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I gesture to those as indicators of shifting sentiment and soft power. You're right, but the journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step, and those are steps. They might stall, I hope they do, but dismissing everything outright is how you eventually get clapped.
I agree with the entirety of the middle of your comment. I was recently exposed to the idea that the CCP would start increasing the strength of the RMB to promote domestic consumption, which I thought was interesting. I think it would both lower the US trade defect and increase desire to save in RMB, especially if it was telegraphed as a long term trend. That being said, the CCP is so locked in on export dominance I'm not sure if they want to (or can). But an interesting thought.
Lol, lmao even. There is nothing people love more than gibs, and nothing they'll irrationally oppose more than taxes. There is no world in which that is politically tenable or happiness increasing.
I don't think that really fits the evidence we've seen in the world. There are tons of people who appear to get warm fuzzy feelings when the government deficit shrinks closer to balanced or even flips to surplus. Many still think fondly of the clinton/gingrich era in the late 90s, even though in reality that was the worst possible case for a government surplus: the rest of the world was still increasingly accumulating USD savings, but the US domestic private sector was dis-saving and running up big private debt unsustainably.
And the taxes going up scenario is about taxes paid, so it need not be the rates changing at all. It would be people spending down savings more and supercharging economic activity, automatically driving up the amount paid in taxes as incomes go up in aggregate. It's kind of hard for anyone to 'feel' that dynamic result as negative.
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