Comment by jbverschoor
7 days ago
The whole table doesn't make sense. We (NL/EU) don't charge the US 39% to import . Apparently orange guy (not the Dutch) doesn't understand VAT rates.
Car? max 4.5 + 21% VAT = 25%. But it simply doesn't matter bc we don't want their cars.. Except for thee Dodge RAM, which can be converted to a tax efficient company car (crazy)..
What amazes me even more is that Elon doesn't seems to understand it either.
They calculate (export-import)/import also they try to hide it behind complicated formulas
https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114272487006550281
On top of that they excluded services and only recognize goods for the calculation.
The thing is that Europeans wanted the Tesla cars. They fit perfectly into the Europeans identity - had Tesla kept on and kept the Tesla cars competitive without any political interference, then that could have been great car exports from the US to the EU.
They wanted it because at the launch until 2018 it was basically free because of all the tax incentives. You got the following benefits (Netherlands):
The 85K car resulted in 90K deductibles in the first year.
The 85K car, including everything was cheaper to drive / own than a FREE car.
Almost all of that stopped in 2022, and what do you know? People stopped buying. THIS is politics. Setting policies which drive behavior.
The government "decides" what you will want to buy / drive / etc.
Yes, this is what I wrote: The price needs to be competitive and the car needs to fit on European roads / in European cities.
The point is exactly, that Americans are more than welcome to sell cars in the EU, if they can satisfy that.
It is not that Europeans categorically don't want to drive American cars.
1 reply →
Tesla built a factory in Germany to produce their cars.
Yes, but only later and only for the Model Y. The irony is that the most popular model, the Model 3, is manufactured in China, across the red sea (houti’s!) to West Europe.
1 reply →
Seems he is using trade deficit percentages in his chart instead of tariff percentages ... :/
> Except for thee Dodge RAM, which can be converted to a tax efficient company car (crazy)
You can no longer do that since 1st of Jan 2025. The BPM discount for company cars was removed.
Thank god, I'm so tired of seeing those things parked around Amsterdam when the original loophole was for farmers :eye roll:
But then by the same logic isn't income tax a tariff.
Brave of you to assume that comrade muskov understands anything.
As found elsewhere on this thread, the rate is based on trade deficit. Trump believes that having a negative trade balance with a country means that they're cheating somehow, as opposed to meaning that you just buy a lot of manufactured or raw goods for them.
And no, that does not make any sense, and you're not missing anything. He believes this because he's a fucking idiot. He's aggressively racist, comically petty and thin-skinned, and overtly authoritarian, and as far as I can tell actively wants to permanently destroy American science and civil society out of spite, but he's also really, really, really dumb. In this case, he's managed to combine his powers to take a goal that's born out of racism and xenophobia and then implement it in the most idiotic way possible, and somehow the result is even worse than the sum of its components.
> But it simply doesn't matter bc we don't want their cars..
But is that cause or effect?
It doesn't make sense because you didn't read the original board. It clearly states 'including trade barriers'. You're attacking a strawman.
Countries, including the EU, like to have 'low tariffs' and then have sneaky backdoor taxes or outright bans on US goods through things like milk quotas (Canada), 'biosecurity' (Australia) or EU courts issuing spurious fines on US companies (based on vague laws that only get enforced against US companies, like DMA).
It doesn't make sense because it is not a table of tariffs (including or excluding trade barriers) at all.
It is a table of the current trade deficit against each country as a ratio.
I think you might be granting the administration too much benefit of the doubt. They aren't based on "tariffs + trade barriers", they're just based on trade deficit alone.
https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1907559189234196942
https://archive.ph/kRkRh
> milk quotas (Canada)
You mean the milk quota on imports that (a) trump negotiated and (b) the us has never hit?
No, I mean the trade dispute that the Biden admin began. [1]
[1] https://ustr.gov/about-us/policy-offices/press-office/press-...
1 reply →
VAT is not a "sneaky backdoor tax", it's imposed on all goods, regardless of where they're produced or imported from.
DMA (and similarly, GDPR) are enforced in EU countries just as much. It's just that the US tends to have more gigantic tech companies that do shady things with user data. Apparently the US doesn't care, but the EU actually does, and so it enforces its laws.
If anything is sneaky, it's the way how the in US you never see salestax until you're about to pay :D
We’re talking many 10s of billions in “fines” specifically levied against US tech firms where there is no EU competitor.
I don’t necessarily disagree with all of the laws themselves (some are incompetent EU risk aversion, some are good protections) but given the massive never ending fines being applied in bad faith and constantly moving goalposts it is indeed a defacto tariff on US tech firms.
18 replies →
DMA is applied equally, you say. How interesting! Can you link me to the examples of the EU going after EU companies for DMA violations? I couldn't find a single one. Not a single case, ever.
The EU wanted to fine Google $35,000,000,000 under DMA. That's a backdoor tax. No European tech company faces this scrutiny. Never have, never will -- because the DMA is a tax on the United States.
It's also interesting that the Google and Meta DMA fines are expected to land in the next week. What a timing coincidence, almost like it's retaliatory (as many articles have suggested).
3 replies →
VAT isn't a trade barrier.
DMA is. GDPR is. Both are applied principally against competitors using arbitrary fines invented by the EU. No compliance guidance is given, because the laws are inherently vague.
7 replies →
Comments like this make me wonder why some Americans think they should be able to move on every other country “like a bitch”.
In some places, dollar is not god. Important, but not god.