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Court Rules That Imported Solar Panels Are Bad For US Manufacturing (theverge.com)
The International Trade Commission has ruled that American companies are being hurt by cheap solar panels from overseas, providing an opportunity for President Donald Trump to tax imports from countries like China. The Verge reports: Today's unanimous decision ruled that the companies SolarWorld Americans and Suniva were struggling financially not because of their own poor management, but because they couldn't compete with cheap panels from countries like China, Mexico, and South Korea. Suniva is now suggesting import duties of 40 cents a watt for solar cells, and a floor price of 78 cents a watt for panels. (Right now, the average floor price, worldwide, for panels is about 32 cents.) The Solar Energy Industries Association warned that implementing these suggestions could end up doubling the price of solar, thus destroying demand and causing Americans to lose their jobs.
Are Mexico, Canada and South Korea dumping solar panels for less than cost of production? Are they using slave labor? Do employees work in hazardous conditions?
If not please go fuck yourselves.
South Korea is NOT a low-cost locale ... labor there is surely more expensive than someplace like Alabama.
Median salary in S. Korea: $29,125
Median salary in Alabama: $39,180
Both figures are the result of a 10 second Google search.
Disclaimer: I think import restrictions on solar panels are idiotic.
Even if you made solar power illegal, it would do absolutely nothing to get the coal miners jobs back. The major reason coal has been killed in the USA is because fracking and other unconventional forms of extraction have made generating power using natural gas more attractive than using coal.
Correct, but irrelevant to GP's point. Protip: sometimes words have more than one meaning.
Uh no. Most countries do not build their own pickup trucks. They might have pickup trucks built there, but the most popular brands in the world (in order) are Ford, Chevrolet, and Toyota. Essentially all the pickup trucks on the planet are made by one of those three companies.
International popularity of the F-150, Ranger, and Silverado is massive. I don't know where this myth about American trucks not selling worldwide came from, but it is bullshit. Our pickup trucks are the most popular in the world, because they are the best. People talk a lot of shit about Toyotas but they don't build anything made to do work at the level of an F-Series or even a Silverado. The next step up from a full-size, full-fat American pickup truck like a 3/4 ton or 1 ton diesel is a much heavier vehicle, like a Unimog.
As for the chicken tax harming American auto buyers, it really hasn't. In fact, arguably, it's done the opposite. In the recent lull in American mid-size truck production, people bought plenty of Japanese mid-size trucks which were actually produced here in the USA. The Chicken Tax actually has helped preserve or even create American jobs! The only vehicles to which it applies are light trucks, and even then only ones for cargo and not for passengers. We've got a 2006 Sprinter T1N and Mercedes has to drop the front subframe and ship the vehicle and the engine+front suspension separately to dodge the tax. But passenger vans just get sent over fully completed, even though they're the same vehicle with holes cut out and windows slapped into 'em. The truth about the chicken tax is that it is not arduous to dodge around its requirements, and also that its requirements only affect a minority of buyers.
There is one group of people who were harmed slightly by the chicken tax: people who bought Toyota pickups before about 2015 or 2016. I'm not sure which year it was, but in one of those years they finally started sharing drivetrain parts between the HiLux (the international model of pickup) and the American pickups. Parts sharing is important to parts availability, and the HiLux parts in question were also stronger.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"