Percentage of people struggling to pay their bills

Yes the US Government is partly to blame. It was former President Clinton that removed the export ban on US technology. The Chinese got their large mainframes systems from the US. Right or wrong that is what happened.

Yes EPA is partly to blame and now we are scrambling for semi-conductors.
What’s the deal with the semiconductor shortage?

One of the major bottlenecks is around the so-called logic chips that are produced by Qualcomm and Nvidia or Apple. These brands don’t actually own the fabrication plants, they outsource them to what are called foundries. These foundries are essentially contract chip makers, or contract manufacturers. About 91% of the contract chip production capacity is within Asia. About 50% of all foundries are located in Taiwan with one company, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and another 25% is Samsung, which is also produced in Korea. The American chip manufacturers like Intel and AMD have not traditionally been foundries. That’s starting to change. Intel recently unveiled a plan to set up its own $20 billion foundry in Columbus. Jason Miller and I conducted some analysis that shows that the Intel facility alone will only even cover less than 4% of the total demand for semiconductor chips.​

 

Globalization (and free trade) is definitely deflationary.

China’s COVID policy interrupted that part of the supply chain, which acutely forces a de-globalization (or at least a diversification away from China). This is inflationary vs. the status quo with China, not necessarily inflationary vs. the absence of trade with China. A protectionist policy would be massively inflationary and cause even more shortages. That being said, the supply chain issues exposes that at the very least trade needs to be more diversified. We were too reliant on Chinese production. The question is what to do about it. It isn’t really the governments job to get in the way of trade.

 

Would you agree that some things should be protected? I'm all for free trade but even that has boundaries.