The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[OakesCS]

he hasnt been on Fox News this morning so no 'stupid comments of the day' to quote. In general i think his views on trade are terribly misguided, e.g. tariffs. Being opposed to IP theft/ransom is not original to him. Everybody except thieves are against theft. However, his solutions to such problems are not solutions. If he wants to stop Chinese IP theft which ultimately enables them to undercut US manufacturing, then cut off visas to Chinese students and workers. That would solve several problems. I dont believe for a minute claims by folks in the tech industry that they need more H1/J1 visas for workers from countries that dont honor IP. HR and hiring managers are frequently just lazy and then there's the compounding effect, that once somebody that came in on a visa gets into a hiring position, they tend to hire people from their culture.

As a little side rant that may sound Navarroan, in SLB's former DBR facility (Canada), the programming group had 12 people when i arrived. 10 were Chinese. The group manager was Chinese. None were born in Canada/US and most were on visas. Shortly after I arrived (2014), they fired the 1 female (I think Algerian - some former French colony) in the group who had just returned from maternity leave. 1 year later they fired the remaining non-Chinese person. The group composition and order of firing had nothing to do with competency - it was all about ethnicity and communication because they generally spoke Chinese in the group.

Trying to resurrect generic steel manufacturing in the US is foolish. I suspect he'd argue that CV19 shows that there is a strategic need for such domestic production. I say BS. There's no need for production if there's no consumption and under normal circumstances, which is >99% of the time, there are dozens of countries that can manufacture steel and therefore there's no real strategic threat due to dependence on a single source. Our circumstance is not like Japan pre-1941 but he seems to think the US is approaching that level of dependency and vulnerability.

article below paints him as the grifter i think he is and as it says:

"Navarro originally set out to be a politician, not just an adviser to one. But he had a problem: people didn’t like him. ... He was right about a lot of things. But he was just an a–hole.”

https://time.com/5375727/peter-navarro/