Before you dismiss this notion as preposterous it may be best to take a moment and listen to my argument here. We are running record setting deficits with Communist China every year. If you remember, President Donald Trump was very concerned about continuous (and rising) U.S. trade deficits, really among all our foreign trading partners. Listed below are America’s five largest trading partners, along with dollar volumes of the goods and services involved:

Mexico – $615 billion traded with a $102 billion deficit
Canada –  $612 billion traded with a $27 billion deficit
China – $559 billion traded with a $346 billion deficit
Japan –  $218 billion traded with a $69 billion deficit
Germany – $188 billion traded with a $67 billion deficit
(ref: https://www.thebalance.com/trade-deficit-by-county-3306264)

In reality, we might still be able to reduce our deficits with these trading partners in a couple of ways:
1) Re-negotiate the increase of exports to major trading partners by finding out what they need most, as we may already be growing or producing plenty of that inside the United States.
2) Return our industry production skills back to the United States, by first making certain that our corporate tax and regulatory environment is “business-friendly”, which encourages entrepreneurship. This second point was a major “fail” for several past Administrations. Plus both Houses of Congress can be blamed for years and years of failure here!

Again, President Trump was involved in both reform measures to ensure that our U.S. economy was independent of foreign influence and free to achieve maximum growth but as you and I know, he was stopped short of that goal by the election. Still, it was Donald Trump who pointed out many times that we are running 100’s of $billions in trade deficits with Communist China annually. Do you even know what this means? Not only are we buying their stuff daily, they are not buying nearly as much of that stuff we make here. After years and years of running sizable deficits such as these, the Communist Chinese government is primarily existing off of what it sells inside America. How did that happen? Because over time not only did American concerns decide to stop making toothpicks and cookware and toys and clothes and little electronic gadgets, but we as American consumers bought in to the idea also – collectively deciding that it’s best if we just buy from China, and it’s cheaper to do so… can you see millions of American jobs disintegrating yet? 🙂

Fast-forward to now, three to four decades later, and we’re beginning to realize, (or at least some of us are), that our decisions on matters of consumption have consequences. It’s now an American hangover – a headache the size of Alaska. Turns out that all along we’ve been feeding the monster, and the problem with monsters is they grow until one day they consume those that fed them… you’ve seen the movie. We’re all guilty of this. Here it is the Holidays and I suspect most of you are waiting on a package in the mail that ultimately was produced in China. I’m still missing one gift that I ordered online from a local business that modifies products according to customer specifications. However, the original blanks for the product may very well have been produced in China, I’m not sure but I wouldn’t be surprised.

Returning to my original thesis from the title on this post, here we are and for all intents and purposes it’s the year 2022 and we’ve now been changed. As an economy, as a people, as a country, changed by things completely out of our control, things that were once firmly within our control, and the culprit is a communist country half a world away? Remember that at first there were years and years of extremely large trade deficits, which we find out decades later has taken a huge toll on us, crimping our economy from reaching its growth potential, both as a country and at the individual household level. Next we shut down the entire U.S. economy over a virus originating (again) out of Communist China. And still today, we are continuously threatened by new variants of that original Communist Virus. There was Delta, now Omnicron, and there will be more just you wait and see! This ugly situation will not end until America and its people have had enough of “all things” Communist China. I’m hoping for that day to come when we can look back on the mistakes we made in the past and at least learn, something… until then, how can one deny that our very economy is not being run from Beijing these days? Tell me how? 🙁