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Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

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Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#201

Post by marcosdumay »

cuuupid wrote: post #161
cheema33 wrote: post #34

This needs to be repeated. Tariffs are a tax on ordinary citizens. Unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not progressive and therefore benefit the wealthy. These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer. And then turn around and complain that rich are getting richer and they are getting poorer.

Everyone has been repeating this for months but inflation remains relatively normal so prices are not rising. Maybe it's a delayed effect that we won't see until later in the year, but at this point it is a theory and far from a fact, not something that needs to be repeated. We have already observed that the opposite does not hold - in 2017 we slashed corporate income tax by 14% across the board, roughly the same as…

Tariffs don't inherently cause inflation.

The noise about inflation is very likely propaganda trying to focus people on something that the government can control. (Yet, it looks like the US government is giving up on controlling it.)

Instead, tariffs have complex effects on the real economy. Universal tariffs do cause the concentration of wealth the GP was talking about (but it's way worse than the GP's claim) and deindustrialization. Inflation may or may not happen, it's not a given.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#202

Post by ajmurmann »

shadowgovt wrote: post #42
ajmurmann wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The implementation is also needlessly fumbled. All these shippers are suspending their service temporarily because this is all so rushed. Normally there would be larger lead times for changes like this and shippers and importers could adjust their processes and businesses with less friction. And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actua…

This is one of the larger effects of Trump's rule-by-EO approach that I think people are coming to realize: The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive. Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.

You could rule by EO and just have them take effect further out, no?

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#203

Post by 93po »

bsimpson wrote: post #198

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend. Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are. There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries…

i appreciate you mentioning MIPS - i had no idea there was a new, better standard, and i'll definitely get one for my next helmet (motorcycle)

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#204

Post by Workaccount2 »

Gud wrote: post #148
arghwhat wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tariffs like this is a market regulation that the people pays for. It doesn't "benefit the wealthy" because it's not progressive, it benefits the wealthy that have investments in the tariffed industry by distorting the market to their advantage instead of having to be competitive on a level playing field. The rest of the wealthy are equally annoyed by the tariffs as everyone else, possibly more so as they see their i…

There is no "level playing field" when you are competing with literal sweatshops though. Frankly tariffs get a bad rep because of from who and how they are implemented but can absolutely serve a purpose.

Bernie removed the section on his website about tariffs being necessary for a healthy economy...

Tariffs are a populist thing, and people seem to think it's just a Trump thing.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#205

Post by bsimpson »

93po wrote: post #203
bsimpson wrote: post #198

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend. Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are. There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries…

i appreciate you mentioning MIPS - i had no idea there was a new, better standard, and i'll definitely get one for my next helmet (motorcycle)

MIPS is actually pretty rare in motorcycles helmets. I know Bell makes a helmet with it, but the premium helmets tend to come up with their own solutions to the same problem.

ECE 22.06 is the standard to look for for rotational protection in 2025.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#206

Post by marcosdumay »

os2warpman wrote: post #172
msgodel wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not nearly as bad as income tax which would have to be raised if we didn't do tariffs. At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.

[flagged]

> I'm a white upper-middle-class military veteran professional landowning (mortgages don't count, buddy) male

If you don't own a stable company, you may still be too poor to benefit from those ones.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#207

Post by 93po »

bsimpson wrote: post #205
93po wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i appreciate you mentioning MIPS - i had no idea there was a new, better standard, and i'll definitely get one for my next helmet (motorcycle)

MIPS is actually pretty rare in motorcycles helmets. I know Bell makes a helmet with it, but the premium helmets tend to come up with their own solutions to the same problem. ECE 22.06 is the standard to look for for rotational protection in 2025.

thanks!

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#208

Post by hypeatei »

bsimpson wrote: post #198

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend. Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are. There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries…

This comment was very informative, thanks. It's really disappointing to see a seemingly new wave of people cheering on isolationism/protectionism.

Maybe some have valid concerns for certain products that we don't make ourselves (e.g. semiconductors) but Trump and his cronies are not the solution to that at all.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#209

Post by ethbr1 »

Retric wrote: post #155
Gud wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no "level playing field" when you are competing with literal sweatshops though. Frankly tariffs get a bad rep because of from who and how they are implemented but can absolutely serve a purpose.

Automation consistently outcompetes sweatshops. What’s missing from these discussions is the idea of competitive advantage. It is inherently more efficient to grow crops in climates where they thrive, tacking a tariff to protect domestic production means intentionally lowering the standard of living of everyone both domestically and abroad to favor some tiny group doing something wasteful.

There are a few situations where tariffs are beneficial:

1. To preserve strategically important domestic industries (historically: food production and mechanization industry)

2. To shield domestic industries while they're growing to take on already efficient and scaled global competitors

Benefiting labor or saving jobs is probably the stupidest use of tariffs, if one of the above isn't also in play, because it'd be more efficient just to offshore it to low COL countries and instead refocus internal labor.

The slippery slope, of course, is that industries will claim to be included in one of the above, but instead sink their tariff-protected excess profitability into shareholder/self-enrichment instead of business investment.

It'd make more sense to require domestic industries in tariff-protected sectors to invest {near tariff} percentages of their revenue in R&D and/or capital expenses (or be heavily taxed).

Otherwise the government is simply artificially inflating their profitability, at the cost of any consumers of the product.

Re: Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

#210

Post by mlyle »

zahlman wrote: post #118
mlyle wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the long run, tariffs basically all fall on the consumer because producer and distributor behavior is near infinitely elastic. Econ 101 predicts that the party who is less able to adjust behavior in reaction to the tax pays most of the tax. In the short run, this isn't true: firms have goods they need to move.

This model predicts much higher prices overall than actually observed, especially on the goods deemed most essential (like food). There are many reasons that companies cannot simply charge "what the market will bear".

You’re mixing up two different questions. "What the market will bear" is a monopoly pricing story.

Food is messy because it's a commodity with a whole lot of substitution-- consumers have a high elasticity as a result.

We are talking about elasticity's prediction for the share producers and consumers each pay when there is a cost structure or tax change. Incidence theory is well validated and fits observed evidence remarkably well, including in 2019 studies of the effects of the 2018 trade war.

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