Comment by dingnuts
5 days ago
it's the whole point of the tariffs. China does an end run around all of our laws, consumer safety, human rights, workers conditions, intellectual property, all that, and in doing so they cut costs and beat domestic companies at the market. Tariffs are a tax we charge to represent those things they have immorally refused to do while participating in our market.
A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
What zamalek describes isn't just that China manufactures cheap products. The complain is more about retailers or marketplaces (particularly online ones) that encourage essentially anonymous, zero-cost seller accounts and product listings.
Traditional retailers like Target or Costco also sell a lot of cheap Chinese stuff, but they don't have quite the same level of junk in their listings.
Right. There's always been a range of products from cheap to quality. But "cheap" used to mean something that wouldn't last as long or that had limited features, but that could still be worth the lower price. Now "cheap" can mean something that will break the first time you use it, at which point is any price low enough?
I bought a garden hose sprayer at Dollar General for $1, and it leaked immediately. $1 is so little now that it was basically free, but even for free it wouldn't have been worth it, and I'm not going to make a trip to get a $1 refund. At some point, "cheap" is so bad that it has negative value, as it only adds clutter and waste.
Do you mean this is the point of a carefully planned, deliberated, executed, and announced tariff rollout, or do you mean that's the whole point of tariffs as they are currently being implemented in the United States?
The tariffs that were announced during the campaign - the same way Ross Perot did - and the reasoning was to bring us manufacturing back to the US and reduce the tax burden on US citizens? Such as writing off car payments if the car is American?
People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US. People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
I really have to wonder how important this Chinese junk is. They make so much junk for the US, that the EU, including Von der Lyon, had to make a plan to deal with Chinese companies wanting to, and I quote here, "dump" all their exports on to the EU market.
The EU is very protectionist over their countries' economic outputs and manufacturing. But if the US does that...
> People wigged out over non-reciprocal tariffs, where we tariff at 50% what they charge the US.
The "reciprocal" tariffs are based on not the tariff duties foreign countries imposed on US goods, but the trade deficit the US has with said foreign country. There's a lot of idiocy in the tariffs, but this was one of the loudest complaints people had with them.
> People wigged out at 10℅ flat rate tariffs. "Heard island penguins get charged 10%!)
Because the list of "countries" being charged made it clear that it wasn't being based on a list of countries as people understand them. Uninhabited islands and islands consisting only of US military bases being on the list were strong signs of the lack of competence in the planning for the tariffs.
And really, that's why people are complaining so hard: it is abundantly clear that tariffs are being rolled out in a botched manner by incompetent people for inane reasons, so whatever positive effect they might have is completely ruined and all of their negative effects are intensely amplified.
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The USA and the EU more or less have had even import duties. The USA averaging out at 1.47 % and the EU at 1.39 %. [1]
The EU has been advocating for a free-trade agreement, the TTIP, with the USA from 2013 on. It was buried in 2016 by the 45th president of the USA, who somehow thought it unfair. The EU has proposed a free-trade agreement only a few weeks ago. [2]
You may believe what you want, but at least in dealings with the USA the EU has always promoted free trade. Even Fox News acknowledges that ;)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tariff_ra...
[2] https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/european-union-ready-neg...
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The weird thing about Heard Island is that it was specifically called out in a list that did not even include every country.
It wasn't that a flat 10% tariff implies that even non-populated islands have a 10% tariff.
> reduce the tax burden on US citizens
Do you consider the tariffs to be a (tax) burden on US citizens?
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well to be fair to parent, the tariffs weren't exactly rolled out in a sane fashion and a lot of credibility was lost along the way, though it certainly was entertaining if you're a sicko like me.
The tariffs were announced with no plan to bolster on-shore manufacturing.
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The tariffs were definitely part of the campaign, described in detail in Project 2025 and will eventually replace higher brackets of the income tax.
This consumption tax is tax policy, not trade policy. That was evident when there was not even any discussion about excepting manufacturing inputs (neither this time nor the 45th administration).
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> A country can't effectively have things like a minimum wage while allowing completely free trade with countries that use slave labor and don't share your values, because they can beat you on price by using human suffering as a competitive advantage, and put you entirely out of business.
Australia (I live there) has free trade, a high minimum wage (USD$16/hr) which is strictly enforced, no tariffs to speak of, and used to share the same values as the USA (in the last 100 days no so much). Australia has been that way for decades. In other words: your wrong, despite what "common sense" might tell you.
There are far more glaring examples, like Singapore. Almost no natural resources to exploit, no tariffs to speak of, and a median yearly income of USD$66,000. The USA's median income is USD$40,000.
Now look at countries with high tariffs, or even just "higher than the USA used to have" tariffs. All of them, and I do mean off of them, including China, have living standards well below those with very low tariffs. So you are not just wrong. Empirical evidence says you have it completely arse about.
after 50 years of de-industrialization in US, it's a sad fact that US can no longer produce most of those items, yes it's totally gone. It will take a few decades to rebuild, if possible at all. For now, whatever those junks are at Amazon, there are not many options to procure them elsewhere.
You want the US to spend the next few decades retooling to ... build junk?
Build essential stuff locally, not junk of course. Or else the virtual economy can not sustain forever based on borrowing money while producing very little locally.
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This weird demoralization has to stop. We went to the moon in less than 10 years from beginning the Apollo program. It’s less than 10 years to build a nuclear power plant on average. We deployed the COVID vaccine worldwide in less than one year. Manufacturing is not that hard. If we want to do it, we can do it and we can do it quickly.
True. The biggest impediment to increased manufacturing is the pile of onerous regulations, many of which were created by the stroke of a pen since 2008, and which can be removed by another stroke of the pen.
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I can see how hitting the EU with tariffs is going to improve human rights ... oh wait.
But on a more serious note, tariffs could have been used for what you are saying, and it would have been a beautiful thing, but I think we can agree that's not what's happening here, can't we?
Not sure why the sarcasm. Do we keep picking up the tab until they're trampling the entire Bill of Rights?
The whole point of the tariffs is to cause chaos and if you think they have an actual plan boy do I have a bridge to sell you