious holdover from its planned economy days: China’s inefficient state-owned sector.

....... China’s own stated goal is to let the market be the decisive force in the allocation of resources in the country. China should continue to restructure, reform, downsize, and privatize the state sector in accordance with this goal, not just because doing so may entice the United States to stop the trade war but because such reforms will be good for China. Whenever China has undertaken market reforms, for example in 1992 and in the early 2000s, its economic growth has surged. Conversely, its growth suffers when the pace of reform slows down. .........

If Phase II leads the United States and China to more trade and greater economic cooperation than they had before the trade war, then both countries will have managed to win.



Weijian Shan Prior to TPG Capital, Mr Shan worked, between 1993 and 1998 at JP Morgan as a Managing Director, concurrently serving as its China Representative, Chief Representative for JP Morgan Beijing Office and Chief Representative for JP Morgan Shanghai Office......... Mr Shan was a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for six years before joining JP Morgan........ Mr Shan worked as an investment officer at the World Bank in Washington D.C. in 1987.......Mr Shan received a Ph.D. and a Masters of Arts in economics from University of California at Berkeley, an MBA from University of San Francisco.
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