101–110 of 385 posts
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> Protecting elections may mean ending winner take all electoral college system. I think 2016 proved that the electoral college is not supplying the adult oversight that the founders intended.
Or maybe it is, and the adults actually won.
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Yes. There was no income tax for the majority of US history, and tariffs were a major source of revenue for the government back then.
I didn't know this was the case, thank you for sharing. For anyone else reading, it appears federal income tax was first implemented in 1913, more reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_tax_in_the_United_State...
Northern manufacturers wanted high tariffs on manufactured goods and low tariffs on agricultural products. Southern farmers wanted high tariffs on agricultural products and low tariffs on manufactured goods--to placate Europeans so they'd buy Southern agricultural products, and to check the economic power of the North. And of course the Federal government relied on tariffs for income--the Articles of Confederation being considered a failure largely because the Federal government had no independent source of income--and as a foreign policy tool.
Everybody was at odds.
(Note that it was also common back then to impose export tariffs, which added considerable complexity to the debate. Today export tariffs are largely unheard of in the U.S. but perhaps ripe for rediscovery. Though we recently loosened restraints on the export of crude oil and natural gas, so it probably won't happen any time soon.)
As much as some people here may hate Trump, the fact is that he was right when we said that it is difficult for us to lose a trade war with China since we import more from them than we export. Is there going to be some short term pain? Absolutely! But, long term it is likely to create more jobs in the US. As an extra bonus, there won't be as much of a carbon footprint for shipping things half way around the world and…
Extremely one sided comments, with a US centric view. The world is not the US, and HN readers are not only US citizens, so let me express a different point of view. Assumption: Trump wants fair trade. HN readers want fair trade. What is needed: fair trading rules, fair IP rules, fair capital structures, and a fair currency. Tackling some of the unfair trade practices does not address all those issues. In particular i…
Game theory has much more merit for a country like China given the (lack of) election cycle.
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It would no doubt be disruptive, temporarily. And it would also prompt a multi hundred billion dollar redirection of investment into moving those supply lines to other countries. Vietnam would love to get some more of China's tech manufacturing action, as would a dozen other developing countries. Others would welcome gains to be had in apparel or autos by moves like that by China. One of the biggest problems China ha…
> One of the biggest problems China has in this trade war: they're entirely replaceable. They offer nothing strictly unique that can't be replaced by another country, even though there may be a serious cost involved. I cannot see evidences that China is particularly more so than any other country.
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> Protecting elections may mean ending winner take all electoral college system. I think 2016 proved that the electoral college is not supplying the adult oversight that the founders intended.
This seems inconsistent with this article anyways: https://www.historycentral.com/elections/Electoralcollgewhy.... Is there a more accurate interpretation describing how the founding fathers believed it served the purpose of "adult oversight"? What exactly does that mean by the way?
Some hard-liners want a more aggressive stance. Lou Jiwei, who retired as finance minister in 2016 but is still the head of the country’s social security fund, suggested on Sunday that China could deliberately disrupt American companies’ supply chains by halting the export of crucial components mostly made in China. But Chinese trade experts dismiss that idea as impractical and not the government’s position. If anyth…
It would no doubt be disruptive, temporarily. And it would also prompt a multi hundred billion dollar redirection of investment into moving those supply lines to other countries. Vietnam would love to get some more of China's tech manufacturing action, as would a dozen other developing countries. Others would welcome gains to be had in apparel or autos by moves like that by China. One of the biggest problems China ha…
The agglomeration benefits of this are HUGE, and losing them would introduce a thousand small frictions into the manufacturing process. Issues that can be sorted out in hours or days in Shenzhen (finding alternate suppliers, repairing specialized machinery, etc.) would take weeks or months anywhere else. That's for individual issues. A complex piece of equipment might have a dozen such issues while scaling and optimizing its manufacturing processes. In Shenzhen, this might cause a few weeks of delay. Anywhere else, the delay would be measured in years.
There are several other such manufacturing ecosystems in China; Shenzhen is just the one I'm more familiar with. Yes, the individual parts may be replaceable -- but the whole is significantly greater than the sum of its parts. Building replacement ecosystems elsewhere would take decades.
It took China roughly two decades to build this kind of ecosystem. Its primary resource for doing so was the ~4 million STEM graduates in produces every year. That's on par with the rest of the world put together. So don't underestimate the difficult of replicating this.
Extremely one sided comments, with a US centric view. The world is not the US, and HN readers are not only US citizens, so let me express a different point of view. Assumption: Trump wants fair trade. HN readers want fair trade. What is needed: fair trading rules, fair IP rules, fair capital structures, and a fair currency. Tackling some of the unfair trade practices does not address all those issues. In particular i…
I wouldn't say the US is strictly playing fair in the economic game either though, even before trump US economic power was a major weapon. The only ones that really seem committed to fait trade are the EU and maybe Canada, Japan, Korea.