No: just that only 1/6th of the country lives in New York and California. Even assuming that for the median upper-middle income household, those states are “high cost of living” (let’s pretend they didn’t buy their house decades ago and are paying back a fixed rate mortgage)
No. It’s that the combined populations are lower.
Nope. The U.S. has the world’s best enforcement of anti-money laundering/know your customer laws. The “actual functioning economy” is the tons of software publishers and manufacturers that employ EB-2 greencard holders and the various industrial sites with EB-5 greencard holders.
If Chinese businesspeople, the people that gained the most out of China’s boom, aren’t confident of its sustainability, then who reasonably can be?
Firms chased comparative advantage. So this isn’t different.
They are trying to flight their assets out of China.
Protectionism doesn’t ban EU exporters from exporting. China’s lack of firms that export in complementary product categories is evidence of China’s industrial impotence.
The fact that the “evidence” China is on the technological frontier means talking to death the same exceptions over and over again. - 5G, HSR, EVs, and green energy - ends up proving the case. If China was actually on the frontier, the chat would be about cases where China is not on the frontier. The exception is the case where China is on the frontier.