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Comment by creato | Hacker News Reader

It's a matter of scale: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/the-u-s-has-been-spending-bi...

If you trust Google's AI summary, China spends 4-5% of GDP on industrial subsidies, vs US at 0.4%. 10-12x as much.

It’s not a reasonable comparison. In China, every corporation is de facto state run. The Party is in the boardroom and the executives are members of the Party. The CCP will build entire mega cities or pump money into this industry or that according to their plan. China isn't a "state-run" economy but a conditional-autonomy one. Private firms operate freely until they collide with Party priorities. Then the state wins decisively and without due process.

What about after accounting for PPP? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity)

Do the US numbers account for state level incentives like tax breaks?

I for one do not trust Google summaries, having seen too many hallucinations, it has pushed me away from their search and ai completely.

Here are some links I found (among many). I tend to trust CSIS, even though the have many hawks, they are generally thorough and nuanced.

https://www.csis.org/analysis/red-ink-estimating-chinese-ind...

Some historical analyses of US policies (know less, but both put it over 1% currently, nuances)

https://www.columbia.edu/~ev2124/research/ErtenStiglitzVerho...

https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w34744/w347...

I'm honestly not sure why this is seen so negatively. It seems to be working pretty well for them, perhaps we should do similar instead of whining about others being more effective?

Another point of comparison we might make, how close is Trump's desired increase to the US Defense budget to what China is spending on industrial subsidies? It looks relatively close to numbers in these research papers.

It would seem that $0.5T could be better spent

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