leftydee, you're in a cleft stick, and there's no way out.

America could not constrain the Chinese economy now, if it tried. Any sort of trade war with China would simply push up the prices in American stores, where the shelves are stacked with Chinese imports. It is because you can buy this low-priced stuff (for which Chinese employees are paid what would be slave-labour rates in the US) that you have your lovely lifestyles.

And yet you're right. This trend doesn't have to go much farther before America's economy is overtaken by China's. Then by India's. Then you'll find out that America isn't that rich after all, because all its resources have gone into missile systems etc. Maybe then, at last, people will start questioning the wisdom of all those deficit budgets, which seem to have been largely designed to help the very rich become insanely rich.

Getting back to the theme of the thread, the US should be butting out of car production, and concentrating its manufacturing effort on sophisticated high-tech product that yields the greatest added value - thereby exploiting its technological expertise, which still leads the world on many fronts.