381–390 of 443 posts
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I've been convinced for a while that teaching economics broadly is a mistake, people who have taken a minimum amount of economics class do in fact understand less how the economy works than people who don't…
People that actually have ran a business and priced stuff generally have a better idea of how pricing works
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Price fluctuation doesn't usually depend on market demand or natural disasters. How you got that idea is beyond me.
All I’m talking about is basic supply and demand: if prices suddenly go up significantly, that usually means that there is either a big change in demand or the supply has become limited and buyers are having to pay more. A big natural disaster can cause that if it affects agricultural supply, shipping, or factory production (e.g. years ago, flooding in Thailand caused hard drive prices to double[1]). My point was sim…
It's as if you told a guy working in a ski station that “the temperature cannot be above 0°C as there's snow everywhere and everyone knows that snow melts above zero”.
It's not how it works, and the economy doesn't work in the simplified fashion you seem to believe it does either. You cannot reason from first principles using “basic supply and demand” arguments like that any more than you can make statements about the weather using the second law of thermodynamics.
Price change all the time for variety of reasons, seasons being one of them (that's why CPI figures are said to be “seasonally adjusted”, BTW).
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Here is a list of 20 district sales taxes in California alone (out of ~150). Los Angeles County Measure H: 0.25%, 10-01-2017 to 03-31-2025 City of Orland Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2017 to 03-31-2025 Rio Dell City Transactions and Use Tax: 1.00%, 04-01-2015 to 12-31-2024 City of El Monte Transactions and Use Tax: 0.50%, 04-01-2009 to 03-31-2025 City of San Pablo Reduction Transactions and Use Tax: 0.25%,…
Yes. This is silly. We should change it. (But it's largely an issue for online sales, not physical locations. The McDonalds in San Anselmo, barring The Big One, stays in San Anselmo.) See also: American healthcare, college, etc. "Our setup is absurdly complex in bad ways" is not an argument for keeping that setup, it's an argument for making fixes.
And why should we eliminate sales taxes, etc. for online sales? Isn't the whole point of software that it makes it trivial to handle multiple sales taxes?
[1] Sales tax, VAT, etc. are taxes on the buyer but are collected by the seller as a matter of administrative convenience. Use tax / reverse charge covers the situations where a non-local seller doesn't collect the tax, but compliance was so low in the first several decades of e-commerce that every government around the world decided to expand sales tax compliance for online sales to non-local sellers.
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There is no more "as QoL in China improves." The majority of parts of "Swiss Made" watches are made in China, utilizing a loophole that requires 60% of the watch's cost to be manufactured and assembled in Switzerland. So they make a rotor made out of gold in Switzerland, which accounts for 60% of the COGS of the watch, pop the rotor on the movement, and the sapphire glass on the watch, and it's "Swiss Made." Best sou…
> There is no more "as QoL in China improves." You start with this, but then the rest of your comment is totally unrelated. Could you elaborate?
Disregard my comment.
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China is already producing top-tier parts at the current set wages. Wages are unlikely to increase as quality of production goes up - it's already world class. That's the argument as I see it at least. I tend to mostly agree, with some carve-outs for highly specialized industry and general "social" differences in how business is typically done. At this point, if you need basic manufacturing - China seems unbeatable o…
In what economic model is wage growth determined by the quality of the work? That sounds very unrealistic to me.
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Yeah, let's ban machines in factories while we're at it. Then Americans will have the honor of stitching clothing and standing at conveyer belts. On a less sarcastic note, pretty much zero mainstream economists believe that tariffs will bring back manufacturing to the US. There are economists who think the US should manufacture more. They talk about taxing consumption more and savings/investment less. When you cite e…
> On a less sarcastic note, pretty much zero mainstream economists believe that tariffs will bring back manufacturing to the US. Mainstream economists also widely agree corporate taxes and capital gains taxes are bad: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2012/07/19/157047211/six-... . Should we eliminate those taxes and have everyone pay a large VAT? I don’t have confidence that economists have fully figured out how ec…
You don't have to go all the way. Just experiment with a VAT and lowering corporate taxes.
> I don’t have confidence that economists have fully figured out how economies work or what the relevant trade offs are. Economics is somewhere between the social “sciences” and real science in terms of methodological reliability.
What economists have is better than vague feelings about the dignity of working in a factory as opposed to a service job.
> The whole point of government is so people can vote to override anti-social individual behavior like this.
Is that the point of the government? Not in the American tradition. Americans are remarkably invididualistic. If that's anti-social, well, the experiment has been running for a few hundred years and it's worked pretty well. I don't believe the past 20 years have been so bad that the US should start acting like a third world country.
"Amazon says it never considered listing import charges on main site - report" https://www.bbc.com/news/live/cpvrrre4zlkt?post=asset%3A0240...
I'm not sure why so many comments think this is a bad idea. I think it's a great idea and should be adopted by all retailers. We already do the same thing with sales tax. Tarriffs are close to sales tax in there effect to consumers so it makes sense to show it up front. It lets customers see just how much more they have to pay due to the, ever changing, tariffs. Good for Amazon.
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what are the unintended concecuences of your plan? Until you figure themout don't propose a change as it might be overall worse.
Proposal: Brick-and-mortar stores, at least, should have to list in-store prices inclusive of tax. Unintended consequences: None?
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Yes, good point. I suspect the numbers won't be precise. The objective is to qualify raising prices, not necessarily their own transparency. Of course this is signaling that Amazon is choosing to distribute the costs to customers rather than absorbing them in any way, so take that for what it is.
> Yes, good point. I suspect the numbers won't be precise. This has to be illegal. You can't slap on a $20 sales tax fee at the end when it's actually $12 and pocket the difference as profit.
Not sure where you are, but this is pretty much de rigueur in the US for a whole bunch of stuff, notably telecom (mobile and fixed line), ISP, cable TV, electric utilities, as well as other stuff. On your invoice, you'll see stuff like "regulatory recovery fee", "franchise fee", "FCC Admin fee" and the like. None of which are taxes or government imposed fees. Rather, they're just using standard cost-of-doing-business expenses to tack on to your bill while claiming the price is at least 10-15% less.
My favorite is the $23/month "broadcast TV surcharge," which the cable company claims is to cover fees paid to the networks they carry. Since they have to pay these folks to carry their content anyway, they should just include it in the normal price, right? But if they did, that alone would increase the "price" by at least 15-20%.
As such, at least in the US, what law makes this "illegal?" Please tell me as it would save me at least $100/month in such fees/surcharges, or at least the "price" would be the actual "total you owe" price on the bottom line.
I wish.