In my continuing efforts to educate the uninformed and the misinformed, here is another article about a trade war with China.  

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/...ina-217830

" The words just now are a shadow of the actions that most of us rightly fear, and it is vital that we all take a deep breath and make a concerted effort to distinguish threats, bluster and modest action from a global trade war that echoes the retrenchment of the 1930s. The infamous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 levied duties of close to 60 percent on nearly 20,000 products, leading U.S. trade with the world to plunge nearly 75 percent. That was a trade war. What we are seeing today might be the first signs of one, but we are a long way from real conflict.

"That makes it an opportune time not to go any further. It may be, of course, that the Trump White House has in this arena found an ideal outlet for its tendency to speak loudly and carry a small stick."

"Trade statistics are highly problematic—we tend to fixate on the hundreds of billions of dollars of U.S deficits, when in fact a large percentage of that is U.S. companies assembling items nominally “made in China” and then selling them in America. The iPhone is perhaps the best example. It is treated as a U.S. import from China at its announced import price of more than $200, but as many economists have shown, only a fraction of that goes to China. The rest is distributed among global suppliers and Apple itself, but arcane “country of origin rules” make it seem otherwise. That is true for almost all products others than commodities and agricultural goods. Our current trade numbers reflect supply chains of the 1950s but how goods are actually made in the 21st century."

"The final problem with the tariffs is that China is the fastest-growing export market for American goods and perhaps the largest potential market for U.S. services. Those services include Chinese tourism to the United States and Chinese students studying here, whose economic ripple effects are surely under-reported (a Chinese student paying rent shows up in no trade number, for instance). And those numbers don’t include China investing tens of billions in the U.S. to buy companies with its surplus dollars, nor its trillion-dollar investment in U.S. bonds."

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