I'd rather have them buy US made mowers and vehicles. If they want to buy "peoples car" from DE, by all means let them. Sure it'd be nice to have them buy 150s, but we can barely afford ford's poorly-run-company-requiring-substantial-margins. It's not even a US built thing. They're building rangers in Thailand and competing against chinese cars that cost ~40% less w/ more standard features in them. How is that? Both have access to cheap labor but somehow the chinese are able to drastically out compete w/ all things being equal (sans massive corporate bloat).
Ford's issues are corporate inefficiencies and poor management. Their sucking-the-consumer-dry approach is broken. That goes for the Germans too -- see their energy costs have skyrocketed making them uncompetitive. Their auto market is getting destroyed right now and VW's debt is staggering. They DE govt is trying to keep them afloat but they're going to fail anyway. Turns out when their "friend" blew up their gas pipeline it was the deathblow to their industry as a whole.
Absolutely. So when there's a trade imbalance, as in you buy more from someone than they buy from you, your capital is fleeing your market. When capital flees your market, you have less overall economic activity because the capital isn't there. Instead it's being sent to other nations to artificially prop up their economies, at your economies expense. Now when this "friend" or "ally" as you'd like to call them, helps create this trade imbalance by placing tariffs on your products and making them less than competitive, it fuels this trade imbalance.
For too long everyone and their dog has been taking advantage of the US allowing this to happen, some might say it's been a result of incompetent leadership and policy -- sounds about right. Meanwhile, while all of this trade imbalance has been occurring, the govt has been borrowing trillions of $ -- putting the US taxpayer on the hook for that money. We're essentially borrowing money, to send to other nations buying goods, to prop up their economies? With friends like that, who needs enemies?
A true balanced approach to trade is roughly parity on trade. We buy 1234 from one country, they buy 1234 from us. Maybe if they can't use certain goods we can enter multilateral relations in a manner where it pretty much all balances out between partners. That's not how it currently works. Instead we send ~$1tril of $ that could be used within the US economy overseas instead of buying American or having balanced trade. So long as it continues to work like this, it's a losing proposition.
