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When they say that the corporate tax rate in America is uncompetitive with the rest of the world, they are talking about China's low tax rate. When they lament the fact that American business can't compete with the rest of the world because of higher regulations, they are talking about China and its lower regulations. After all, China is our number one competitor and the number one foreign magnet for American business. They don't dare say that they would like the United States to become like China, but that's what they mean. Of course U.S. corporations could still make money in an environment such as Western Europe. But they can't gorge themselves the way they can in China.
They would love to loosen up environmental regulations and let us breath foul air such as what people have to breath in China. As an immigration attorney, I've been several times to Beijing and the air is pretty foul and elsewhere in China, the water is not something I would care to drink. The wages in China are low and people work very, very long hours each day, sometimes up to 7 days a week. Extended families live in one or two rooms in crampted conditions. Most Chinese live in modest apartments with no heat in winter and no air-conditioning in the summer. Buying a car in China is a major event, like buying a house in the U.S. Of course in the major tourist centers such as Beijing and Shanghai, there are luxurious hotels and suburban tracts. But if you go into the countryside or to large industrial cities such as Shandong beyond the tourist trek, you will see a very different China.
The average Chinese person has come a very long way since the days of Mao. But the wealth gap continues to widen in that country at an alarming rate. We don't hear about it in our media, but China has a great deal of social unrest these days, with bombings, killings, demonstrations, and riots because of the growing gap between rich and poor. The average American simply would not tolerate living the way an average Chinese person lives. Yet the Republicans would like the U.S. to model its corporate tax code and corporate regulatory scheme on China, although they don't dare pronounce that name. Instead of adopting what's good about China, some of their social safety net such as it is, the Republicans would have us adopt the bad aspects of China. They want a race to the bottom and for the work hours and pay of our citizens to go into decline to supposedly make us more competitive.
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