"Bray Haven" wrote in message
...
You ought to look up Warren Buffet's plan. After we've all been buffeted
around by China and India for another decade or so, it just may gain some
traction.

Ed Huntress

It sounds like a better plan than the current (putting out fires) policy.
It
might have some inherent problems though, as those countries that would
like/need to build their trade with us, (but are underdeveloped). They
would be
hamstrung up front to achieve the "credits" needed to gain favorable
markets
for their goods here. A catch 22. As long as the US has the appetite &
the
money, there will never be "balanced" trade.
Greg Sefton

All of that is true, and I doubt if Buffet would want to see it implemented
just as he has laid it out, especially as an ironclad doctrine that we
imposed without considering individual circumstances.

It looks like a philosophy that could be a great stabilizer. We could use
something like that right now in the US, to avoid the social/economic
carnage that some industries are experiencing. Macroeconomists brush those
problems off as "displacements" and "creative destruction," without paying
much attention to what a "displacement" really means to the social
expectations and principles on which much of our economic activity
depends -- particularly the encouragement for small-business investment and
entrepreneurship. If you create a generation of cynics about the
opportunities in small manufacturing businesses, you've put a big rip in the
social fabric.

We aren't chess pieces on a board, in other words. Sometimes the free-trade
economists and policy-makers seem to think we are.

Ed Huntress