China decided it was time to devalue the yuan, enabling the communist country to steal even more of the global economy as it competes around the world.
The Chinese currency is a real problem for America, as it has cost us millions of well-paying manufacturing jobs and sales of many of our own goods, all because its value has been kept artificially low.
China has been pegging the yuan to the dollar at ridiculously low levels essentially to steal our growth and productivity. Even perhaps the greatest American-designed product of our age is manufactured there.
While nothing is more American than apple pie, nothing is more Chinese-manufactured than the Apple iPhone. In the US, we are struggling to grow our annual gross domestic product at a rate above 2 percent. We haven’t had a single year of 3 percent GDP growth since President Obama took office.
China, on the other hand, has been growing at 7 percent to 8 percent annually for the past 10 years, and its most recent growth numbers put it at a solid 7 percent.
And it still felt the greedy need to devalue in order to swipe more of our jobs and undersell us where its products compete with ours.
Remember, the currency game, while complex in nuance, is simple in substance: The cheaper a country’s currency, the cheaper it is to buy its products. Have you ever wondered why the iPhone is made in China?
Foxconn — the China-based outsource manufacturer that makes the iPhone — employs more than 300,000 people inside its walled “iPhone City.”The average worker purportedly is paid around 1,000 yuan — or $156 — after taxes per month.
That’s what a US worker would make before taxes in a single day. So Apple, that hip, cool, socially aware company, builds in China for economic reasons.
Competing on merit is great for America — win, lose or draw, it always makes the world better. But underwriting what amounts to borderline slave labor in China just so Apple can make its iProfits does not.
nypost.com
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