If that's the goal, one might wonder why are tariffs implemented in such a static way. Why not having your own tariffs importing from XYZ be updated on a monthly basis based on what XYZ imported from you last month.
Uncertainty has a cost. The stupid daily changing trade war with Canada is causing a lot of Canadian companies to make medium or long term decisions to decouple from the US.
Oh I definitely agree with that. I’m just wondering here if having something mechanical, predictable, deterministic (instead of whatever the hell that is that we have right now) wouldn’t be an interesting way to align incentives.
> is causing a lot of Canadian companies to make medium or long term decisions to decouple from the US.
Like which? Because recently Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management moved their head office from Toronto to New York. So it seems it's only strengthening the US and weakening Canada.
Large corporations don't care about nationalism/patriotism, they just go where the money is. They'll say they support Canadians to save face and get public support, while through the back door moving their assets and jobs to the US, or any other jurisdiction that makes them more money.
>That sounds like the kind of decision that would take way more turnaround time to implement than the month or two of uncertainty we've had.
Maybe, but the end result is still Canada loosing and US winning.
>And it's not about nationalism, it's about certainty as was claimed above. Long term that's a necessity for profit.
Good democracy and certainty don't go together very well most of the time. It's a feature of democracy, not a bug. The best regimes for certainty are autocratic ones like the CCP, Saudi Arabia, etc where citizens don't have a say. I for one value democracy more then the quarterly profits of soulless corporations who would gladly make the world burn for profit.
> Maybe, but the end result is still Canada loosing and US winning.
It is but when the discussion is about businesses racing a certain way to decisions made by a government that's only been in power for two months then it's misleading to focus on a decision made before that time.
> Good democracy and certainty don't go together very well most of the time. It's a feature of democracy, not a bug.
Good democracy? I'm not sure how loaded that phrase is but, regardless, doing business with the US has seemed a lot more certain for at least the past 20 election cycles than it does today. The current government, whether or not its behaviour is indicative (for you) of a "good democracy," is an outlier in terms of looking friendly to businesses or other investors looking to trade there.
What's "good for business" is orthogonal to people's votes and wishes in a free democracy since slavery and destroying the environment is also "good for business".
In other words, people have the freedom to choose candidates who make decisions that are also bad for business. That's the amazing perk of having a completely free democracy which you'll only appreciate when you don't have it anymore(ask me how I know).
I am sure most people in the European parliament don't know or care what a red state is. It's one of those American things that is opaque to Europeans.
I guess they tried to find stuff to tax which does not hurt the bigger European populace.
The US biggest export is oil and they certainly want that to be cheap so no tariffs there.
And they are incapable of putting tarifst on online services and digital products.
How does that help? That will only make red states hate the EU more, not Trump. The EU already had tariffs against red state as retaliation back in his first term and it didn't affect him.
I don't know if you know but MAGA crowd already doesn't like the EU because they see them as ungrateful freeloaders in term of trade deficit and receiving free defense and would very much like to see the US pull out of NATO and leave them to the Russians.
EU targeting them specifically will only prove their point not turn them against Trump.
IMHO, if you wann get to trump target Elon Musk's businesses and the likes of Big Tech who kissed his ring, Meta, etc.
I don't know if this is about targeting red states so much as it is about just finding anything to tariff. In 2023, the EU had a trade surplus on goods with the US of about $150 billion. It's much easier for the US to find things to tariff than for the EU, since they're importing more.
You could be right. There are stories about Trump voters being hurt by his cuts and still feel
it’s for the greater good.
On the other hand some of these elections are won by narrow margins. Most Trump voters didn’t sign up for pain (not personally, they only voted to harm others). Pain may influence their votes in the future or motivate their legislators to contain the executive branch.
I’m guessing multiple governments are trying to come up with some sort of a deal that resembles it. It just feels like China is going to be the sole winner in the end, as that’s they’re the only partner that is strong enough against US when it comes to trade.
The US trade more with the EU (both exports and imports) than with China, and it is fairly balanced. So actually this is the trade war nobody wants.
On the other hand the US import a lot from China but export much less so they can hurt China more (but balanced with the fact that this would probably hurt US consumers more as well). Hence we've seen that the Chinese response to Trump has been minimal.
I've thought about that too, but of course reality is a bit more complicated. For example, the EU has a pretty large (and somewhat struggling) automotive industry that could be pretty negatively impacted by Chinese imports.
I'd wager there are other areas though that could be mutually beneficial though.
That would seriously undermine the existence of the EU as a whole. Bear in mind, it justifies the very steep membership fees (for the countries that have high enough GDP to pay) by tying membership to free trade. The EU keeps quite high external tariffs on a lot of things, especially in order to protect French agriculture. Thus the primary argument Remainers presented for staying in the EU was that if Britain left the EU would levy new trade barriers and tariffs on its exports.
The EU has many members who are in it primarily for the transactional benefits. If the EU eliminated external tariffs not only would the French be out on the streets again immediately, but one of the primary motivations for membership would evaporate and the EU would lose a lot of leverage over member states.
The EU is a lot broader than just a tariff agreement; even just the "four freedoms" of the EU are goods, capital, labour, and services, and keeping with the Brexit theme, the trade barriers that Remain was talking about also included "no you can't just do your trade across the border now, we no longer recognise your qualifications" and "we need to inspect the goods crossing this border to make sure they're complying with our legal requirements; yes, we know you didn't change your own, but now there's nothing stopping you from having imported something from somewhere else that didn't follow our rules, and we need to check".
(Also, I said "lower" not "eliminate"; I was thinking more of Chinese PV, and perhaps cars, though cars would have a different group protesting).
Yes, there are lots of trade barriers beyond tariffs, nonetheless the EU does impose plenty of them. See my other reply. And if your goal is to simply have closer trading relations then tariffs vs other kinds of regulatory barriers isn't an important difference. This is why Trump talks about things like VAT, and others in his camp talk about the fines levied on tech companies. From their perspective it's all financially equivalent to tariffs.
Regulatory barriers are the foundational reason the EU parliament exists — to remove those barriers between member states and make sure all member states are on the same page when change needs to happen.
One of the big talking points from the Leave campaign was about sovereignty: that's the ability to make the rules in your own jurisdiction. I never bought those arguments in part because the UK got basically everything it asked for, but also because Brexit combined (1) losing the power to influence those rules going forward, (2) still being de-facto subject them thanks to the Brussels effect, and (3) having a trade barrier with the EU despite #2, because the EU couldn't afford to just trust the UK on the matter.
Every small business that stopped trading with the EU post-Brexit due to customs forms being too complex even when they and their customers would have been fine with the actual cost of the tariffs themselves, is a non-financial barrier.
> This is why Trump talks about things like VAT, and others in his camp talk about the fines levied on tech companies. From their perspective it's all financially equivalent to tariffs.
Does any inter-state trade within the US have tariffs due to different states having their own sales-tax rates? Because to me, the US talk about VAT is that kind of foolishness.
Similar for fines for non-compliance with laws — what's the difference between two US states having different laws and one state suing a business for non-compliance, vs. the EU and US having different laws and an EU member state suing a business for non-compliance?
In fact, if the regulatory barriers between the EU and US were levelled out, then the result would be somewhere on a line between "every Big Tech firm could be sued in a US court for GDPR violations" or "GDPR doesn't exist any more". I'm sure there's plenty of people in the US who would love to delete all the cookie popups and are eager to spy on everyone, but it really isn't just about pure monetary cost.
Actually, now I think about it, cars and eggs: for cars, UK (and IIRC EU) law doesn't permit Cybertruck on the roads — if you tried to model that as a tariff, it would be ∞; likewise for eggs, US controls the salmonella risk of eggs by requiring cleaning which in turn damages the shells meaning they must be refrigerated in the supermarkets, while EU eggs handle it with vaccination of the hens and regard refrigeration before sale as a potential risk factor due to causing damage to the shells.
> Bear in mind, it justifies the very steep membership fees (for the countries that have high enough GDP to pay) by tying membership to free trade. The EU keeps quite high external tariffs on a lot of things, especially in order to protect French agriculture
The EU justifies the high membership fees for the rich members by the benefits those rich members get - the poorer EU countries get invested in, get developed, some of their people go live in the richer countries and contribute there, but in the end, the country evolves a lot and becomes a significant market for EU goods and contributor. Point in case, Poland, the Baltics, Spain, Romania. France has benefited from Romanian development a lot, and from Romanians when Romania was less developed. It's literally a win win win win.
I don't think you can say the benefits the rich members get are their fees being sent to poor members. That's not a benefit to the people who live in the rich countries, that's a price levied on membership. Which is why the last time the EU was seriously debated at a national level (Brexit) nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
I'm not sure what relevance your link has to what I said, by the way. The Mercosur agreement only happened because the EU was able to keep agricultural tariffs in place:
> For sensitive products like beef, poultry or sugar, in particular, access to the EU market will be permanently limited through gradually implemented quotas. The EU will grant very limited access to its market to imports of agri-food products.
Moreover, a bilateral safeguard clause can be applied in case increased imports from Mercosur cause - or even only threaten to cause - serious injury to the relevant EU sectors.
For the first time, this safeguard clause also covers imports under tariff rate quotas.
The agreement does not give duty-free access to Mercosur beef. It will allow 99,000 tonnes of Mercosur beef to enter the EU market with a 7.5% duty. 55% of the quota will consist of fresh or chilled meat and 45% of lower-value frozen meat.
> I don't think you can say the benefits the rich members get are their fees being sent to poor members. That's not a benefit to the people who live in the rich countries, that's a price levied on membership. Which is why the last time the EU was seriously debated at a national level (Brexit) nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
The way you phrase this suggests you're considering it from the wrong perspective. What you're arguing against doesn't even seem to be present in my reading of the comment you're replying to.
The membership benefit isn't the fees, any more than your Amazon Prime (etc.) membership's benefit is the fee.
The benefit of the fee to rich countries (i.e. net spenders) is that these other countries, the ones that you're sending money to, are going to align their laws with yours, have a cheap workforce willing to to supply you with labour at a lower cost than your own citizens would otherwise, and that they are now a stable destination for any investment opportunities with your own capital precisely because they're getting integrated with your own economy and law.
Specifically this:
> nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement.
We did. You may not have heard it, but we did.
> You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
Incorrect. Closest you get is that there's a scheme called the "Blue Card" (modelled after the US green card), that applies to everyone except Ireland and Denmark (and before Brexit, the UK): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)
But each member state gets to set quotas on how many Blue Cards they accept, and can also open up rules for other routes into their countries.
> The EU justifies the high membership fees for the rich members by the benefits those rich members get - the poorer EU countries get invested in
Which is just another way of saying "the benefit of paying the fees is that someone else gets them". That's not a benefit and membership fees aren't investments (you don't own anything as a result of paying them).
Same for the rest of this thread. Other countries can align their laws without being given money, and should if those laws are better than their own. It's not a "benefit" to be paying them to fix their own legal systems. Cheap immigrant labour isn't a benefit to the workers in the country, minimum wage laws still apply anyway so the benefits even to rich people are limited, and you don't have to pay foreign countries to attract immigrants from them. They come regardless of what money their government is receiving. In fact big transfer payments make it less likely that they will want to migrate, not more. Finally, countries generally try to be stable locations for investment regardless of EU membership or receiving transfer payments.
> We did. You may not have heard it, but we did.
I don't think anyone did. If they did, then this thread doesn't reflect well on what they must have been saying because not a single argument in it for why fees are a "benefit" make any sense. It's common sense that fees are never a benefit, which is why free trade zones don't normally charge for membership. In fact AFAIK only the EU does that and that's because it's primarily an ideological project that needs huge sums of money for its other goals: free trade is just a carrot-cum-stick used to get countries to go along with it.
> Incorrect. Closest you get is that there's a scheme called the "Blue Card"
The Blue Card is an EU-level scheme with rules set by the Commission, and it only applies to people with "higher professional qualifications" and whose salary is higher than average. Obviously, nobody needs to pay billions in membership fees for the privilege of having random visa scheme imposed on them, any country that wants to can set up such a scheme itself. It's even named after a non-EU document. There is no immigration benefit to being an EU member. If you want to attract lots of migrants from poor EU countries, you can do that easily outside as well.
> Other countries can align their laws without being given money, and should if those laws are better than their own.
"Better" presumes something which does not always exist. Sometimes "aligned" is itself the improvement — but aligned to whom? Why should, e.g. Bulgaria pick alignment with Parisian interests over alignment with Moscow's?
But also, mere alignment is not sufficient: note that customs checks were introduced immediately after Brexit, because the requirement isn't simply to be aligned, but to have the force of international agreement over maintaining that alignment.
> It's not a "benefit" to be paying them to fix their own legal systems.
Compare and contrast with where this hasn't happened — there's a huge growth opportunity in many African nations since well before the end of the colonial era, so much of that potential is held back precisely because the legal systems there aren't able to prevent corruption. Making the investment in the legal system would make it possible to invest in the nations there, which would benefit both those nations (by having lots of money pouring in that doesn't immediately turn into a corrupt official's holiday home) and also the investors (who get a return on that investment).
> Cheap immigrant labour isn't a benefit to the workers in the country,
> minimum wage laws still apply anyway so the benefits even to rich people are limited,
That benefits both sides of the equation: the workers from the poorer country get a boost, you get more people willing to work at (or near) that level.
> and you don't have to pay foreign countries to attract immigrants from them. They come regardless of what money their government is receiving.
Only when their qualifications are going to be recognised, when their health insurance options are valid, etc. — it isn't enough to just know how to be an electrician, you also need the local insurance company to sell you public liability insurance.
> In fact big transfer payments make it less likely that they will want to migrate, not more.
Only once the investments have actually converted into a real boost to the economy, thus paying for themselves.
> Finally, countries generally try to be stable locations for investment regardless of EU membership or receiving transfer payments.
The EU is a mechanism for doing that; that it isn't the only mechanism is irrelevant.
> not a single argument in it for why fees are a "benefit" make any sense
You're misreading this, I think. Fees pay for the benefits, they're not the benefits themselves.
They one of the things that makes EU a place of growth. It's like all the discussions about USAID, except on your doorstep. Or, for that matter, any investment scheme your own government pays for out of taxes which are spent entirely within your own country, like highways — I benefit from the existence of a highway network, despite having only owned a car for a week total and that nearly a decade ago, this is like that.
> Please re-read what I wrote, as this answer doesn't seem to make sense in context.
Could say the same to you, on this, given you've ignored that:
(1) The Blue Card scheme is not used by all EU nations
(2) Each nation can set its own quotas for how many are issued — "As of August 2020, European countries vary wildly in the number of issued Blue Cards. Cyprus, Greece and Netherlands have not yet issued any cards," from my link
(3) Each nation has its own additional visa scheme entirely separate from this
(4) The Blue Card scheme was not "imposed", it was a voluntary streamlining (see #1)
Your previous comment claimed, falsely:
> a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
I took the bit about re-reading out of my post as it was unnecessarily snarky. Still, we're clearly not seeing eye to eye here at all. Every "benefit" of the fees posited in this thread a country can have for free, other than the EU dropping tariffs.
If a non-EU government wants to give foreign aid to Poland, it can.
If it wants to invest in Romania (normal definition of invest), it can.
If it wants to enable mass immigration of min-wage workers, it can. (and the UK government is doing so right now).
If it wants to align its laws with those of the EU, it can.
Not a single benefit in this thread is actually a benefit. EU membership fees are mandatory foreign aid European countries are expected to pay as a price of not being tariffed, and that's an artificial "benefit" that nobody else in the world charges for and that the EU also doesn't charge non-European countries for.
I'm not going to get into an argument about who benefits from cheap labour, it's a different debate and well worn. On your other points:
• The EU isn't a place of growth. Last year it managed GDP growth of 1%, the year before it was 0.4%. The US managed near 3% each time. It's scary that people living inside it aren't aware of this. EU growth should be higher than the US given that it contains countries still catching up from the communist era.
• Blue Card is mandatory under EU law. It's "not used" by a few countries because it was forced on them with the loophole of there being no minimum issuance quotas, not because it's a voluntary scheme they didn't choose to sign up for.
But once again, we seem to be talking at opposites here. What claim are you responding to with this Blue Card stuff? Is it the "not if it's inside" bit? Because to repeat, Blue Card doesn't let you attract as many migrants as you want if you're inside the EU - it has a legal requirement for higher-than-average salaries - and obviously it's not a benefit of paying membership fees, which is where this thread started.
When your model is that he is a decapitation strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK) against the US, everything makes perfect sense.
Blockcades are an act of war. They are strategically useful to disable a foreign military through robbing it of supplies it needs.
These tariffs are having a blockade like effect by cutting off trade. Does it matter that much whether trading is ceased due to foreign ships blocking trade routes or a foreign backed coup making us do it to ourselves "willingly?"
Our military is absolutely failing to live up to their oath to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic.
> Our military is absolutely failing to live up to their oath to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic.
You guys voted to have the republican being the majority in both the house and the senate, get the presidency and also, indirectly, the supreme court.
That is democracy in action. If the military intervened right now it would just look like a coup. You can't really be surprised that the people you put in power do what they say they were going to do.
Now if they try to do something like the January 6 again, that is something else.
> Our military is absolutely failing to live up to their oath to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic.
A good portion of them are probably cheering.
That being said, even for those with humanity, empathy and a conscience, a coup against the elected president is quite a serious thing to do, even if he is treasonous and obviously trampling human rights, constitution, separation of powers and being allowed to do so by the other branches of government that are supposed to be the checks and balances.
It will be interesting to compare the UK and EU cases, as well as China. EU responded immediately with counter-tarriffs on goods worth about as much as those taxed by the US. UK and China grumbled but said they don't want to escalate. These are both in different ways similar to the EU case (China because it's big, UK because it's a European "ally", whatever this means nowadays).
The very limited evidence so far, from Canada, seems to suggest that immediate retaliation works better.
Isn’t this what trump wants? He’s already delayed twice and he always talks about a “deal” but he starts with a shock strategy. Someone told me he wrote this in his book
Its only a matter of time for EU, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China, basically everyone to sit together at a table and harmonize counter tariffs in a collective action. 20% more on Canadian steel? everyone else bumps all tariffs in unison.
I wonder if Trump has ever read an economics book? He seems to be approaching this all in a rather counterproductive manner. I'm reminded of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I was reading the HN thing on the potato famine yesterday and I think it was the same idea - they Brits didn't want to starve a million Irish to death, they just had this free markets are great idea and were to stupid to change. Likewise Trump doesn't actually want to wreck the US and global economies but has this tarrifs are great idea and same thing.
That a country whose currency is world's reserve currency somehow concluded that they're cheated on, wow. By the time the FED balance sheet will reach pre March 2020 levels, we will be living in Back to the Future II.
Other countries stashing dollars is basically pure seignorage profits for the US. And these countries using the dollar as a long term storage of value is geopolitical insurance. This makes no sense unless you read it as the Trump administration sabotaging US interests.
This isn't aiming to be overdramatic, but still there's interesting comparisons with the arch-populist, Hitler. His main quality was really that he captivated crowds, his resentments resonated with his voters, and he had no inhibitions to do the unthinkable. Without in any way comparing Trump to Hitler in other ways, in these three specific things they are alike.
Reading about Hitler's rise to power, it's obvious he kind of bumbled his way into it. There were many people for whom it was convenient, he did many random reckless things that should have been disastrous but somehow he made them into success - for example rearming the Ruhr, or frankly invading Poland with the French army right on its western border.
Hitler was incredibly lucky for a long time, and that's why he managed to do so much damage. But there wasn't really a clever master plan to it. He had hateful ramblings in his head and acted rashly on them. It was sheer luck and shock effect that he wasn't spat out after just a few heads in politics.
I suspect this is also what Trump is doing. And as in 1930s, for a while, everyone else has too much to lose to stand up to it. But unless he will have Hitler's luck for just as long, eventually the random lashings will end badly for him.
Of course Hitler's luck ran out in the end too, with him dead, Germany on its knees and split into two, and German imperialism more or less dead.
> But there wasn't really a clever master plan to it. He had hateful ramblings in his head and acted rashly on them.
Hitler had a fairly consistent worldview and sets of goals going all the way back to Mein Kampf, even though he didn't know how to get there from the start. I don't think this can be said about Trump.
Yeah, I'm not claiming it's an all-encompassing analogy.
Though you could argue Trump was always going on about tariffs, even as a supposed Democrat. Also Hitler's views radicalized dramatically over time. Or maybe more accurately, the ideas were constant, but their scope and ruthlessness expanded.
Au contraire, project 2025 is very detailed and has clear paths to reach their (the heritage foundation, conservatives at large) goals.
It’s just that the goal sucks for everyday people. Why would these powerful people want goals that suck? Because the converse of it sucking for you is it getting better for them - meaning, money is being siphoned.
I think Trump is following a plan as best as he can given the state of our economy and government. I think the fact the plan is so bad that it doesn’t even feel intentional IS intentional. The plan sucks because it’s meant to.
> Au contraire, project 2025 is very detailed and has clear paths to reach their (the heritage foundation, conservatives at large) goals.
I agree, but these weren't Trump's goals that he's had for 10 years or something like in Hitler's case. It's a plan by the Heritage Foundation that somehow got Trump to sign off on it.
> Thankfully there are alternative currencies that can be used for that nowadays.
Iraq and Libya have tried, and look what's happened to them ...
The main reason countries are using the USD as the reserve currency is because if they don't, the "Free World TM" will bomb them back to the stone age.
Euro to start with, it's quite stable (and even appreciates against the dollar).
Depending on risk profile, desire for diversification and acceptance of variability, swiss francs, british pounds, chinese yuan, indian rupee, japanese yen, south korean won, etc. can also be used.
> Euro to start with, it's quite stable (and even appreciates against the dollar).
There's not enough euro issuance to replace Treasuries, and issuing more (particularly at EU level where it would really help) is super, super controversial.
Not really. You have seen what the US (under multiple administrations) does to countries that try to switch away from the dollar. Even China and Russia have issues trading in their own currencies with each other - to name the top two "enemies" of the US. What options do you think smaller countries have?
The issues these countries have are largely self-imposed. For example, China's struggles with international trade have a lot to do with their capital controls.
Small countries would probably have an easier time of it because they can just trade however they like without having to mollify their own bureaucrats. The traders will figure it out. The threat of US intervention is real, but I wouldn't be certain about whether it gets more or less pressing for smaller countries. The US probably won't even notice what they are doing if they keep quiet enough. Oil trading would be a different story though.
> Even China and Russia have issues trading in their own currencies with each other
Because EU and US sanction Chinese banks and company that do that. What does that have to do with the exact currency? they’d have the same issue if they wanted to use dollars or euros (to answer your question € is the other option smaller countries have).
I'm so glad that a spat at the upper echelons of governments are going to cause untold misery for millions across the world for... no discernable benefit? Wonderful news.
Why the plural? This is something that was very much US made and other countries have no choice but to react. This is not something caused by multiple "upper echelons of governments".
This is something caused by exactly one government - US one. What did you expect, other countries to instantly give up their economy and soverenity the moment Trump said "I hate you and seek to harm you economically"? Especially since he added multiple times "and I want to annex you, take away pieces of your territory" and then added completely baseless accusations as a reason for it?
Personally I didn't expect anything, I'm British. My point is more that it's economic ping-pong beyond the control of almost everyone except governments.
The US government is specifically to blame here though, of course.
No discernable benefit to you maybe, but every crisis ends up benefiting those at the top as it always leads to a wealth transfer either during the crash phase, or the recovery phase, or both. See 2009 crash, Covid, etc.
Your leadership doesn't work to serve you, they work to serve themselves and the elite. People keep calling Trump a stupid bafoon but how come this stupid bafoon keeps getting richer and richer all the time if he's as stupid as people think him to be?
To whit, how much are you willing to bet that after Trump's mandate is over in 4 years time, both Trump, Elon and all his other cronies, will walk away with a bigger net worth than the one they came in? So no, what you see as stupidity now on the news is actually a carefully orchestrated multi year enrichment plan for the elite covered in bread and circus to distract the plebs, that will become evident as time goes on and events unfold.
1. Launch TRUMP and MELANIA cryptocurrencies to get a few hundred millions of dollars of cash. (and possibly also get some cash from the "First Buddy" Elon Musk)
2. Announce tariffs, and in general cause chaos, crashing the stock market.
>The proposed target products include industrial and agricultural products, such as steel and aluminium, textiles, home appliances, plastics, poultry, beef, eggs, dairy, sugar and vegetables.
Why tariff such low margin US goods and not high margin US services like software? US doesn't export much goods, as most of the bulk of their economy is tech, finance and services not exporting cheap merch in shipping crates like Asia. How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
How is a tarif on US textiles or eggs supposed to be a deterrent? When was the last time you saw US eggs or clothes in the EU shelves? Even in the US, less than 10% of the textiles are domestically made.
Edit: a skim of the list suggests it's pretty broad. Agricultural products, wood, clothing, wine, polythene. There's an insane number of very slightly different product categories, no wonder compliance is so expensive.
> Them being red state products is a weak argument that sees no base of argument or success.
Because Trump (presumably) listens to Rep Senators/Congresspeople. If he doesn't, then making his voters worse off is a good way to get them to complain.
Tariffs are bad for anyone who needs to import, which is why the US stock market doesn't like the US having tariffs; the EU doesn't want to raise them either because EU doesn't want to damage the parts of its own economy dependent on imports, it's only raising them at all because it wants to put political pressure on the US to prevent damage to those parts of its economy dependent on exports.
By focussing tariffs on only the places that politically support Trump, they get the political impact with the smallest currently-possible negative side-effects.
How can you even tariff multinational companies where nothing is transferred between one country to another. Although I think they could tax the company on moving the money out of country. So e.g. whatever money google got from ads from European country can only be spent in Europe else they face heavy tariff.
Republicans do not care about blue states economies and prosperity. They are happy when liberals suffer and would be happy engineering it. They might care if red states economy goes down, because that harms their election chances.
Red states voted for this, because they wanted other people to suffer and thought it will bring them prosperity. It makes sense to target that part of america.
> How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
What would be the plan exactly here? These services are being sold by European-based companies and being served from European territory (eg AWS Frankfurt). There’s no import happening here.
In general it makes sense to tariff something that you can replace. E.g. tariff American eggs, so suddenly it makes more sense to import them from Peru.
If you put a 100% import tax on Windows license, the only result is that the EU customers are now paying double the price for Windows. It’s very unlikely it’ll result in people switching to an alternative system.
Same with AWS - even if you’d tariff all American cloud companies, what result would you expect? Sure, in X years maybe you’d grow an EU cloud company, but until then you’d make every European business using cloud very uncompetitive globally.
You use tariffs to prop up the companies you already have. You could put “tariffs” on Apple Music, so people would move to European Spotify.
1) Because the purpose is not really to make money from tariffs (only trump think that is a thing). The purpose is to encourage people to buy replacements from other countries/your own country/union. People arent going to switch from AWS to Hetzner just because a temporary tariff. But they could easily buy steel/corn/etc from another place while tariffs are in place
2)Software is very hard to tariff because often you can set up a company inside the other country and sell the software from there. And then it never crosses the border. Same can't be done with beef. It has to cross a border.
How do you tariff a software service ? Tariffs are applied at import ? Are you paying US software if its hosted in EU datacenter by EU subsidiary ? Or if software licence is sold by EU subsidiary ? The concept makes no sense to me.
That's not a tariff that's a tax. If you start taxing foreign entities different from local you are violating all sorts of treaties and depending on how the laws are written it could be unconstitutional discrimination (once you start talking about foreign ownership etc.)
>Do you block your own citizens from accessing sites hosted in foreign countries if those sites/companies don’t comply with your foreign law?
Sure happens, including in the EU. There are some european anti-copyright-theft laws for example, and local ISPs are forced to block some warez/pirated ebook etc websites (you can bypass via VPN, but the "official" gateways/DNS block them).
>Do you arrest your citizens for accessing those sites anyways or use VPNs to circumvent blocking?
Not at the moment. And the logistics do not make it very easy (can't track each individual). But you can sure fine any commercial company accessing such sites, prohibit state infrastructure and any company doing work with your state from using them, etc.
I'm not sure what the objection is. Do you mean "does not make sense" from a democratic/open society standpoint (as if european countries are a bastion of that, and such moves are beneath the legislators)? Or that it "does not make sense" from a technical aspect? For the latter, when there's a will, there's a way.
I don't agree that it's "trivial". The devil will be in the detail and could drag out in the courts depending on the language definitions. Quite apart from the fact that anything dreamt up at short notice is going to have shortcomings, tariffs are much easier impose when you're transporting physical objects across physical borders.
I will note (as an Irish person who's followed this case), that it wasn't about this specific case (and the first deal was in 1991, when Apple was not in a good place) rather it was to demonstrate to multinationals that we'd support them if the EU decided there was an issue.
It was a signalling thing rather than a principles thing.
Also note that Apple last got that deal in 2007, before the iPhone was launched.
Software companies just open subsidiaries in the target country and sell services through the subsidiaries. The only thing this does is make it harder to move profit to the home country (and there are ways sound this) and add a lot of accounting work
VW producing cars in their factories in the USA? Put a tariff on these cars as the parent company is based in Europe.
It’s really not that simple, as e.g. big tech has their development centering the EU as well - so these products are at least partially produced here.
If you want to write some custom rules, sure, but then you’re really opening a pandora box. Technically you could just add 100% tax just on vehicles that have Tesla in their name. Try making such moves and look as investors immediately drop any trust in your countries political system (and currency).
That's expected. The other side already imposes some tarrifs (as did the EU - it's BS that Trump's tarrifs to EU are some unprecedented move, the EU already had tarrifs of US cars and other products).
The problem we're discussing (at least according to a parent comment) is that the US has a lot more "digital services" products than actual physical products where EU tarrifs are currently applied.
So, what's discussed is how to tax those (and how to sidestep "but it's a European subsidiary, not a US company" hurdle).
So, sure the US can counter EU digital services by also using the same sidestepping. But it's not like EU has many such worth talking about. All the big players are from the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, MS, etc).
something I learned recently: payments to foreign bank accounts in Brazil have an automatic 25% tax imposed regardless of the purpose of the transfer. This seems to applied to companies of a certain size, or moving certain volume of transfer, but still.
The US is a massive meat exporter [0] and has put a lot of energy into getting import deals etc. with partner countries. The most famous one is with Japan, but the EU probably has it's range of agreements.
Taxing US meat is hitting right where it needs to, with very limited impact on he local population. France for instance will just increase it's domestic sales, and other EU countries can also turn to neighbor to get their meat.
Software and electronics are a different beast and a lot more impacting in that regard.
Tariffs on products and services with no realistic alternatives in the short term would simply be a tax on your own businesses and citizens. You don't want to do that. It's better to impose tariffs on something inconsequential. Something where alternatives exist and you wouldn't mind if that part of trade just stopped completely.
Also afaik the only way to implement tariffs on packets is through lawyers attacking an arbitrary set of big enough players that aren't sufficiently globalized that they would be taxing the EU's own productivity, and any attempt to levy that inherently appears selective and thus resembles cronyism.
That said, now that I've explained how irrational it is, I could totally see trump doing that as he will seemingly take any form of pretext to enact cronyism.
It's also because it's low impact. How much textile or eggs are really getting exported from the US to the EU? The EU isn't dumb, they don't want to sabotage their economy just to retaliate.
i am asking which has the highest tarrifs? because isnt it the case (and im asking) that for a very long time, the EU has had tarrifs for US goods, while the US did not, or had much lower?
Unfortunely we are a bit compromised in what concerns computing, we need to get back to cold war ecosystem of computing hardware, operating systems and programming languages.
Exactly, fuck US-products as long as Agent Orange is in power. I never really cared about where my goods come from, but suddenly I do after a month of #47.
Good that the US do not want to annex any EU countries, then ...
... because, if you are referring to Greenland, then are not in the EU and have again just voted for their Parliament and sent a clear message that they don't want to be controlled by Denmark, either (not part of the US, either, just independent with possibly closer ties with the US).
And in any case, this is typical Trumpian bluster. Possibly the aim is to make independence happen because that would suit the US.
Well you’d (average EU citizen) could be losing your job because European companies would lose a significant proportion of sales to the US while still having to compete with American companies locally.
As a EU citizen I have the complete opposite view, why should we be impacted by lower exports due to American tariffs while still letting their products access our market without repercussions?
Even more, none of the tariffs imposed on the USA will impact your consumption directly, there are alternatives to them and with the price increase you'll naturally choose those alternatives that are cheaper. Nothing being levied a tariff is a product that only the USA exports to the EU.
> [...] why should we be impacted by lower exports due to American tariffs while still letting their products access our market without repercussions?
You'll be impacted by lower exports regardless. Reciprocal tariffs do not change that fact.
My question to you is: why would I, as a consumer, want to make certain US exports more expensive for me to buy? Because the US does the same to their own consumers? How does that make any sense?
I'm wondering if it may be more impactful (and mutually beneficial) if everyone outside the US lowers the tariffs they have with each other?
If the US doesn't want to buy Chinese or EU or Canadian etc., make it cheaper for China, the EU, Canada, etc. to replace the US with each other.
The EU would already prefer that people buy European.
The problem with anti-import schemes is that they inevitably hit exports. Trade has to have something in both directions, eventually.
If that's the goal, one might wonder why are tariffs implemented in such a static way. Why not having your own tariffs importing from XYZ be updated on a monthly basis based on what XYZ imported from you last month.
Uncertainty has a cost. The stupid daily changing trade war with Canada is causing a lot of Canadian companies to make medium or long term decisions to decouple from the US.
Oh I definitely agree with that. I’m just wondering here if having something mechanical, predictable, deterministic (instead of whatever the hell that is that we have right now) wouldn’t be an interesting way to align incentives.
> is causing a lot of Canadian companies to make medium or long term decisions to decouple from the US.
Like which? Because recently Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management moved their head office from Toronto to New York. So it seems it's only strengthening the US and weakening Canada.
Large corporations don't care about nationalism/patriotism, they just go where the money is. They'll say they support Canadians to save face and get public support, while through the back door moving their assets and jobs to the US, or any other jurisdiction that makes them more money.
> recently Canadian investment firm Brookfield Asset Management moved their head office from Toronto to New York
That sounds like the kind of decision that would take way more turnaround time to implement than the month or two of uncertainty we've had.
> Large corporations don't care about nationalism/patriotism, they just go where the money is.
And it's not about nationalism, it's about certainty as was claimed above. Long term that's a necessity for profit.
>That sounds like the kind of decision that would take way more turnaround time to implement than the month or two of uncertainty we've had.
Maybe, but the end result is still Canada loosing and US winning.
>And it's not about nationalism, it's about certainty as was claimed above. Long term that's a necessity for profit.
Good democracy and certainty don't go together very well most of the time. It's a feature of democracy, not a bug. The best regimes for certainty are autocratic ones like the CCP, Saudi Arabia, etc where citizens don't have a say. I for one value democracy more then the quarterly profits of soulless corporations who would gladly make the world burn for profit.
> Maybe, but the end result is still Canada loosing and US winning.
It is but when the discussion is about businesses racing a certain way to decisions made by a government that's only been in power for two months then it's misleading to focus on a decision made before that time.
> Good democracy and certainty don't go together very well most of the time. It's a feature of democracy, not a bug.
Good democracy? I'm not sure how loaded that phrase is but, regardless, doing business with the US has seemed a lot more certain for at least the past 20 election cycles than it does today. The current government, whether or not its behaviour is indicative (for you) of a "good democracy," is an outlier in terms of looking friendly to businesses or other investors looking to trade there.
What's "good for business" is orthogonal to people's votes and wishes in a free democracy since slavery and destroying the environment is also "good for business".
In other words, people have the freedom to choose candidates who make decisions that are also bad for business. That's the amazing perk of having a completely free democracy which you'll only appreciate when you don't have it anymore(ask me how I know).
I think that is basically the case indirectly.
Here an example with my limited understanding:
Chinese steel is super expensive in the US now, so US manufacturers buy less of it raising the cost of US products.
This makes Chinese steel more available on the world market and it becomes cheaper for everyone else.
Due to the increased cost of steel US stuff made out of said steel, is generally more expensive while everyone else's become cheaper.
So products not made in the US become cheaper in comparison and thus sell better for more profit.
Oddly enough the EU imposed counter Tariffs on some weird stuff like Alcohol and Motorcycles...
Europeans can easily replace Jim Beam in their Cola.
And Harley Davidson is insanely expensive anyway with the usual customers being by MC-Members or dentist in their midlife crisis.
> Oddly enough the EU imposed counter Tariffs on some weird stuff like Alcohol and Motorcycles...
Red state tariffs.
NB the US tariffs apply to EU steel and steel products, not just Chinese ones, which is why this whole thing is happening.
I am sure most people in the European parliament don't know or care what a red state is. It's one of those American things that is opaque to Europeans.
I guess they tried to find stuff to tax which does not hurt the bigger European populace.
The US biggest export is oil and they certainly want that to be cheap so no tariffs there.
And they are incapable of putting tarifst on online services and digital products.
>Red state tariffs.
How does that help? That will only make red states hate the EU more, not Trump. The EU already had tariffs against red state as retaliation back in his first term and it didn't affect him.
I don't know if you know but MAGA crowd already doesn't like the EU because they see them as ungrateful freeloaders in term of trade deficit and receiving free defense and would very much like to see the US pull out of NATO and leave them to the Russians.
EU targeting them specifically will only prove their point not turn them against Trump.
IMHO, if you wann get to trump target Elon Musk's businesses and the likes of Big Tech who kissed his ring, Meta, etc.
I don't know if this is about targeting red states so much as it is about just finding anything to tariff. In 2023, the EU had a trade surplus on goods with the US of about $150 billion. It's much easier for the US to find things to tariff than for the EU, since they're importing more.
Sure but these "trade surplus" memes Trump keeps parroting conveniently don't include the SW products and services that makes the US so rich.
You could be right. There are stories about Trump voters being hurt by his cuts and still feel it’s for the greater good.
On the other hand some of these elections are won by narrow margins. Most Trump voters didn’t sign up for pain (not personally, they only voted to harm others). Pain may influence their votes in the future or motivate their legislators to contain the executive branch.
Pain also brings the desire for revenge. So when you use a weapon against someone, don't be surprised when it will be used against you.
Well, yes, that's why the EU is engaging in retaliatory tariffs in the first place. As is Canada.
I’m guessing multiple governments are trying to come up with some sort of a deal that resembles it. It just feels like China is going to be the sole winner in the end, as that’s they’re the only partner that is strong enough against US when it comes to trade.
The EU, the US, and China are all similar sized GDPs, and which one is on top depends if you measure with nominal or PPP dollars.
From Wikipedia:
EU: $20T nominal, $29T PPP
China: $19.5T nominal, $39.4T PPP
US: $30.3T (nominal == PPP by definition)
The US trade more with the EU (both exports and imports) than with China, and it is fairly balanced. So actually this is the trade war nobody wants.
On the other hand the US import a lot from China but export much less so they can hurt China more (but balanced with the fact that this would probably hurt US consumers more as well). Hence we've seen that the Chinese response to Trump has been minimal.
Somebody wants that trade war and started it.
I've thought about that too, but of course reality is a bit more complicated. For example, the EU has a pretty large (and somewhat struggling) automotive industry that could be pretty negatively impacted by Chinese imports.
I'd wager there are other areas though that could be mutually beneficial though.
That would seriously undermine the existence of the EU as a whole. Bear in mind, it justifies the very steep membership fees (for the countries that have high enough GDP to pay) by tying membership to free trade. The EU keeps quite high external tariffs on a lot of things, especially in order to protect French agriculture. Thus the primary argument Remainers presented for staying in the EU was that if Britain left the EU would levy new trade barriers and tariffs on its exports.
The EU has many members who are in it primarily for the transactional benefits. If the EU eliminated external tariffs not only would the French be out on the streets again immediately, but one of the primary motivations for membership would evaporate and the EU would lose a lot of leverage over member states.
The EU is a lot broader than just a tariff agreement; even just the "four freedoms" of the EU are goods, capital, labour, and services, and keeping with the Brexit theme, the trade barriers that Remain was talking about also included "no you can't just do your trade across the border now, we no longer recognise your qualifications" and "we need to inspect the goods crossing this border to make sure they're complying with our legal requirements; yes, we know you didn't change your own, but now there's nothing stopping you from having imported something from somewhere else that didn't follow our rules, and we need to check".
(Also, I said "lower" not "eliminate"; I was thinking more of Chinese PV, and perhaps cars, though cars would have a different group protesting).
Yes, there are lots of trade barriers beyond tariffs, nonetheless the EU does impose plenty of them. See my other reply. And if your goal is to simply have closer trading relations then tariffs vs other kinds of regulatory barriers isn't an important difference. This is why Trump talks about things like VAT, and others in his camp talk about the fines levied on tech companies. From their perspective it's all financially equivalent to tariffs.
> tariffs vs other kinds of regulatory barriers isn't an important difference
It's a huge difference! It's why the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect exists at all.
Regulatory barriers are the foundational reason the EU parliament exists — to remove those barriers between member states and make sure all member states are on the same page when change needs to happen.
One of the big talking points from the Leave campaign was about sovereignty: that's the ability to make the rules in your own jurisdiction. I never bought those arguments in part because the UK got basically everything it asked for, but also because Brexit combined (1) losing the power to influence those rules going forward, (2) still being de-facto subject them thanks to the Brussels effect, and (3) having a trade barrier with the EU despite #2, because the EU couldn't afford to just trust the UK on the matter.
Every small business that stopped trading with the EU post-Brexit due to customs forms being too complex even when they and their customers would have been fine with the actual cost of the tariffs themselves, is a non-financial barrier.
> This is why Trump talks about things like VAT, and others in his camp talk about the fines levied on tech companies. From their perspective it's all financially equivalent to tariffs.
Does any inter-state trade within the US have tariffs due to different states having their own sales-tax rates? Because to me, the US talk about VAT is that kind of foolishness.
Similar for fines for non-compliance with laws — what's the difference between two US states having different laws and one state suing a business for non-compliance, vs. the EU and US having different laws and an EU member state suing a business for non-compliance?
In fact, if the regulatory barriers between the EU and US were levelled out, then the result would be somewhere on a line between "every Big Tech firm could be sued in a US court for GDPR violations" or "GDPR doesn't exist any more". I'm sure there's plenty of people in the US who would love to delete all the cookie popups and are eager to spy on everyone, but it really isn't just about pure monetary cost.
Actually, now I think about it, cars and eggs: for cars, UK (and IIRC EU) law doesn't permit Cybertruck on the roads — if you tried to model that as a tariff, it would be ∞; likewise for eggs, US controls the salmonella risk of eggs by requiring cleaning which in turn damages the shells meaning they must be refrigerated in the supermarkets, while EU eggs handle it with vaccination of the hens and regard refrigeration before sale as a potential risk factor due to causing damage to the shells.
> Bear in mind, it justifies the very steep membership fees (for the countries that have high enough GDP to pay) by tying membership to free trade. The EU keeps quite high external tariffs on a lot of things, especially in order to protect French agriculture
You're wrong: https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...
The EU justifies the high membership fees for the rich members by the benefits those rich members get - the poorer EU countries get invested in, get developed, some of their people go live in the richer countries and contribute there, but in the end, the country evolves a lot and becomes a significant market for EU goods and contributor. Point in case, Poland, the Baltics, Spain, Romania. France has benefited from Romanian development a lot, and from Romanians when Romania was less developed. It's literally a win win win win.
I don't think you can say the benefits the rich members get are their fees being sent to poor members. That's not a benefit to the people who live in the rich countries, that's a price levied on membership. Which is why the last time the EU was seriously debated at a national level (Brexit) nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
I'm not sure what relevance your link has to what I said, by the way. The Mercosur agreement only happened because the EU was able to keep agricultural tariffs in place:
https://policy.trade.ec.europa.eu/eu-trade-relationships-cou...
> For sensitive products like beef, poultry or sugar, in particular, access to the EU market will be permanently limited through gradually implemented quotas. The EU will grant very limited access to its market to imports of agri-food products.
Moreover, a bilateral safeguard clause can be applied in case increased imports from Mercosur cause - or even only threaten to cause - serious injury to the relevant EU sectors.
For the first time, this safeguard clause also covers imports under tariff rate quotas.
The agreement does not give duty-free access to Mercosur beef. It will allow 99,000 tonnes of Mercosur beef to enter the EU market with a 7.5% duty. 55% of the quota will consist of fresh or chilled meat and 45% of lower-value frozen meat.
> I don't think you can say the benefits the rich members get are their fees being sent to poor members. That's not a benefit to the people who live in the rich countries, that's a price levied on membership. Which is why the last time the EU was seriously debated at a national level (Brexit) nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement. You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
The way you phrase this suggests you're considering it from the wrong perspective. What you're arguing against doesn't even seem to be present in my reading of the comment you're replying to.
The membership benefit isn't the fees, any more than your Amazon Prime (etc.) membership's benefit is the fee.
The benefit of the fee to rich countries (i.e. net spenders) is that these other countries, the ones that you're sending money to, are going to align their laws with yours, have a cheap workforce willing to to supply you with labour at a lower cost than your own citizens would otherwise, and that they are now a stable destination for any investment opportunities with your own capital precisely because they're getting integrated with your own economy and law.
Specifically this:
> nobody attempted to defend the membership fees as anything other than a purely transactional arrangement.
We did. You may not have heard it, but we did.
> You certainly can't claim that immigration is a membership benefit because a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
Incorrect. Closest you get is that there's a scheme called the "Blue Card" (modelled after the US green card), that applies to everyone except Ireland and Denmark (and before Brexit, the UK): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Card_(European_Union)
But each member state gets to set quotas on how many Blue Cards they accept, and can also open up rules for other routes into their countries.
The comment I replied to said this:
> The EU justifies the high membership fees for the rich members by the benefits those rich members get - the poorer EU countries get invested in
Which is just another way of saying "the benefit of paying the fees is that someone else gets them". That's not a benefit and membership fees aren't investments (you don't own anything as a result of paying them).
Same for the rest of this thread. Other countries can align their laws without being given money, and should if those laws are better than their own. It's not a "benefit" to be paying them to fix their own legal systems. Cheap immigrant labour isn't a benefit to the workers in the country, minimum wage laws still apply anyway so the benefits even to rich people are limited, and you don't have to pay foreign countries to attract immigrants from them. They come regardless of what money their government is receiving. In fact big transfer payments make it less likely that they will want to migrate, not more. Finally, countries generally try to be stable locations for investment regardless of EU membership or receiving transfer payments.
> We did. You may not have heard it, but we did.
I don't think anyone did. If they did, then this thread doesn't reflect well on what they must have been saying because not a single argument in it for why fees are a "benefit" make any sense. It's common sense that fees are never a benefit, which is why free trade zones don't normally charge for membership. In fact AFAIK only the EU does that and that's because it's primarily an ideological project that needs huge sums of money for its other goals: free trade is just a carrot-cum-stick used to get countries to go along with it.
> Incorrect. Closest you get is that there's a scheme called the "Blue Card"
The Blue Card is an EU-level scheme with rules set by the Commission, and it only applies to people with "higher professional qualifications" and whose salary is higher than average. Obviously, nobody needs to pay billions in membership fees for the privilege of having random visa scheme imposed on them, any country that wants to can set up such a scheme itself. It's even named after a non-EU document. There is no immigration benefit to being an EU member. If you want to attract lots of migrants from poor EU countries, you can do that easily outside as well.
> Other countries can align their laws without being given money, and should if those laws are better than their own.
"Better" presumes something which does not always exist. Sometimes "aligned" is itself the improvement — but aligned to whom? Why should, e.g. Bulgaria pick alignment with Parisian interests over alignment with Moscow's?
But also, mere alignment is not sufficient: note that customs checks were introduced immediately after Brexit, because the requirement isn't simply to be aligned, but to have the force of international agreement over maintaining that alignment.
> It's not a "benefit" to be paying them to fix their own legal systems.
Compare and contrast with where this hasn't happened — there's a huge growth opportunity in many African nations since well before the end of the colonial era, so much of that potential is held back precisely because the legal systems there aren't able to prevent corruption. Making the investment in the legal system would make it possible to invest in the nations there, which would benefit both those nations (by having lots of money pouring in that doesn't immediately turn into a corrupt official's holiday home) and also the investors (who get a return on that investment).
> Cheap immigrant labour isn't a benefit to the workers in the country,
Oh yes it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect
> minimum wage laws still apply anyway so the benefits even to rich people are limited,
That benefits both sides of the equation: the workers from the poorer country get a boost, you get more people willing to work at (or near) that level.
> and you don't have to pay foreign countries to attract immigrants from them. They come regardless of what money their government is receiving.
Only when their qualifications are going to be recognised, when their health insurance options are valid, etc. — it isn't enough to just know how to be an electrician, you also need the local insurance company to sell you public liability insurance.
> In fact big transfer payments make it less likely that they will want to migrate, not more.
Only once the investments have actually converted into a real boost to the economy, thus paying for themselves.
> Finally, countries generally try to be stable locations for investment regardless of EU membership or receiving transfer payments.
The EU is a mechanism for doing that; that it isn't the only mechanism is irrelevant.
> not a single argument in it for why fees are a "benefit" make any sense
You're misreading this, I think. Fees pay for the benefits, they're not the benefits themselves.
They one of the things that makes EU a place of growth. It's like all the discussions about USAID, except on your doorstep. Or, for that matter, any investment scheme your own government pays for out of taxes which are spent entirely within your own country, like highways — I benefit from the existence of a highway network, despite having only owned a car for a week total and that nearly a decade ago, this is like that.
> Please re-read what I wrote, as this answer doesn't seem to make sense in context.
Could say the same to you, on this, given you've ignored that:
(1) The Blue Card scheme is not used by all EU nations
(2) Each nation can set its own quotas for how many are issued — "As of August 2020, European countries vary wildly in the number of issued Blue Cards. Cyprus, Greece and Netherlands have not yet issued any cards," from my link
(3) Each nation has its own additional visa scheme entirely separate from this
(4) The Blue Card scheme was not "imposed", it was a voluntary streamlining (see #1)
Your previous comment claimed, falsely:
> a country can set its visa policy to attract however many migrants it wants if it's outside the EU, but not if it's inside.
The countries absolutely can. And do.
https://www.dw.com/en/german-immigration-policy-whats-changi...
I was showing you that the closest thing you had, the blue card, still wasn't what you claimed.
I took the bit about re-reading out of my post as it was unnecessarily snarky. Still, we're clearly not seeing eye to eye here at all. Every "benefit" of the fees posited in this thread a country can have for free, other than the EU dropping tariffs.
If a non-EU government wants to give foreign aid to Poland, it can.
If it wants to invest in Romania (normal definition of invest), it can.
If it wants to enable mass immigration of min-wage workers, it can. (and the UK government is doing so right now).
If it wants to align its laws with those of the EU, it can.
Not a single benefit in this thread is actually a benefit. EU membership fees are mandatory foreign aid European countries are expected to pay as a price of not being tariffed, and that's an artificial "benefit" that nobody else in the world charges for and that the EU also doesn't charge non-European countries for.
I'm not going to get into an argument about who benefits from cheap labour, it's a different debate and well worn. On your other points:
• The EU isn't a place of growth. Last year it managed GDP growth of 1%, the year before it was 0.4%. The US managed near 3% each time. It's scary that people living inside it aren't aware of this. EU growth should be higher than the US given that it contains countries still catching up from the communist era.
• Blue Card is mandatory under EU law. It's "not used" by a few countries because it was forced on them with the loophole of there being no minimum issuance quotas, not because it's a voluntary scheme they didn't choose to sign up for.
But once again, we seem to be talking at opposites here. What claim are you responding to with this Blue Card stuff? Is it the "not if it's inside" bit? Because to repeat, Blue Card doesn't let you attract as many migrants as you want if you're inside the EU - it has a legal requirement for higher-than-average salaries - and obviously it's not a benefit of paying membership fees, which is where this thread started.
Even the "bad countries" like Greece have bought a lot of German stuff: cars, weapons...
https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/athen/20974.pdf
When your model is that he is a decapitation strike (https://archive.is/1xkxK) against the US, everything makes perfect sense.
Blockcades are an act of war. They are strategically useful to disable a foreign military through robbing it of supplies it needs.
These tariffs are having a blockade like effect by cutting off trade. Does it matter that much whether trading is ceased due to foreign ships blocking trade routes or a foreign backed coup making us do it to ourselves "willingly?"
Our military is absolutely failing to live up to their oath to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic.
> Our military is absolutely failing to live up to their oath to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic.
You guys voted to have the republican being the majority in both the house and the senate, get the presidency and also, indirectly, the supreme court. That is democracy in action. If the military intervened right now it would just look like a coup. You can't really be surprised that the people you put in power do what they say they were going to do.
Now if they try to do something like the January 6 again, that is something else.
[flagged]
That article reads of hypothetical heat dreams without evidence to base the premise on
> Our military is absolutely failing to live up to their oath to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic.
A good portion of them are probably cheering.
That being said, even for those with humanity, empathy and a conscience, a coup against the elected president is quite a serious thing to do, even if he is treasonous and obviously trampling human rights, constitution, separation of powers and being allowed to do so by the other branches of government that are supposed to be the checks and balances.
Also, standing by and allowing the U.S. to be destroyed from within is quite a serious thing to do when it goes against their oaths.
It will be interesting to compare the UK and EU cases, as well as China. EU responded immediately with counter-tarriffs on goods worth about as much as those taxed by the US. UK and China grumbled but said they don't want to escalate. These are both in different ways similar to the EU case (China because it's big, UK because it's a European "ally", whatever this means nowadays).
The very limited evidence so far, from Canada, seems to suggest that immediate retaliation works better.
> UK because it's a European "ally", whatever this means nowadays
If we wander through a typical supermarket, there'll be very little produce (if any) from the U.S. - most if it will be from europe or asia.
I was trying to get a historical sense of what happens after tariffs.
From what I could find, the modern example is the EU tariffs on Chinese solar panels. The outcome was negotiation.
I think trade negotiation is the best outcome we can hope for. Tariffs are going to really hurt jobs if they persist.
Isn’t this what trump wants? He’s already delayed twice and he always talks about a “deal” but he starts with a shock strategy. Someone told me he wrote this in his book
Its only a matter of time for EU, Canada, Mexico, Australia, China, basically everyone to sit together at a table and harmonize counter tariffs in a collective action. 20% more on Canadian steel? everyone else bumps all tariffs in unison.
I wonder if Trump has ever read an economics book? He seems to be approaching this all in a rather counterproductive manner. I'm reminded of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
I was reading the HN thing on the potato famine yesterday and I think it was the same idea - they Brits didn't want to starve a million Irish to death, they just had this free markets are great idea and were to stupid to change. Likewise Trump doesn't actually want to wreck the US and global economies but has this tarrifs are great idea and same thing.
That a country whose currency is world's reserve currency somehow concluded that they're cheated on, wow. By the time the FED balance sheet will reach pre March 2020 levels, we will be living in Back to the Future II.
Aren't we already living in the Biff got rich timeline?
Other countries stashing dollars is basically pure seignorage profits for the US. And these countries using the dollar as a long term storage of value is geopolitical insurance. This makes no sense unless you read it as the Trump administration sabotaging US interests.
> This makes no sense unless you read it as the Trump administration sabotaging US interests.
Occam's razor - they are all morons.
Yeah, assume no malice when stupidity can be postulated. Caveat: intentional stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
This isn't aiming to be overdramatic, but still there's interesting comparisons with the arch-populist, Hitler. His main quality was really that he captivated crowds, his resentments resonated with his voters, and he had no inhibitions to do the unthinkable. Without in any way comparing Trump to Hitler in other ways, in these three specific things they are alike.
Reading about Hitler's rise to power, it's obvious he kind of bumbled his way into it. There were many people for whom it was convenient, he did many random reckless things that should have been disastrous but somehow he made them into success - for example rearming the Ruhr, or frankly invading Poland with the French army right on its western border.
Hitler was incredibly lucky for a long time, and that's why he managed to do so much damage. But there wasn't really a clever master plan to it. He had hateful ramblings in his head and acted rashly on them. It was sheer luck and shock effect that he wasn't spat out after just a few heads in politics.
I suspect this is also what Trump is doing. And as in 1930s, for a while, everyone else has too much to lose to stand up to it. But unless he will have Hitler's luck for just as long, eventually the random lashings will end badly for him.
Of course Hitler's luck ran out in the end too, with him dead, Germany on its knees and split into two, and German imperialism more or less dead.
> But there wasn't really a clever master plan to it. He had hateful ramblings in his head and acted rashly on them.
Hitler had a fairly consistent worldview and sets of goals going all the way back to Mein Kampf, even though he didn't know how to get there from the start. I don't think this can be said about Trump.
Yeah, I'm not claiming it's an all-encompassing analogy.
Though you could argue Trump was always going on about tariffs, even as a supposed Democrat. Also Hitler's views radicalized dramatically over time. Or maybe more accurately, the ideas were constant, but their scope and ruthlessness expanded.
Au contraire, project 2025 is very detailed and has clear paths to reach their (the heritage foundation, conservatives at large) goals.
It’s just that the goal sucks for everyday people. Why would these powerful people want goals that suck? Because the converse of it sucking for you is it getting better for them - meaning, money is being siphoned.
I think Trump is following a plan as best as he can given the state of our economy and government. I think the fact the plan is so bad that it doesn’t even feel intentional IS intentional. The plan sucks because it’s meant to.
> Au contraire, project 2025 is very detailed and has clear paths to reach their (the heritage foundation, conservatives at large) goals.
I agree, but these weren't Trump's goals that he's had for 10 years or something like in Hitler's case. It's a plan by the Heritage Foundation that somehow got Trump to sign off on it.
> That a country whose currency is world's reserve currency somehow concluded that they're cheated on
Thankfully there are alternative currencies that can be used for that nowadays.
> Thankfully there are alternative currencies that can be used for that nowadays.
Iraq and Libya have tried, and look what's happened to them ...
The main reason countries are using the USD as the reserve currency is because if they don't, the "Free World TM" will bomb them back to the stone age.
This argument has always struck me as silly to conspiracy theory. The EU has its own reserve currency!
The current state of the aforementioned countries would prove otherwise, I'm afraid.
But the missing link is the reserve currency question, rather than .. all the other disputes involved!
Which would those be?
Euro to start with, it's quite stable (and even appreciates against the dollar).
Depending on risk profile, desire for diversification and acceptance of variability, swiss francs, british pounds, chinese yuan, indian rupee, japanese yen, south korean won, etc. can also be used.
> Euro to start with, it's quite stable (and even appreciates against the dollar).
There's not enough euro issuance to replace Treasuries, and issuing more (particularly at EU level where it would really help) is super, super controversial.
Not really. You have seen what the US (under multiple administrations) does to countries that try to switch away from the dollar. Even China and Russia have issues trading in their own currencies with each other - to name the top two "enemies" of the US. What options do you think smaller countries have?
The issues these countries have are largely self-imposed. For example, China's struggles with international trade have a lot to do with their capital controls.
Small countries would probably have an easier time of it because they can just trade however they like without having to mollify their own bureaucrats. The traders will figure it out. The threat of US intervention is real, but I wouldn't be certain about whether it gets more or less pressing for smaller countries. The US probably won't even notice what they are doing if they keep quiet enough. Oil trading would be a different story though.
> Even China and Russia have issues trading in their own currencies with each other
Because EU and US sanction Chinese banks and company that do that. What does that have to do with the exact currency? they’d have the same issue if they wanted to use dollars or euros (to answer your question € is the other option smaller countries have).
I'm so glad that a spat at the upper echelons of governments are going to cause untold misery for millions across the world for... no discernable benefit? Wonderful news.
They like the misery. And it's what their constituents want and voted for. People really underestimate the angry pro-misery constituency.
> governments
Why the plural? This is something that was very much US made and other countries have no choice but to react. This is not something caused by multiple "upper echelons of governments".
This is something caused by exactly one government - US one. What did you expect, other countries to instantly give up their economy and soverenity the moment Trump said "I hate you and seek to harm you economically"? Especially since he added multiple times "and I want to annex you, take away pieces of your territory" and then added completely baseless accusations as a reason for it?
Personally I didn't expect anything, I'm British. My point is more that it's economic ping-pong beyond the control of almost everyone except governments.
The US government is specifically to blame here though, of course.
>no discernable benefit?
No discernable benefit to you maybe, but every crisis ends up benefiting those at the top as it always leads to a wealth transfer either during the crash phase, or the recovery phase, or both. See 2009 crash, Covid, etc.
Your leadership doesn't work to serve you, they work to serve themselves and the elite. People keep calling Trump a stupid bafoon but how come this stupid bafoon keeps getting richer and richer all the time if he's as stupid as people think him to be?
To whit, how much are you willing to bet that after Trump's mandate is over in 4 years time, both Trump, Elon and all his other cronies, will walk away with a bigger net worth than the one they came in? So no, what you see as stupidity now on the news is actually a carefully orchestrated multi year enrichment plan for the elite covered in bread and circus to distract the plebs, that will become evident as time goes on and events unfold.
True. Sorry, I thought that was implied!
There is nothing left down here to be vacuumed up, as we probably agreed by now that trickling down doesn't happen.
Maybe that's the Trump plan?
1. Launch TRUMP and MELANIA cryptocurrencies to get a few hundred millions of dollars of cash. (and possibly also get some cash from the "First Buddy" Elon Musk)
2. Announce tariffs, and in general cause chaos, crashing the stock market.
3. Buy the dip.
4. Revoke all tariffs.
5. Profit.
Don't forget shorts.
Perhaps you missed this, but emperor says that we will be so rich soon that we won't know what to spend all our money on. Just hold on. /s
He's right, the problem is everyone mistakenly thinks they're one of "we"
Everyone is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire. That's why they are voting like they are millionaires.
Humans are not good a thinking.
>The proposed target products include industrial and agricultural products, such as steel and aluminium, textiles, home appliances, plastics, poultry, beef, eggs, dairy, sugar and vegetables.
Why tariff such low margin US goods and not high margin US services like software? US doesn't export much goods, as most of the bulk of their economy is tech, finance and services not exporting cheap merch in shipping crates like Asia. How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
How is a tarif on US textiles or eggs supposed to be a deterrent? When was the last time you saw US eggs or clothes in the EU shelves? Even in the US, less than 10% of the textiles are domestically made.
The list isn't given, but I've heard in both the Canada and China cases the tariffs are targeted at "red state" products.
Original press release: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_...
This seems to be the list: https://circabc.europa.eu/ui/group/e9d50ad8-e41f-4379-839a-f...
Edit: a skim of the list suggests it's pretty broad. Agricultural products, wood, clothing, wine, polythene. There's an insane number of very slightly different product categories, no wonder compliance is so expensive.
That doesn't answer my question: "Why tariff such low margin US goods " that aren't major imports in the EU anyway or major parts of the US economy?
Them being red state products is a weak argument that sees no base of argument or success.
> Them being red state products is a weak argument that sees no base of argument or success.
Because Trump (presumably) listens to Rep Senators/Congresspeople. If he doesn't, then making his voters worse off is a good way to get them to complain.
That's the logic anyway, who knows if it'll work.
Tariffs are bad for anyone who needs to import, which is why the US stock market doesn't like the US having tariffs; the EU doesn't want to raise them either because EU doesn't want to damage the parts of its own economy dependent on imports, it's only raising them at all because it wants to put political pressure on the US to prevent damage to those parts of its economy dependent on exports.
By focussing tariffs on only the places that politically support Trump, they get the political impact with the smallest currently-possible negative side-effects.
How can you even tariff multinational companies where nothing is transferred between one country to another. Although I think they could tax the company on moving the money out of country. So e.g. whatever money google got from ads from European country can only be spent in Europe else they face heavy tariff.
Republicans do not care about blue states economies and prosperity. They are happy when liberals suffer and would be happy engineering it. They might care if red states economy goes down, because that harms their election chances.
Red states voted for this, because they wanted other people to suffer and thought it will bring them prosperity. It makes sense to target that part of america.
> How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
What would be the plan exactly here? These services are being sold by European-based companies and being served from European territory (eg AWS Frankfurt). There’s no import happening here.
In general it makes sense to tariff something that you can replace. E.g. tariff American eggs, so suddenly it makes more sense to import them from Peru.
If you put a 100% import tax on Windows license, the only result is that the EU customers are now paying double the price for Windows. It’s very unlikely it’ll result in people switching to an alternative system.
Same with AWS - even if you’d tariff all American cloud companies, what result would you expect? Sure, in X years maybe you’d grow an EU cloud company, but until then you’d make every European business using cloud very uncompetitive globally.
You use tariffs to prop up the companies you already have. You could put “tariffs” on Apple Music, so people would move to European Spotify.
1) Because the purpose is not really to make money from tariffs (only trump think that is a thing). The purpose is to encourage people to buy replacements from other countries/your own country/union. People arent going to switch from AWS to Hetzner just because a temporary tariff. But they could easily buy steel/corn/etc from another place while tariffs are in place
2)Software is very hard to tariff because often you can set up a company inside the other country and sell the software from there. And then it never crosses the border. Same can't be done with beef. It has to cross a border.
How do you tariff a software service ? Tariffs are applied at import ? Are you paying US software if its hosted in EU datacenter by EU subsidiary ? Or if software licence is sold by EU subsidiary ? The concept makes no sense to me.
>How do you tariff a software service ? Tariffs are applied at import ? Are you paying US software if its hosted in EU datacenter by EU subsidiary?
If there's a political will and your position is strong enough, a scheme / legal formula is trivial to find.
Even something like "5% of what you make off showing ads to European users" would be enough.
Can add any arbitrary qualifier like "if your main base of operations is outside the EU" - which could hold whether you're a EU subsidiary or not.
That's not a tariff that's a tax. If you start taxing foreign entities different from local you are violating all sorts of treaties and depending on how the laws are written it could be unconstitutional discrimination (once you start talking about foreign ownership etc.)
That still does not make sense.
Do you block your own citizens from accessing sites hosted in foreign countries if those sites/companies don’t comply with your foreign law?
Do you arrest your citizens for accessing those sites anyways or use VPNs to circumvent blocking?
And there are dozens of other questions that raises, but you’re talking about what most people describe as totalitarian states.
>Do you block your own citizens from accessing sites hosted in foreign countries if those sites/companies don’t comply with your foreign law?
Sure happens, including in the EU. There are some european anti-copyright-theft laws for example, and local ISPs are forced to block some warez/pirated ebook etc websites (you can bypass via VPN, but the "official" gateways/DNS block them).
>Do you arrest your citizens for accessing those sites anyways or use VPNs to circumvent blocking?
Not at the moment. And the logistics do not make it very easy (can't track each individual). But you can sure fine any commercial company accessing such sites, prohibit state infrastructure and any company doing work with your state from using them, etc.
I'm not sure what the objection is. Do you mean "does not make sense" from a democratic/open society standpoint (as if european countries are a bastion of that, and such moves are beneath the legislators)? Or that it "does not make sense" from a technical aspect? For the latter, when there's a will, there's a way.
I don't agree that it's "trivial". The devil will be in the detail and could drag out in the courts depending on the language definitions. Quite apart from the fact that anything dreamt up at short notice is going to have shortcomings, tariffs are much easier impose when you're transporting physical objects across physical borders.
I'm reminded of how the EU had to sue Ireland to get them to properly enforce their own tax rules against Apple.
Yeah, fair.
I will note (as an Irish person who's followed this case), that it wasn't about this specific case (and the first deal was in 1991, when Apple was not in a good place) rather it was to demonstrate to multinationals that we'd support them if the EU decided there was an issue.
It was a signalling thing rather than a principles thing.
Also note that Apple last got that deal in 2007, before the iPhone was launched.
Kind of like Vat is applied now - you’re from a given country, you pay more per month for a subscription
Software companies just open subsidiaries in the target country and sell services through the subsidiaries. The only thing this does is make it harder to move profit to the home country (and there are ways sound this) and add a lot of accounting work
But software/services are sold by EU companies (subsidiary)
If it's a subsidiary, there's a way to assosiate with the parent company.
Sure, but then the other side can do the same.
VW producing cars in their factories in the USA? Put a tariff on these cars as the parent company is based in Europe.
It’s really not that simple, as e.g. big tech has their development centering the EU as well - so these products are at least partially produced here.
If you want to write some custom rules, sure, but then you’re really opening a pandora box. Technically you could just add 100% tax just on vehicles that have Tesla in their name. Try making such moves and look as investors immediately drop any trust in your countries political system (and currency).
>Sure, but then the other side can do the same
That's expected. The other side already imposes some tarrifs (as did the EU - it's BS that Trump's tarrifs to EU are some unprecedented move, the EU already had tarrifs of US cars and other products).
The problem we're discussing (at least according to a parent comment) is that the US has a lot more "digital services" products than actual physical products where EU tarrifs are currently applied.
So, what's discussed is how to tax those (and how to sidestep "but it's a European subsidiary, not a US company" hurdle).
So, sure the US can counter EU digital services by also using the same sidestepping. But it's not like EU has many such worth talking about. All the big players are from the US (Facebook, Google, Amazon, MS, etc).
It's a nice accounting trick, but that's all it is.
What do you mean by that? That’s not how VAT works.
something I learned recently: payments to foreign bank accounts in Brazil have an automatic 25% tax imposed regardless of the purpose of the transfer. This seems to applied to companies of a certain size, or moving certain volume of transfer, but still.
Toll-wires
Exactly what I was thinking. We need a great firewall of EU that is charging for packets crossing the Atlantic
Of course, what is needed to preserve democracy and freedom is *checks notes* ideas from totalitarian dictatorships.
The US is a massive meat exporter [0] and has put a lot of energy into getting import deals etc. with partner countries. The most famous one is with Japan, but the EU probably has it's range of agreements.
Taxing US meat is hitting right where it needs to, with very limited impact on he local population. France for instance will just increase it's domestic sales, and other EU countries can also turn to neighbor to get their meat.
Software and electronics are a different beast and a lot more impacting in that regard.
[0] https://www.mda.state.mn.us/sites/default/files/inline-files...
> How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
Microsoft, Apple and Amazon all sell from EU countries, not US. My AWS and Azure Bills are EU based, not US based...
If a steel company has a EU subsidiary it doesn't absolve it from import tariffs. Same with everything else.
When AWS has its HQ and development in the EU it's another matter, but so far it's just a bunch of salespeople.
How do you calculate the proportion of value coming from:
- data centers operated in the EU
- R&D done in the Europe (almost all major tech companies employ lots of developers etc. across Europe)
What if European companies have offices and hire workers in the US? Do you tax them too?
What EU could do that is double down and regulating US tech companies and charging them even more multi-billion “fines”.
What proportion of it would be able to autonomously operate if North America disappears tomorrow? Zero. That means 100% of value comes from the USA.
This. The IP comes from the US and most of the profits go to the US.
Tariffs on products and services with no realistic alternatives in the short term would simply be a tax on your own businesses and citizens. You don't want to do that. It's better to impose tariffs on something inconsequential. Something where alternatives exist and you wouldn't mind if that part of trade just stopped completely.
Without any evidence or education or experience whatsoever I would assume they target swing states and key voter demographics?
> How about a 100% tariff on Office 365, Windows, AWS, Azure, etc?
+ Apple products, + google (& their ads), + Facebook (& their ads), + Netflix, + all Hollywood film and television output.
Funnily enough all the money everyone outside the US spends on these things is not included in the "trade deficit" that is "the problem".
> Apple products
Which would effectively have to be implemented as a tariff on products manufactured in China and Taiwan and imported and sold by an Irish company.
It’s impossible to do that without some massive legal changes which are politically infeasible and would also hurt European economy.
Tax the repatriation of the profits to the US and/or the "royalty payments" paid to wipe out any profits that would arrise in the Irish company.
If the US sees the world as zero sum, as they are entitled to, it is time we stopped accomadating a globalised tax system.
> Tax the repatriation of the profits to the US and/or the "royalty payments" paid to wipe out any profits that would arrise in the Irish company.
This doesn't happen anymore (the royalty payments), now the revenue is booked in Ireland, with consequent impacts on their tax collection.
They found exactly $26B worth of goods.
Also afaik the only way to implement tariffs on packets is through lawyers attacking an arbitrary set of big enough players that aren't sufficiently globalized that they would be taxing the EU's own productivity, and any attempt to levy that inherently appears selective and thus resembles cronyism.
That said, now that I've explained how irrational it is, I could totally see trump doing that as he will seemingly take any form of pretext to enact cronyism.
Can you tariff software? How exactly would that work? Does a legal framework and system which would allow that even exist?
How do you determine where exactly is software “manufactured”?
It's also because it's low impact. How much textile or eggs are really getting exported from the US to the EU? The EU isn't dumb, they don't want to sabotage their economy just to retaliate.
please don’t make my aws bill even higher than it already is :/
/s
so who is imposing biggest tarrifs? and who imposed biggest tarrifs 2 years ago?
If you're trying to make a point then you should spell it out. Because I don't understand what you're getting at.
i am asking which has the highest tarrifs? because isnt it the case (and im asking) that for a very long time, the EU has had tarrifs for US goods, while the US did not, or had much lower?
As a EU citizen I really wish we weren't stupid enough to impose counter tariffs.
Just because the Trump administration is punishing (ultimately) its citizens for buying non-US goods doesn't mean I want the EU to punish me as well.
I prefer not to buy any US goods when not absolutely necessary. No need to support a country that wants annex a EU country.
Unfortunely we are a bit compromised in what concerns computing, we need to get back to cold war ecosystem of computing hardware, operating systems and programming languages.
Do tariffs targeting US goods apply to products manufactured in China or Taiwan (by American companies)? Why would they?
Deal. Americans can have Windows and MacOs and Europeans will have Linux. It's a fair deal no take-backsies
We also need to sort out the hardware where Linux runs.
Exactly, fuck US-products as long as Agent Orange is in power. I never really cared about where my goods come from, but suddenly I do after a month of #47.
Good that the US do not want to annex any EU countries, then ...
... because, if you are referring to Greenland, then are not in the EU and have again just voted for their Parliament and sent a clear message that they don't want to be controlled by Denmark, either (not part of the US, either, just independent with possibly closer ties with the US).
And in any case, this is typical Trumpian bluster. Possibly the aim is to make independence happen because that would suit the US.
Well you’d (average EU citizen) could be losing your job because European companies would lose a significant proportion of sales to the US while still having to compete with American companies locally.
I welcome companies in my area having to compete with US companies. The more competition the better for me and my fellow consumers.
Here I thought I was the last person who considered free trade a good thing
As a EU citizen I have the complete opposite view, why should we be impacted by lower exports due to American tariffs while still letting their products access our market without repercussions?
Even more, none of the tariffs imposed on the USA will impact your consumption directly, there are alternatives to them and with the price increase you'll naturally choose those alternatives that are cheaper. Nothing being levied a tariff is a product that only the USA exports to the EU.
> [...] why should we be impacted by lower exports due to American tariffs while still letting their products access our market without repercussions?
You'll be impacted by lower exports regardless. Reciprocal tariffs do not change that fact.
My question to you is: why would I, as a consumer, want to make certain US exports more expensive for me to buy? Because the US does the same to their own consumers? How does that make any sense?
These tariffs are highly focussed on hurting red states. So in practice that means:
- Alcohol: Are you really buying American Alcohol when you live in EU???
- Harley-Davidson: Do you plan to buy one the next few years?
- Jeans: I'm sure there will be plenty of choice in all price ranges.
EU did the same thing in the past when Trump was president. It's really a 'been there done that' type of thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Trump_tariffs#European