I'm interested about this part, will you please take the time to explain in more detail, thanks.

I have said in other places that US corn subsidies gotta go. My point was more along the lines that it's actually a concession on Trump's part, especially considering much of his base is made of direct beneficiaries of such subsidies.

You don't seem to understand what I meant this essentially describes status quo. What I meant is most of the cars made in NA are already made by labor making $16/hr or something close. In other words, in most cases, the restriction is not currently binding. It amounts to a promise to improve labor standards long term... which is something Mexican government promised its people anyway.

The amount of parts imported from China, even according to the numbers you cite, is relatively insignificant. Auto production tends to be very local due to JIT production systems and increasingly specialized requirements for plants. Even the same models produced at different plants will often have different requirements.

Mike Pence does an excellent job explaining the administration's view on China. It's more erudite and worldly than anything Obama ever uttered.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings...-toward-china/

If you want to understand what Trump is doing with trade and why (his comments five minutes ago are currently tanking the market), that speech is what you need to read. This is NOT something to appeal to his base - it's a deeply held conviction widely supported by the intelligence community and basic foreign policy. Trade is the only non military tool the US has to halt the rise of China's Nazi-like regime from becoming a global superpower. This (as well as free trade itself, which China is destroying at the expense of US wealth) is the long-term aim of the Trump administration and you should understand that when assessing how trade dispute news will unfold.

I am making up the numbers to express the point. The idea however is accurate.

Ethanol is profitable because of the subsidies. For every calorie of energy we use in producing corn [this should probably be ethanol, not corn] we get like 0.35 calories out.

This should never happen.

If I'm not mistaken it also led to the mass adoption of high fructose corn syrup, which is in basically everything ever deemed unhealthy to consume, but tastes delicious. No data to back this up, but it's probably literally killing people thru diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc and contributes to ascending health care cost.

I knew that corn based ethanol is a wash at best when it comes to environmental concerns w/ sugar based ethanol being 7 times 'stronger' and that it's a sop to the corn states but I'm left wondering if it can actually be gotten rid of and replaced by sugar based which I read runs all of the cars in Brazil, probably the only thing that they do right.

Despite early support for biomass fuels, Sierra Club and most environmental groups actively opposed expanded use of ethanol in gasoline in the 90s and they still do.*

In the past few decades expansion of ethanol use has been mostly driven by farmers. It happened in Brazil, Canada, US, Europe, and pretty much everywhere that grows corn/soybeans in large quantities.

*Interestingly occasionally literature comes out of those groups that amount to: anything is better than oil.

Most "green" efforts are frauds and scams and rent-seeking, that actually do net environmental harm. Ethanol is no exception.

Obama's Paris agreement was a giant fraud as well - giving China a blank check to pollute at will out to 2030 while the West must take steps to reduce theirs, at great cost and waste and loss of industry (and meanwhile, the manufacturing that goes to China as a result of green policies is 4x less efficient per unit of output, greatly increasing global pollution). Meanwhile, emissions do this:



This is what happens when you keep policies that have the effect of needlessly duplicating manufacturing capital in a highly energy inefficient communist dictatorship. While lauding the Paris agreement which is worthless/net harmful to the environment. It's so incredibly dumb and destructive to both the environment and Western economies.