Comment by yeahwhatever10
7 days ago
You are right about olive oil. So why did he do it? The trade imbalance with Tunisia. Why is there are trade imbalance with Tunisia? US consumers have money to buy products from Tunisia, Tunisian consumers don't have the ability to afford products from the US. Why can't Tunisian's afford US products? This is the central question for every country in the trade war and it has myriad factors, but two of the biggest are: A higher cost US dollar, suppression of wages in countries like Tunisia (and Germany, and China, etc).
> Tunisian consumers don't have the ability to afford products from the US.
They do use products from the US, just not physical ones. It's weird to read such takes on HN of all sites.
There is this group-think on HN today that services are intentionally left out as part of the US trade balance. That confusion likely comes from tax and corporate structures. Ie all those profits are locked into sub-corps, so Apple-Cayman Islands or Google-Ireland (corporate tax havens) which is why they don't show up on the balance sheet as "trade" into the US (typically those sub-corps buy financial assets with those profits). Read the first chapters of Trade Wars are Class Wars for more depth.
So they are left out, but not intentionally?
It's not a weird take if you reasonably assumed that OP meant: "they don't have the ability to afford the same value of products from the US." Which makes total sense because their income per capita is only a fraction of that of the US.