Jobs creation, industrial production and car sales are slipping, and consumer confidence and stock prices have turned south. The U.S. economy may be tumbling into a second recession or worse, hitting the mat for good. Solutions are at hand, but politicians — and voters — won’t embrace what needs doing.
The U.S. economy lacks not ideas and enterprise, but is short on customers for what Americans make. The huge trade deficit sends abroad dollars that Americans earn to pay for imports but do not return to purchase exports and create jobs.
With a trade deficit exceeding 3 percent of the gross domestic product, either Americans borrow and spend more than they earn to keep the economy going, or the demand for U.S.-made goods and services is insufficient to accomplish full employment.
Too many Americans can’t find decent-paying jobs, houses don’t sell and prices stay depressed, and consumers don’t spend. In the funk, unemployment stays above 9 percent, and counting adults stuck in part-time jobs or too discouraged to look and young college graduates flipping hamburgers, it is closer to 20 percent.
Oil and goods from China account for the entire U.S. trade deficit — on everything else, trade is balanced.
Beijing engages in quantitative easing on a grand scale — hogging growth and exporting inflation. It is time to recognize what it does — currency manipulation and protectionism to gain competitive advantage — and address it forthrightly.
Each year, China maintains an undervalued currency by printing yuan to purchase about $450 billion in dollars and other foreign currencies. This reduces domestic Chinese consumption and places a 35 percent subsidy on Chinese exports, accelerates investment and jobs creation in China, and suppresses growth in the United States and Europe, which contributes importantly to sovereign debt problems on both sides of the Atlantic.
China also uses those yuan to subsidize purchases of oil and other scarce commodities it lacks, creating global inflation.
Stagflation results — slower growth and more inflation in the United States and Europe.
Diplomacy has failed to persuade China to relent. The solution is to impose a tax on the conversion of dollars into yuan, either for the purpose of importing Chinese goods or investing in China, equal to China’s currency market intervention divided by its exports — 35 percent.
When Beijing stops intervening, the tax stops. In the meantime, prices that drive investment and jobs creation would be more closely aligned with those that would prevail absent Chinese currency market manipulation and protectionism. Those would be free trade prices.
That tax bothers everyone, but look outside.
America is collapsing. China’s currency market intervention is destroying the U.S. industrial base, thrusting millions into unemployment, driving up global energy consumption and pollution, and undermining the free trade system that took half a century to build.
China continues to grow and will soon overtake the United States. Yet U.S. politicians and pundits argue about spending cuts and tax increases, when neither will help us avoid the immediate threat of a double-dip recession or ultimately the decline of America.
The steps outlined are extraordinary and are hardly in the American tradition of free markets and private enterprise — but America is confronted by challenges and threats to its prosperity and democracy on a scale not seen since the Great Depression and World War II.
Extraordinary times require actions to match.
Peter Morici is a professor at the University of Maryland’s Smith School of Business.
