This is our ball field; the visiting teams are cheating to win. What do we do about it? We support the cheaters and defend them to our last job!
Is it simply greed? Do Americans turn a blind eye on the cheating because they think they can obtain a tiny personal advantage for themselves?
Do they secretly like proven, serial cheaters?
Just what does a trading partner have to do to us to get us pissed? Why is “win at all costs” considered “fair trade” when Americans view Toyota, but simply talking of the US removing the cheating, suddenly “isolationism”?
Actual fair trade would kick Toyota in the nuts and give American cars a fighting chance on their own soil. A decision to buy a Toyota or Honda is like declaring “I’m ok with them stealing our jobs and running our deficits so high our children’s children will get nose bleeds”.
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“Currency manipulation is a policy used by the governments and central banks of some of America’s largest trading partners to artificially set the value of their currency to gain an unfair competitive advantage for their exports.
The IMF defines currency manipulation as “protracted large-scale intervention in one direction in the exchange market.” Since 1998, Japan has spent $505 billion intervening in currency markets more than 160 times. Japanese government officials also continue to send strong messages to the markets to keep the yen artificially weak. This astonishing record, by any standard, is the classic case of disruptive, trade-distorting currency manipulation.
Countries manipulate their currencies to protect jobs and promote exports. This comes at the expense of taking jobs and siphoning economic growth from their trading partners.”
“Many people believe that Japanese cars and trucks sold in the United States are almost exclusively built in the United States. However, Japan is still exporting nearly 2 million cars and trucks annually into the U.S. – the same level as twenty years ago. In contrast, last year just 15,565 cars were imported into Japan from the U.S”
“Japan’s artificially weak currency policy provides an average subsidy of thousands of dollars for each and every car it exports to the United States. for example at 116 yen to the dollar, a luxury sedan imported into the U.S. can receive an $8,000 subsidy from the government of Japan. Japanese cars produced at plants here in the U.S. are also partially subsidized because of their high imported parts content.” http://www.autotradecouncil.org/Images/ATPC_curr_92606.pdf
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Of course those numbers change as the value of the dollar changes and some sources put the amounts lower, but they all show drastic unfair advantages to Japanese manufacturers obtained by cheating.
This is a war over jobs and national wealth. They are cheating us out of ours. This is fact; nobody in the know denies it. Yet like some nation of masochists, we not only allow it to continue year after year, we defend the cheater and beg for more.
