How to fix the trade imbalance with China

From the NYTimes today:

China’s hospitals were already overcrowded, underfunded and inadequately staffed in the best of times. But now with Covid spreading freely for the first time in China, the medical system is being pushed to its limits.

The scenes of desperation and misery at the Tianjin Medical University General Hospital, captured on one of several videos examined by The New York Times, reflects the growing crisis. Even as Covid cases rise, health workers on the front lines are also battling rampant infections within their own ranks. So many have tested positive for the virus in some hospitals that the remaining few say they are forced to do the job of five or more co-workers.

Source: ‘Tragic Battle’: On the Front Lines of China’s Covid Crisis – The New York Times

Apparently, the Chinese didn’t come up with an effective vaccine, or a distribution program in the last 3 years. The scenes at the World Cup where a hundred thousand people were all celebrating soccer in a giant spreader event, with no masks on, were too much to keep the Chinese people in lockdown mode any longer, and now- they have a problem. Covid is hitting them, like it did us in 2020 in NYC- only, 10x worse (more people). Sure, they can make more body bags, but, apparently, we make one thing they can’t, an MRNA vaccine.

Our trade imbalance with China has been out of control for decades. We buy stuff made in China, and the ships go back practically empty.

This is a chance for the morons in Congress to fix that. Forget tariffs as the only tool in your toolbox. Offer our highly effective MRNA vaccines to the Chinese, reboot our ventilator lines that we set up when the epidemic hit (or sell them our spares). Even offer to send our trained and vaccinated military medical teams over to help- in exchange for wiping a few trillion off the debt.

Military superiority isn’t the only way to win wars, sometimes, you can kill them with kindness- and establish a favored nation status that means something. We all know Putin is too busy to help his largest neighbor, so maybe instead of spending so much time and effort on trying to be a military powerhouse, we change course and save the world, instead of being the leading risk to humankind by sticking with the insane idea of mutually assured destruction.

Almost 2 billion Chinese on our side would go a long way to a brighter future.

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