U.S. Readies $11B in Tariffs on E.U (opens in new tab)

Consumption taxes are regressive, income taxes are progressive. The poor are disproportionately impacted by tariffs and sales/consumption taxes. The administration is taking money out of the hands of Americans under a truly misguided idea of what a trade deficit is.

Maybe this is naive, but don't tariffs, like subsidies, risk encouraging local inefficiencies? So your point of view seems shortsighted?

I understand that in theory they can be used to capture externalities to level the playing field, but I find it hard to believe anyone can really figure anything close to the real amount of "unfairness" (for lack of a better word)

I sell in US and I also support ecommerce sellers in US. Most of us have raised the prices of products to counter the tariffs. You are actually paying income tax as these tariffs.

Some products which can be produced in US will benefit from tariffs. But the whole point of not having tariffs is to buy cheap labour from outside and move your own country up the value chain.

Also, no one is going to start manufacturing these products because the next President is going to remove the tariffs and destroy the advantages, if any.

Just my 2 cents.

Trade balances are a silly thing to measure in the 21st century when a lot of value moves around in the form of intangible services.

Such as? As far as I know the EU has had a rather positive position regarding the US for the last decades, and still does, even after the most recent election.

According to this page: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe... it's rather balanced. Whoever upsets that balance might need to reconsider, but the US would definitely have a problem if less stuff comes in from the EU. For the EU, however, it's less of an issue: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_...

Yeah, what are you talking about? As a business selling into Europe you pay VAT and that's about it. But VAT has been around for a long time.

If you an office in Europe then I guess you are subject to additional taxes? But you are operating in Europe, so how is that unreasonable?

Oh, you mean like direct tax subsidies, "investment" incentives, and overpaying for defense contracts? Because that's what the US does, and the WTO also ruled that that is an illegal.

That fact that you seem to believe the rest of the world is abusing the US is more about a misplaced belief that the US's abuse of other countries is perfectly acceptable.

If the US wanted to lead by example, it could do what NZ did a drop subsidies and tariffs on agriculture. But that's not what you want.

If all European countries really wanted was just a slice of the pie, they could just put a tax on foreign-owned tech companies (like France is doing).

Are you seriously suggesting the EU took the trouble of implementing GDPR, causing significant disruption to European companies as well, for the sole purpose of fining FAANGs and making money out of it?

What ridiculous laws do you mean? GDPR? Or monopoly abuse fines? Do you think US businesses should be able to run under US law in the EU, meaning they can do whatever they want to consumers, monopolizing markets by violating local laws, taking in huge profits, and then hardly paying corporate taxes (neither in EU nor US)?

None of that has anything to do with these tariffs, btw.

I mean, the current administration was elected on a platform of "America First" so, what did you think would happen?

I think the US has been self-centered for quite some time, and there was a hilarious thread in a different article that went into the idea that America is the world-policeman that everyone wants but... yea, for equal treatment and to avoid regulatory capture - one needs to avoid that dying empire.

Nations are economic competitors, it's really naive to put this in terms of 'selfish / confrontational'.

All nations are 'selfish' in direct trade terms.

In terms of Geopolitics, there's an enormous degree of material goodwill added by the US following the WW2 and the creation of the NWO and not all of it is 'repaid' to them. The entire framework of global trade relies on the US, even today. Most of the free world still depends on the US for defence, at least partially and in some very 'lynchpin' ways.

The US's negotiations with China are reasonable.

The negotiating positions on refiguring NAFTA were mostly reasonable, although I don't think it will make a difference.

And FYI it's the EU that's constantly skittish, changing their minds, and arbitrarily taxing and back-taxing US companies often for their own, self directed problems (i.e. Irish/Dutch/Luxembourg taxation).

Even though Donald Trump is a huge political jerk, making noise for the sake of making noise, there's little on the table that is entirely unjust. The 'bad noise' is mostly rhetoric.

I like the part where they complain bitterly that people they called stupid, lazy leeches won't go along with boycotts of, say, Iran or Huawei, just because they were told to.

I learnt in the third grade that that approach doesn't work.

Doesn't every country do the same thing— albeit perhaps not at the same scale? When Embraer complained about Bombardier's subsidies from the Canadian government, the WTO decided that they were illegal. Then Bombardier complained about Embraer's subsidies from the Brazilian government and the WTO decided that those are illegal too.

Other countries are going to start ignoring FAA safety rulings now, so meaning that in exchange for a short term monetary gain a bunch of politicians and executives will probably cause significant long term costs - although the people who made those decisions and took those bribes won't have to pay for those consequences, they've already got there's :-/

That's what almost always the outcome of gov economic policies. Help a few large companies who are friends with the gov, whether it's giant food producers producing corn no one wanted in the first place, pharma companies competing against generics, banks making a killing on low-end mortgages, etc, while increasing costs and other burdens on regular citizens (or pushing unneeded externalities on to other countries).

We're experiencing that in Canada too with the dairy cartel getting cross-party support from both liberal and (mainstream) conservative parties because it helps a few local farmers stay moderately-wealthy while 100% of the population has to pay more for dairy products.

you cant kill boeing. if shit hits the fan theyre pretty much our only airline manufacturer. i mean what happens if the eu tells the us to fuck off. we don't get any more airbuses and if boeing is dead no way to make our own planes.

Every word of the article's headline is true, and the facts it contains (subject, object, action, and magnitude) are the most important facts of this story.

The reasoning you want to see in the headline is in the first paragraph.

If you're interpreting the headline as "Trump is unilaterally fucking up the world order yet again" then that is something that happens entirely in your head.

It's somewhat bold to fault others for an error that is entirely yours.

Wow, how is this comment not getting more notice. This is a hilarious screw-up. Seems like the NYT is launching a new privacy initiative tomorrow.

this appears to be a legit email, although I don't understand how this got into the page source.

The URL posted in the email nytimes.com/privacy-project redirects to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/opinion/internet-pr... and there are articles that are published on 4/11/2019 whereas it's only 4/10 as of me writing this comment.

And when did your friends become your enemy?