'China's manufacturing advantage over the U.S. is actually due to a complex array of unfair trade practices, all of which are illegal under free-trade rules'

from latimes.....

"The American economy has been in trouble for more than a decade, and no amount of right-wing tax cuts or left-wing fiscal stimuli will solve the primary structural problem underpinning our slow growth and high unemployment. That problem is a massive, persistent trade deficit — most of it with China — that cuts the number of jobs created by nearly the number we need to keep America fully employed.

To understand why huge U.S. trade deficits represent the taproot of the nation's economic woes, it's crucial to understand that four factors drive our gross domestic product: consumption, business investment, government spending and net exports. This discussion focuses on net exports.

Net exports represent the difference between how much we export and import. A trade deficit means net exports are negative, and that directly reduces both the GDP growth rate and rate of job creation.

America's trade deficit is costing us close to 1% of GDP growth a year at a loss of almost 1 million jobs annually. That's millions of jobs we have failed to create over the last decade; and if we had those jobs now, we wouldn't see continuing high unemployment numbers, padlocked houses under foreclosure and empty factories pushing up weeds.

It follows that if we want to get America back to work, we need to sharply reduce our trade deficit. As a statistical matter, that means sharply reducing our trade deficit with China".............READ MORE