By Paul B. Farrell, MarketWatch
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (MarketWatch) — China must be secretly rooting for a guy like Rick Perry as the next U.S. president. They’d love competing against an America led by another Texas governor who talks from a big hat, loves war spending and tea parties, thinks the Fed chairman is acting “treasonous,” believes Social Security is a “Ponzi scheme” and admits he’s an antiscience, antievolution, anti-intellectual who will turn back the clock to the 19th century frontier Wild West.
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Yes, China’s rooting for a guy who will not only make Washington “inconsequential” for all Americans, he’ll make America “inconsequential” in a world where China knows that its competitive edge and economic growth all hinge on investing in science, innovation and intellectuals with a vision of the future.
You can bet China’s leaders are cheering for a president who’ll stall the American economy even further while China races ahead of us in the global economic war. China would probably settle for the other leading GOP candidate, that ex-governor whose values shift with the latest polls and Tea Party questions … whatever happened to the GOP’s Bill Buckley soul?
China’s commie-capitalism beating GOP’s Reaganomics since 2000
Adam Smith’s original 1776 capitalism made America the world’s greatest superpower. We’ve lost that too. So America’s now in a handicap race with China, and losing. Why?
In just the past decade China’s state-run hybrid commie-capitalism has beaten the American economy, going from a “poor country” to racing ahead to global economic dominance. Unfortunately, our politicians just don’t get it. They’re like high school teens fighting a turf war who can’t see the building’s burning down.
In his “Triumph of Politics Over Economics,” Reagan’s budget director David Stockman warns: “America’s at a crossroads struggling to redefine ourselves, at a time when even Reagan couldn’t win the GOP nomination. Why? Because myopic politicians have hijacked the economy. Politicians are the new economists. Politicians now run the economy, puppets of the Super Rich and special-interest lobbyists.”
Stockman calls this corrupt system Crony Capitalism. We call it Reaganomics and Doomsday Capitalism, a sellf-destructive ideology that works to China’s advantage.
Here are 11 reasons China’s leaders would love an inconsequential president making America inconsequential in China’s march to economic world domination:
1. China’s economy: $123 trillion, 3 times America’s by 2040
In an eye-opening Foreign Policy cover story last year titled “$123,000,000,000,000: Why China’s economy will grow to $123 trillion by 2040,” Nobel economist Robert W. Fogel of the University of Chicago writes about China’s unbelievable leap forward. Back in 2000, just one decade ago, China was a “poor country” when the GOP and its “war president” took over control of America, announcing that “debt doesn’t matter.”
Yes, by 2040 “the Chinese economy will reach $123 trillion, or nearly three times the economic output of the entire globe in 2000. China’s per capita income will hit $85,000, more than double the forecast for the European Union … much higher than that of India and Japan … the average Chinese megacity dweller will be living twice as well as the average Frenchman … Although it will not have overtaken the United States in per capita wealth … China’s share of global GDP— 40% — will dwarf that of the United States (14%) and the EU (5%) 30 years from now,” one brief generation.
2. China’s political system is more capitalist than America’s
“The Chinese political system is likely not what you think,” says Fogel, “Most economic reforms, including the most successful ones, have been locally driven and overseen.” Today there’s “more criticism and debate in upper echelons of policymaking.”
Fogel attends meetings of the Chinese Economists Society. Many economists are openly “critical of the Chinese government,” will even “point out that the latest decision by the finance ministry is flawed … even publish a critical letter in a Beijing newspaper.”
3. China is rapidly turning into a capitalist consumer economy
Yes, “China’s long-repressed consumerist tendencies” are exploding,” says Fogel: “In many ways, China is the most capitalist country in the world right now.”
Get it? While we borrow from China then waste money fighting wars, while Wall Street and the Super Rich are amassing wealth in the hands of the top 1%, “in the big Chinese cities, living standards and per capita income are at the level of countries the World Bank would deem ‘high middle-income,’ with a clear, growing affinity for acquiring clothes, electronics, fast food, automobiles.”
Why? Because China’s leaders “made the judgment that increasing domestic consumption will be critical to China’s economy, and a host of domestic policies now aim to increase Chinese consumers’ appetite for acquisitions.”
4. China’s massive investments in education, ahead of America
China’s making “enormous investments” in education, says Fogel. They know “educated workers are much more productive workers. … college-educated workers are three times as productive … a high school graduate is 1.8 times as productive as a worker with less than a ninth-grade education.”
In the next generation China’s high school enrollment rate could reach 100%, the college rate about 50%, adding “more than 6 percentage points to the country’s annual economic growth rate.” Meanwhile, America runs up massive debts wasting trillions on wars, shortchanging education.
5: China’s locking up global resources, using U.S. dollar reserves
The title of a Malcolm Knox feature in BusinessWeek says it all: “The deal is simple. Australia gets money. China gets Australia.” Wake up America: While our clueless myopic politicians are fighting self-destructive election turf wars, China is using its reserves (U.S. dollars!) to buy rights to Australia’s commodities and natural resources, giving China long-term access to natural gas, minerals, iron ore.
And that’s just one continent: China’s quietly buying up future rights to commodity-resources worldwide.
6. China’s rural economy of 700 million adding to growth rate
Go beyond the Shanghai high-rises and Guangdong factories,” says Fogel. You’ll see “changes afoot in the Chinese countryside … an under-appreciated economic engine.”
From 1978 to 2003 China’s labor productivity averaged about 6%. In the future, productivity will also increase in rural areas, for about 700 million or half of China. “That large rural sector is responsible for about a third of Chinese economic growth today” and will explode as a new generation adds another hundred million.
7. China’s government statistics underreporting progress
Don’t be misled by reports that “Chinese data are flawed or deliberately inflated in key ways,” says Fogel. Just the opposite: Their “statisticians may well be underestimating economic progress … Small firms often don’t report their numbers to the government.”
And as in America, “official estimates of GDP badly underestimate national growth” because they don’t “take into account improvements in services such as education and health care.” In short, “the rapid growth of China’s service sector makes the underestimation more pronounced.”
8: Yes, China does have a long-range plan to conquer America
China is America’s worst nightmare, engaged in economic warfare against us on multiple fronts: Stealing millions of jobs, stealing U.S. state secrets, stealing proprietary patents, stealing technology, stealing our wealth. China has also forged strategic alliances with our enemies, Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. China is engaged in a not-so-secret cyber-war against America.
Ross Terrill, a China expert at Harvard, wrote in the Wilson Quarterly: “The Chinese Communists are very aware of this contest with the United States, though Americans (beyond the Pentagon) are not.” Terrill warns: “By being a shrinking violet, the United States would simply hand over the future to China.”
9: China’s aware of Pentagon strategies, is one-upping generals
You know China’s generals have copies of the Pentagon’s strategic war manual. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman warns of China’s long-range plans beyond waging “economic warfare” and tying up long-term natural resources.
Krugman says China’s actions tell us they’re planning long-term military strategies as well as economic war. He warns that in the near future, some seemly inconsequential incident may provoke “dangerously trigger-happy” Chinese leaders into escalating from defensive military strategies to a preemptive strike to advance China’s economic power.
10. The “Goldman Conspiracy” is helping China sabotage America
Li Delin’s “The Goldman Sachs Conspiracy” was a best seller in China. His Chinese readers love his vivid description: “Goldman Sachs knows when to go for your neck” like a “Manchurian tiger.”
Actually China’s playing a clever game: As author Matt Taibbi might say, China is now a “vampire squid wrapped around the face of Goldman, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into Goldman’s capital, talent and connections.” Eventually China will suck the life out of Goldman.
11. By 2040 China will be the world’s biggest superpower (again)
“To the West, the notion of a world in which the center of global economic gravity lies in Asia may seem unimaginable,” says Fogel. “But it wouldn’t be the first time. … China was the world’s largest economy for 18 of the past 20 centuries. … While Europe was fumbling in the Dark Ages and fighting disastrous religious wars, China cultivated the highest standards of living in the world. Today, the notion of a rising China is, in Chinese eyes, merely a return to the status quo.”
And thanks to guys like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, Rick Perry, Barack Obama, the Goldman Conspiracy and buddies, China is destined to once again become the world’s superpower by 2040, when China’s economy is three times bigger than America’s.
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