They will if we don't get our own house in order. We can compete with China, but not by trying to "force" them to change their policies. What we have to do is easy to explain, but politically difficult to accomplish: We have to pay off our debts. We have to stop borrowing and start saving. We have to (as someone said above) make our taxes equal to our expenditures. Actually, we've borrowed so much, that for a while (I'm thinking a decade should be adequate) we have to pay more tax than we want the government to spend. Once we've paid our debts, we will once again be the strongest country in the world. What Mr. Magruder (sp?) in Dickens' Great Expectations said applies to nations as well as individuals. I paraphrase: The key to happiness is to spend one dollar less than your income; the road to misery is to spend one dollar more than your income.
On Inauguration Day, 1981, the U.S. was the greatest Creditor Nation on Earth. By Inauguration day, 1989, the U.S. had become the greatest Debtor Nation on Earth. That has severely hampered the response to economic difficulties ever since. Speak for yourself. My entire career since college has been working for, or very close too, large companies that are net exporters. Not true. While these things are not present in China to the degree we demand here, they still have a considerable volume of it. Central government control alone cannot come close to generating the market power displayed by the China.
