From that amusing whine in Current Affairs:
“… thanks to Joe Biden’s stubborn insistence on staying in the race despite his obvious incapacity, Harris had to take over an operation that she did not build …”
Hey, the Constitution has a provision for removing an obviously incapacitated President … but that would have required Democrats such as VP Harris to get off their rear ends and actually do something. Not their strong suit.
The author accepts that the Democrat Inner Party is hollow, but what is he proposing to do about it? (Apart from continuing to plead with Americans of African Ancestry to please stay on the reservation).
They seem to forget that right up until it became obvious to normies, they were all saying that Joe was better than ever. Why would a guy at the top of his game step aside?
No ability to self assess or be honest. How about we should have never pretended that Joe was in perfect mental condition. Probably not something they can say out loud.
Second they assumed they could beat Trump with anyone because their campaign was Trump bad. I can’t fault them for that because I thought that would work too.
CEO Makoto Uchida said Thursday that Nissan had not foreseen hybrids’ sudden popularity in the US and that demand for revamped versions of core models had not been as strong as hoped. Nissan’s restructuring is the latest chapter in a long-running attempt to revitalize its business, as it has never fully recovered from the 2018 ousting of former Chairman Carlos Ghosn and the scaling back of its partnership with Renault.
Under the Keiretsu and MITI systems, Toyota was the default national carmaker. Thus, Nissan and Honda did not have big Japanese presence and could not rely on the protected Japanese market for huge amounts of revenue. They had to be exporters.
France tailored the Renault-Nissan merger very favorably to the French owners of Renault, ultimately leading to the breakup. But the merger meant Nissan did not have a big European presence.
Nissan stumbled in the US perhaps partially due to poor management coming out of France.
This is rather a staggering graph – if it is accurate. It turns out that back in the year 2000, those car-crazy Euros were cranking out three times (3 times!) as many cars as the much greener US. Why can’t the Euros be more like the US?
Even today, those Euros are still cranking out 3 times as many cars as the US. Can the planet take the strain?
However, the big point is that it has been almost 15 years since the Chinese exceeded the Euros’ car production, and they have since gone from strength to strength. I fear that those in the West who point to the strength of the US stock market are missing the point about what a real economy looks like.
Something is wrong with this graph. For starters, it only appears to account for 2/3 of world production. This site, which is allegedly the source of data, has a rather different proportions. For instance, US is about 11% (not 3%) and China is 32% (not 39%). Given that much “American” production is in Canada and Mexico, it would be more meaningful to include all of NAFTA, which accounts for 17%. Add that to the 19% that is all of Europe: North America plus Europe exceed China.
These journos do nothing but lie.
Correction: I was looking at vehicle production, not just cars. China is 38% of passenger car production in 2023. It remains true that the graphic is misleading because it leaves out many European countries. The figure for Europe is 23%, not 13%. India is also significant producer at 7%.
Perhaps it’s not unreasonable that India and China, which represent over 1/3 of the world population, might produce almost half the passenger cars to serve their people.
That is the part which needs some careful thought. Once upon a time, Americans earned good salaries working in car factories, and local, State, and Federal govs got tax revenue which paid for infrastructure to make the country stronger. “American” production in Canada and Mexico does not do that.
Perhaps even more importantly than the loss of employment, pay checks, and tax revenue – the US has lost a generation of guys who were trained on how to produce real goods. The fact that at least some of those guys still have jobs sweeping floors in dealerships which sell the Canadian and Mexico vehicles is small recompense.
According to the AI about 65 to 70% of the assembled car is domestic content.
Loss of manufacturing is similar to other US problems in that it is due to government regulation, tax policy and a deterioration of US culture.
Really all three are a cultural issues of wanting life to be better without having to work or sacrifice to make life better. In short, we want free stuff. This goes back many years and has been increasing for many years. Now, it is accelerating with Gen Y and Gen Z.
Thus, we have seen the nation move to the political left which thrives on and promotes this deterioration. The right wing Trump is nothing more than a 90s Democrat (probably left of where Clinton was at the time). His recent backing of the longshoremen’s position against automation is an obvious example. It is the strategy used by democrats to take advantage of the citizen’s tendency to want free stuff. Let’s protect a small group of people that will hurt everyone and make the country less competitive. The cost is not obvious so it is free. Nobody will notice that it is not free and will not make the connection between these types of actions and the further deterioration of the US. Every Trump policy is protectionist. Even the proposed tax cuts fall into this category. Most of his proposed tax cuts in reality are no different than welfare checks.
It doesn’t surprise me at all that the US cannot compete with countries that have not embraced the culture of free stuff.
I could not find that image on the Department of Energy website – but I am not as smart as an AI.
What I do notice with my Mark 1 eyeballs is that there are a lot of pickup trucks being driven around in my area. Demand is such that there are even auto dealers and used vehicle dealers who specialize in pickup trucks, the vehicle that keeps the US rolling. Famously, the Ford F150 pickup truck has been the best selling vehicle in the US for who knows how many years. Yet that graph shows pickup trucks at only about a steady 10% of US production. Odd!
Getting to the facts would take a deeper dive than I have time to do.
Free trade is a chimera. There are all kinds of ways for countries to erect subtle barriers to make trade not free de facto. Japan and EU countries are experts at this.
Free trade is not an end in itself; it’s only good if it serves the citizens of the country.
One can’t consistently deplore the “loss of manufacturing” while simultaneously supporting the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to low-cost countries. There’s more to life than cheap foreign-made goods and obedience to Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage. The flourishing of one’s own citizens is the goal of government policy, not just a happy, occasional side-effect. It’s also not identical to maximizing GDP per capita.
This is the true culture of (nearly) free stuff: cede manufacturing to China so that Walmart can be filled with cheap trinkets. It’s the road to national ruin.
As a theory, Ricardo’s hypothesis makes sense: a country with a warm climate grows bananas, while a country with a cool climate grows apples; they trade, and everyone has apples & bananas. Implicit in the theory is that everyone in both countries is hard at work and productive. Also implicit is that the trade is balanced.
Real world experience is different from the theory, because the implicit conditions are rarely met. In the 19th Century, unilateral “free trade” ruined the once-dominant UK economy. In the 20th Century post WWII, unilateral “free trade” has left the US de-industrialized, import-dependent, running an unsustainable trade deficit, and with pointless government hiring disguising a lack of genuinely productive jobs.
I’ve heard some estimate that half the US GDP is fake in the sense that no value is produced. Sounds about right to me. Not every time money changes hands, which is what GDP is, results from productive activity. Anyone who has sat in on committee meetings knows this instinctively: lots of billable hours, zero results.
As of 7/17 there were 1.12 million pickup trucks (not including the trivial amount of pickups sold outside of Ford, GMC, Chevy, Toyota and dodge). That is a yearly pace of 2.05 million. Seems to match up with the graph.
However, I was reading a FED report that said that in 2018 11.3 million cars were assembled and 17.7 million sold.
