China still has developing nation status? This seems more than reasonable to renegotiate.
US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
191–200 of 380 posts
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#192Do people in this thread realize the USPS is almost entirely self funded? I see a lot of talk about tax dollars etc. The USPS doesn't work that way.
If you call losing ~$1B+/qtr self funded, yeah they’re “self funded” https://about.usps.com/who-we-are/financials/financial-condi...
That's not really their fault.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-04-04/congress-...
> The law requires the Postal Service, which receives no taxpayer subsidies, to prefund its retirees' health benefits up to the year 2056. This is a $5 billion per year cost; it is a requirement that no other entity, private or public, has to make. If that doesn't meet the definition of insanity, I don't know what does. Without this obligation, the Post Office actually turns a profit. Some have called this a "manufactured crisis."
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of free trade/globalization is everyone benefiting from the efficiency of each place doing the work it can do most efficiently. Iowa corn and Swiss fine machinery and Arab oil and all sorts of things where one place can do something better and cheaper because of the nature of the place. Poverty (cheap labor) and treaties (cheap postage) shouldn't be the drivers of this efficiency because they aren't caused b…
I’m not sure if Swiss fine machinery is the best example here. What is it about the nature of Switzerland that makes it a more natural place to create fine machinery then anywhere else? Similarly, using American corn as an example of how free trade should work is pretty underhanded. There’s a ridiculous amount of subsidies there, and the US doesn’t have any qualms with dumping the resulting product on international m…
The climate and soils in Iowa make it a great place to grow corn - even without subsidies farmers would grow corn in Iowa. Despite a much lower cost of labor in other countries Iowa can still compete well in the world markets because corn grows so much better.
There is probably no advantage to making machines in Switzerland that you couldn't duplicate in Iowa, but because Iowa has the natural advantage in corn it is better for everybody if Iowa concentrates on growing the best corn (hopefully this includes improving their soils to grow even better corn), while the people of Switzerland concentrate on making better machines. Then they trade machines for corn and everybody is better off. If instead everybody was a jack of all trades there would be less corn because the people of Iowa aren't as focused, and the machines the Swiss produce wouldn't be as good because they don't get as much practice making them.
Of course the above is simplistic. Iowa has machinists that make fine machines, and there are Swiss farmers who grow some fine corn.
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not a threat of withdrawal, it's an actual withdrawal, which takes time to take effect (like Brexit), with the idea that if negotiation is satisfactory, the withdrawal might be cancelled.
Either the Brexit example is a simple mistake or you're confused about the mechanics behind it, so I'll elaborate to avoid people thinking it's a sound analogy: The Brexit referendum was non-binding, so at that point nothing legally relevant had happened yet. The UK government then decided to honour the will demonstrated by the 37.5% of the population that cast a vote in favour of leaving the EU (51.9% of the result…
> Either the Brexit example is a simple mistake or you're confused
Or it is exactly what it was offered for, an example of an actual withdrawal that, once triggered, takes time, which is why the “(like Brexit)” parenthetical was placed precisely where it was but not (for instance) after the reference to th negotiate-then-cancel strategy, which wouldn't mechanically work with Brexit, as you note, and had never been suggested to be the strategy of Brexit (though trying to effect a cancellation in the face of failed exit negotiation send to be emerging as an idea in some significant corners of British politics, but that's a different thing.)
Your essay was well-crafted, but entirely misplaced.
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. The USPS is in the constitution because the Framer’s thought it was important to put there. But it is completley self-funded at this stage.
They are self funded except that every year they have another multi-billion dollar loss.
They have a multi-billion dollar loss because the GOP Congress passed legislation requiring them to pre-pay their employee retirement health benefits instead of funding it on a pay-as-you-go basis.
Given that the USPS is a government established and run service, thus backed by the USG in terms of its liabilities, the idea that somehow the USPS is "saving" this health benefit money somewhere is ludicrous.
It's just as stupid as the SS "trust fund" and "lockbox", which is nothing more than a paper shuffle of US treasuries from one drawer in a filing cabinet to another.
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
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That's what I've been gathering too. Trump signed a few bills recently, and while they weren't his administration's bill in the first place, that hasn't stopped the media (and definitely social media) from trash talking Trump constantly. It's almost as if people that hate Trump with the ferocity that they do are incapable of reporting anything positive and just saying "Ok, this was a good thing."
> Trump signed a few bills recently, and while they weren't his administration's bill in the first place
This is a bizarre statement. If he's signing the bill, his administration - and him specifically - is explicitly endorsing it. That's the whole point of the thing.
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#197A friend helped the Wall Street Journal expose the damage this treaty was doing to his small business in the United States as it tried to fend off counterfeiters. https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-subsidy-for-china-is-dumb-... Seems like a win for American innovation if you care about that thing. Seems like China is going to get hurt by this change which is bad for globalization if you are into that thing.
This is a nice anecdote. But what about the mass of consumers who will now have to pay a markup for the exact same product from an importer?
They will pay more because currently the cost is partially covered by the USPS. Such treaty makes sense in two cases:
- the cost of recovery is high. 140 years ago, doing the accounting for all the parcels, letters sent from France to the US would have cost and from the US to France to then "balance" the accounts would have been way higher than the recovered money from one party.
- the traffic is balanced, that is, both countries send/receive approximately the same numbers of parcels/letters each way, each year.
Once these two assumptions do not hold any more, it makes sense to reconsider the situation. This is a question of balance.
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#198China still has developing nation status? This seems more than reasonable to renegotiate.
In Shanghai and Beijing the average household income is $7,000 a year.
If it isn't a developing economy, what would you call it?
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#199Developed countries have a moral duty to support developing nations, that includes China.
I know your comment is in jest, but no, developed countries don't owe developing countries shit.
Well actually, current developed countries owe developing countries for not paying for the externalities (pollution primarily) now causing climate change that were not paid for by the developed countries while they became developed.
That's a purely economic argument and leaves out the exploitation of developing countries by government supported corporate entities over the entire period of colonization.
So actually, you're right, they "don't owe [them] shit." What they owe them is getting rid of the shit that was created in the first place.
Re: US Announces Withdraw From Postal Treaty
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Withdrawing from the UPU will allow the US raise the rates Chinese mailers pay to mail into the US, but won't lower (and, depending on how China responds, may raise) the rates US mailers have to pay to mail into China. It's potentially an extension of the existing trade war in that respect.
Trade war or not. This particular move makes sense though. There is no reason to continue giving China - an economic superpower - a discount on mail.
> There is no reason to continue giving China - an economic superpower - a discount on mail.
Yes, working to negotiate a change to that particular element of the UPU price structure makes sense (which is why Canada already did it for China-Canada mail.)
Whether rage-quitting the UPU makes a lot of sense (even as a negotiating tactic), is a different question; the UPU is more than a Chinese discount.