131–140 of 316 posts
Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
Quite funny to see the US import the utterly disastrous "Import Substitution" model that destroyed India's fledgling industrial base that was left-over after the British left.
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Yeah, I noped-out when I saw eBay's writeup on tariffs owed by the buyer (not paid by the seller): "Shipping carriers or US Customs usually charge $5–$30 in processing fees. Add the item price, import fees, and processing fees to estimate your final cost." https://pages.ebay.com/tariffs/ Not something I'm doing for a $5 item... I'll sit back and wait until the Supreme Court finds the tariffs are illegal, and the Fed…
How would this ever work? The vast bulk of tariffs are surely paid by the buyer, not the seller.
The US has declared import tariffs are to be paid by the importer/shipper, not collected from the end purchaser after... The opposite of the rest of the world.
If you look through eBay, at items coming from China, you'll see most are noted as:
Import fees: Includes import fees
This item includes applicable import fees—you won’t pay anything extra after checkout."
It seems to be a rare exception that you'll see the seller is not paying the tariffs:
Import fees: Import fees due prior to delivery
Due to US customs policies, the buyer of this item will need to pay import fees to the shipping carrier prior to delivery.Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
We need manufacturing in the US. The service economy can't survive long term; you have to make things. Tariffs are not fun, but they are an important part of making that happen. But, tariffs on used cameras or vintage electronics does not help bring manufacturing back. Let's just bring back the de minimis exemption for things like this. More industry targeted tariffs, fewer blanket tariffs.
The reason services are such a big part of your economy is because you can sit in an air conditioned office, send some emails, push some numbers around on a spreadsheet, and call it work.
In Germany, you can pre-register with DHL Express¹ with a bank account and optionally an EORI (Economic operators registration and identification) number, and then they immediately ding your bank account instead of providing their "disbursement service" where they 'benevolently' loan the customs fee to you for a 'minor' fee . I've not found similar options elsewhere, though I would assume they exist but might be corp…
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I am imagining Mexican cartels smuggling hardware into the US... (But seriously I do not know how good US Customs is but in my country every day millions of packages from Asia arrive and they are checking not even a percent).
This kind of happens. There are all sorts of cases of counterfit ICs. Some even making it into military hardware
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... "cheap" is the main metric consumers care about because whenever anything can be supplied for less, the Federal Reserve calls that "deflationary" and creates enough new money to make sure prices go up to erase those gains. So the cost of buying anything isn't bottom of the barrel keeps going up in real terms. Most people can afford to swim against the current in one product category, and some people [the affluent…
Dang it no! That isn’t remotely how deflationary works. There’s always things being supplied for at lower prices. That is what product or service improvements do. Your car is vastly safer than a Ford Model T. Air bags, better brakes, power steering, AC - all of which make it a vastly superior vehicle. If inflation worked the way you implied, the price of it would have constantly gone up, and never would it have manag…
You're talking about something different than what I was - improvements that make a product better without the price going up (because the cost is small enough to become the new baseline, either by market stickiness or regulation). Those don't affect CPI, and therefore make life better at the same price. So I agree with where you're coming from there.
My point is about the manufacturing/product innovations that make prices go down (regardless of whether quality gets better or worse). Take for example offshoring, which was sold as maybe your local factory will have to lay off some people but we will have less expensive items at the store so we will all win on average. But it's a trick because the Fed creates a feedback loop that makes it so prices cannot go down on average.
Wages haven't risen as fast as consumer price inflation because that new money is injected into the financial industry (the fake "fiscal responsibility" of the Republican party). And when too much newly created money finally leads to too much demand for labor and wages start rising, the Fed then tamps down on the monetary creation.
Tariffs are great. They protect the struggling domestic IT industry and gives it time to ramp up its production of vintage computer parts.
As an European, I'm kinda pissed we don't retaliate the duties. I'd rather take a financial hit than act so weak and passive. I swear between chat control, selling out EU's privacy to US tech companies (you can check how many times Palantir & others met commission members, it's public), the insanity of the ICE ban and this tariffs passivity I'm very unhappy. Also, it's too convenient to only focus on material goods w…
Leaving aside the other (valid) items in your list, reciprocal tarifs really aren't helpful. Firstly, they're unnecessary. Just do what Canadians are doing. Stop buying US goods. Stop going to the US on holiday. Shop keepers get the hint real quick. Secondly, they just make goods more expensive for you. They gave no impact on American producers. So it may feel like the EU is doing nothing. But really, there's nothing…
If only there was a way to make US goods more expensive to discourage their purchase :P
And herein lies the rub: It's been like this in many countries for the longest time. In Thailand, say, you receive an order from abroad, the post office sends you a slip and you have to pay the assessed duties to receive the package. It often ends up feeing arbitrary; some stuff comes through, others get assessed at a higher value and you have to show receipts and convince them that no, this isn't that expensive of a…
The downside is the insane consumption associated with that. Americans are responsible for an insane amount of pollution, far more per capita than any other people in the history of the world, much of which is tied to how easy/cheap it is to order shit we don't need. So, good if ya wanna buy cheap pollution, pretty bad if ya care about the next generation.
I verified everything and it wasn't a scam; the government was legitimately about to take me to court or start garnishing my wages or something like that. They said that UPS or FedEx had told them I imported the equipment but never paid import duties.
I got ahold of the case worker for my case and told them it must be some error. After a week or two of back and forth, we finally figured out that it was for a laptop that a user in Canada had shipped back to me when they left the company, and it had been mis-categorized and valued on the import documents. Since we had purchased the laptop in the US in the first place and shipped it to the user, the case was dismissed and I didn't have to pay anything, but it's always a mini heart attack when you get a letter from Uncle Sam saying you owe thousands.