This is bullshit! Gabe keeps dogging on Chris Brown, a strong black man trying to overcome a difficult situation, but he is in love with Mel Gibson, and would never say bad things about Charlie Sheen! So typical! GTFO! Chris Brown is a beautiful sexy man, and a great and talented mucisian! I would be honored to have him punch my vagina in the face with his big penis!
China is not as self-sufficient as your model suggests, and America is not nearly so worthless. In a situation where the dollar is severely devalued in relation to the Yuan, there would be a huge resurgence in American manufacturing, because it would become profitable. Your model looks mercantilist, and ignores that China is thriving in a world economy, and is quite reliant on our exports to them. China’s ability to produce cheap small appliances and consumer electronics doesn’t mean that they would flourish following a global economic disaster. It might even be worse for them. Either way, there is no real way of knowing until it happens, and I’d prefer not to find out.
The Chinese economy is largely manufacturing based, with a strong emphasis on exporting goods around the world, to the U.S. in particular. Their primary investments are in U.S. Securities. If we default on our debts, it would send the world into an inflationary spiral, which would destroy worldwide demand for Chinese products and crash their economy as well. They would be unable to fall back on investments, because we’ve already defaulted on them. They would be hard-pressed to collect by force, because our military is still too powerful, but they might try. The result of our insolvency would probably be worldwide depression and possible war, and no one, especially not newly-drafted young Chinese men, would likely be sitting around laughing about it.
Perhaps, but that wasn't Gabe's assertion. If we're going to criticize this advertisement, we need to do so on its merits. There is plenty here to make fun of without falling into the lazy habit of calling things racist just because they have a racial element and we disagree with them.
Yeah, that's why I said "a large bulk" rather than "the large bulk". As jles points out, they are still our largest single creditor, unless you count the Social Security Trust Fund, which isn't even included in those calculations. The ad was meant to make people afraid of national decline from economic insolvency, which is easier to dramatize this way than with global inflation which would probably hurt the Chinese as much as it would hurt us. There are numerous ways that the logic in the ad doesn't work for anyone with a basic understanding of how national debt works, but that wasn't really my point. My point was that the ad's presentation of China and Chinese people was incidental to its goal of stoking nationalistic fears that are unrelated to race.
I'm not sure that I buy the charge that this ad is racist. I mean, the owner of a large bulk of our debt is China, and China is made up predominately of Chinese people, and these particular Chinese people are not presented in a positive light, but that isn't because of any particular racial element to their characterization.
Granted the ad is crazy demagogic, but it is playing on nationalistic and economic fears rather than racial ones. While the use of Asian actors in this context could be used to create a sense of "otherness" that could be a racist tactic, it is unreasonable to make that charge since only Asian actors could reasonable be used to stoke the nationalistic fears that this ad was targeting, as, again, China is made up of Asian people. If our largest creditor was a European nation, I'm sure that this ad would be full of white people, and it would be just as insane and nationalistic and demagogic.
I'm not trying to defend the ad, which I think is crappy and offensive and harmful to efforts to bring the cost of government under control, but it seems like a lazy attack to use the word "racist" to describe it when the racial element is incidental to the point. Seriously, would this make any sense if the Chinese classroom was full of pan-racial youths like a street gang from a mid-nineties television show? Would that be less crazy or demagogic?
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