China/USA.

Now what do I know about China? Well, not much really; but, as I have said before, when has that stopped me?

'China' in Britain has always been slang for your friend; - Hello, my old China, you'd say. China plate = mate. Cockney Rhyming slang, it is, and it seems to have spread to all classes and places like Ireland and Australia and is far better than the modern slang.

The main reasons for a lot of slang was to either speak in code to your China, or make the meaning clearer.

Making the meaning clearer is when there is a lot of noise and you lengthen the word the same as you do on the phone when spelling things out. 

I think the Americans got that wrong, by the way, when they were giving clues to letters over the phone; for example in Britain you would say 'B for Butter' but when I got to America they would say 'B as in Boy.' The problem with that is that 'Boy' is one syllable and could sound like 'T as in Toy' but Butter has two and gives you a clue when spelling things out; of course it's B-Beta, these days.

The other slang of years gone by was the butchers' back slang so that they could talk to each other in front of customers in confidence. They used a lot of curse words such as sipffo!!

A lot of people these days won't use the rhyming slang for secrecy maybe because everybody knows it. I could have said, instead of people, the younger generation or youngsters, but it seems those are phrases are not used anymore.

I don't think the modern slang will last that long. Some of the sales/estate agent types use things like SPOC – he's my spoc, for example. Spoc = Single Point Of Contact!

But the 'in slang' in North West London use words like 'long' meaning late and 'bare' meaning 'a lot of;' I'd only recently got used to 'bad' meaning good!!

Anyway back to China – I have no idea why I went on about slang!!

They say – and who are they – that China is the fastest growing economy on earth and that by about 2030 it will be larger than America; the economy that is; but China, the country, the place, is a strange anomaly isn't it? It has a population of 1.3 billion; that's an American billion, by the way but in British terms it would be one thousand, three hundred million – 1,347,350,000 – as a British billion is one million million, a trillion is a billion billion and so on.

Because of the huge population, they tried to control the birth rate by only allowing couples to have one child, so one wonders how what the population would be now if it had been left alone.

What is certain is that it would be a more balanced society. At the moment there are many families with just one child; that one child will have to look after its two parents later in life and four grandparents. If you multiply that by how many families there are, you can see that there might be a problem in a few years time. 

This is because in a modern society the younger generations have to support the older ones. They do this through taxes and that is how it works; there will be a larger than natural older percentage of the population which will increase the tax burden.

They are supposed to be a communist country; that's what they call themselves, in fact there are people in America who still call it Red China.

But it's about as far from the philosophy of Karl Marx/communism/socialism as you can get; like the USSR used to be.

They are a Capitalist Society run by the government – Government Capitalism - and the only people that seem to benefit, as far as I can see (and what do I know?), are the American Companies, the Chinese Government and a few very privileged people.

The economy, which is still growing, is only based on a relatively small percentage of the population as there is a vast rural society where people are starving. Even the middle classes can't afford to buy a house and are living from hand to mouth.

So what's going to happen there?

China are America's bankers; they will make a lot of money from the USA as America will continue to service its debt. If America switches its debt elsewhere, China will be in the soft and smelly and if America, when the MAD president is ever elected, decides to welch on the debt all bets will be off.

At the moment the USA are an asset to China; companies, such as Walmart, run a lot of the economy by giving them lots of business and controlling the terms.

Walmart, for example, have a workforce of 2.2 million worldwide but not many in China; a lot of companies in China manufacture only for Walmart and if Walmart turn off the tap???? Soft and Smelly!! 

The Chinese Companies manufacture their stuff for as little as 1 cent per item and the Americans nickle and dime them so that the only way they can deliver the goods is by paying slave wages.

So don't ever feel sorry for the Americans with their debt to China. The USA produce 15 trillion dollars worth of goods every year - every year - and they are too big to fail – it's not going to happen - so we need to get over it and deal with it; there's not going to be a revolution there, no Arab Spring type of uprising just the same old same old.

If Obama wins on Tuesday he will have the same hard job getting things through Congress as he has had in the past four years as the Republicans will try and thwart him every step of the way which is why he didn't get the health care system he wanted and why he couldn't close Guantanamo Bay - but he did save the Car Industry (yes he did) and he has improved the standard of living for the middle classes.

That would be a strange platform to stand for in Britain – the middle class; despised by both the working class and the upper class; they both hate the bourgeoisie.

Talking of Britain, a man call IDS, who is some kind of one man band Conservative Think Tank Commander, who was once the leader of the party (one of the many who tried and failed to oust Tony Blair and New Labour) wants to abolish Child Benefit after the second child. One more than in China.

Surely they are getting it wrong; when I did sociology, many years ago, it was estimated that with loss of earnings, general upkeep, schooling, nursery fees and everything else, it cost, on average, £80,000 to bring up one child to the age of eighteen.

I'm sure that figure is much much larger by now! May more like £250,000.

Then you have the cost of University – or Uni as it is now called.

When that child is ready for work everybody chases it. First the banks – because they know that there is a potential one million pounds worth of business there. If 10% of them never work the other millions will kick in, as many of those will be worth more than a million and the banks can always bother the ones who owe them money for the rest of their lives for their student loans and put their debts down as assets so they can raise money against them.

On top of that the children will pay taxes.

So why restrict child benefit?

As soon as it gets spent it puts money in to the pockets of the exchequer. 

In fact instead of trying to trim 10% off the welfare budget they should double it; yes DOUBLE IT!! the extra money will make the recipients feel better and they will spend money in the shops who will pay their workers who will pay tax – sometimes even the big stores and companies will pay corporation tax; sometimes!!!!

But then we have the 6,000 pound gorilla in the room; the deficit.

Da da da daaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

What the hell is the deficit? They keep talking about it; John Stewart got mixed up with America's debt and the deficit recently in a mock debate, but a deficit is the difference between what you pay out and what is paid in; and that is for the last year. If less is paid in than what is paid out it is a deficit!

Some people live on a deficit for years; eventually they will go broke – unless they have a nest egg; as this country and the USA have; so why can't we have a deficit some years? It's all business; Britain lent the IMF £10 million a few months ago; we send aid to countries; we spend money on the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and any other place we want to invade and as soon as this lot is over we will have to find some other place to invade or the arms industry will go broke.

What Eisenhower said in the fifties is true when he spoke of the Military Industrial Complex; we can't make money without war so why be surprised by it?

The Greek debt, for example – and try to find out how much it is – is far less than the USA's and Britain's debt. Under George W Bush the bailout to banks was $750 billion; one quarter of that would have done Greece very nicely, thank you; I'm not suggesting that the USA should have bailed out Greece but . . . ..

Not my problem – but do you see what I mean, my old China?

Something else is going on and we're letting it happen.

But back to America - the good old US of A and the election tomorrow: in Britain we are miss reading what's happening in America; over here we see Obama as a 'shoe in' and should easily beat Romney but what we don't realise is a lot of people over there don't want health care; they don't care that much about their fellow Americans and see the introduction of health care as the road to socialism and their country turning in to Soviet Russia. What was that HL Menkin quote I used recently?