How is the Green New Deal coherent or even based in fact? Why are Trump's plans to disregard Chinese trade incoherent?
Why I said Donald Trump's views on trade are incoherent is because of the points:
1) He vastly overrates his ability to inflict damage on China while underrating the damage China can do in return.
2) The Chinese early were limiting their retaliatory tariffs. Now they’ve been saying through their more aggressive actions, is: “You think you can bully us. But you can’t. We, on the other hand, can ruin your farmers and crash your stock market. Do you want to reconsider?” Based upon today's tweets, there is no indication that this message is getting through. Instead, every time the Chinese pause and give Trump a chance to rethink, he takes it as vindication and pushes even harder. What this suggests, in turn, is that sooner or later the warning shots will turn into an all-out trade and currency war.
3) His incoherence is on view almost every day. Trump has been complaining nonstop about the strength of the dollar, which he claims puts America at a competitive disadvantage. Recently he got the Treasury Department to declare China a currency manipulator, which was true seven or eight years ago but isn’t true now. Yet the very next day he wrote triumphantly that “massive amounts of money from China and other parts of the world is pouring into the United States,” which he declared “a beautiful thing to see.” Um, what happens when “massive amounts of money” pour into your country? Your currency rises, which is exactly what Trump is complaining about. And if lots of money were flooding out of China, the yuan would be plunging, not experiencing the trivial decline that Treasury condemned.
4) Still, even if Trump isn’t making sense, will China give in to his demands? The short answer is, “What demands?” Trump mainly seems exercised by China’s trade surplus with America, which has multiple causes and isn’t really under the Chinese government’s control.
5) Others in his administration seem concerned by China’s push into high-technology industries, which could indeed threaten U.S. dominance. But China is both an economic superpower and relatively poor compared with the U.S. Does anyone imagine that China can be bullied into scaling back its technological ambitions?
6) While Trump’s tariffs certainly hurt the Chinese, Beijing is fairly well placed to counter their effects. China can pump up domestic spending with monetary and fiscal stimulus; it can boost its exports, to the world at large as well as to America, by letting the yuan fall. It has done this by letting the yuan float on currency markets. Nobody can claim they are manipulating the currency by letting it float.
Thus, Trump and his economic team have no clue and are being out-gunned by China, who rely upon smart people helping them make trade decisions.
As for the Green New Deal, it has been being formulated since 2006. One can say it is ambitious. One can't say it isn't based in facts.