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White House Announces Tech Tariffs, Investment Restrictions on China (axios.com)
The White House announced this morning a plan to levy a 25% tariff on $50 billion worth of Chinese tech goods -- with the exact list to be announced next month -- as well as tech investment limits for Chinese nationals and entities. From a report: It also plans to pursue litigation at the World Trade Organization relating to Chinese intellectual property abuses. The big picture: It's a show of force that has surprised some sources close to the White House who believed Trump would defer any aggression towards China until after the North Korea summit. A source close to the White House who has a keen understanding of the internal dynamics on China told me that this is an "initial move in a long negotiation that shows the Chinese Trump is very serious -- and a move to balance the criticism that he was soft on ZTE."
Yes, he wants to be the exporter--the one threatened in the trade relationship by the capacity of the importer to just go to the next country over and pull the plug on your economy--so he's willing to harm America by reducing the benefit we get from lower-cost goods.
Mostly, he and Bernie Sanders don't understand economics, and they're projecting their failed grasp of macroeconomics onto a nation.
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And "with the exact list to be announced next month "
China don't have to worry, next month they will list what and when is going to be effectif hten, China will buy another hotel to Trump and every sanction willbe drop !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
I'm no lover of Trump's policies. He's an authoritarian ass and enabler to state violence (i.e. "rough them up a bit").
But I can't bring myself to be upset about this tariff, and think it's a shame that it can't be 100%. Yes. 100%, full cost of the item. People throw too many things out -- I've seen perfectly good electronics on the street due to a damaged power cord or similar minor issue.
We've become a throw-away society where "used" and "repair" are dirty words, and which produces an unsustainable amount of toxic, poorly recyclable e-waste. Trump may not mean to be an environmentalist, but raising the cost of dirt-cheap disposable electronics is ultimately an environmental good.
Remember the 80s and 90s, where people kept their TVs for 10-15 years, then handed them down to their college student children?
Better yet, fix what you have or keep it longer instead of generating more toxic e-waste because shiny and new! No one needs a new phone or TV every year. The difference between 1k and 4k is basically invisible to most people at actual viewing distance.
I'm thinking you don't understand economics, either. The middle class spending their money doesn't make them wealthier. Owning things doesn't improve your standard-of-living, unless you base the quality of your life on how many material things you own. It may grow low paying retail jobs, but not wealth, except for the 1% of course.
The tech community in general is more educated and mere diverse (in some ways) than the general population and hence much less will to support trump. Plus tech CEOs are not psychologically the types to kiss the kings ring so yes, he is about to screw tech for both fun and profit. Probably he will use as leverage to extort more personal gain out of Beijing.
True, although we prohibit the sale of pirate IP here, so they can't export their stolen IP to America (and other countries operating under certain international treaties). Strengthening these international IP agreements was one of the big things for which people attacked the TPP: we don't like the Berne Convention (I'd rather limit copyright to 14 years, or some such).
My point is importing cheap stuff from China actually makes our economy more-powerful and raises our standards of living. People think it just means jobs go away and we get poorer somehow.
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Owning things doesn't improve your standard-of-living, unless you base the quality of your life on how many material things you own.
You work 40 hours. You trade that labor for things. You can get a limited amount of stuff in trade--that's purchasing power.
Food. Housing. Clothing. Your car. High-speed Internet. Healthcare. These are things for which you need buying power.
Lowering the cost of goods and services means your purchasing power extends further: instead of choosing between a car and healthcare, you can have both.
Literally nothing else is standard-of-living except what you can buy for your time worked.
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It's a hoarding/bunker mentality versus a focus on quality of life.
On one side, there's the folks who want to keep economic and physical resources on hand and maintain and develop manufacturing capability to ensure self sufficiency.
On the other, you've got the folks who want to enjoy as many of the available ancient vises and modern conveniences as possible.
Both sides have good arguments supporting them. On one side, what happens if international trade goes to hell? And on the other, why live like a Great Depression survivor when that crisis may never come?
As with most things, the most successful strategy is probably a middle ground between the two extremes.
I'm sure they will negotiate a solution where her business gets a concession and this goes away. The good thing about corruption is that it's predictable and it's much easier to run a business in a predictable environment.
But (as a human, not as a country), what's wrong with living cheaply, not keeping up with the Joneses (they're dumb anyway) and just keeping old stuff or buying used? The tradeoff from living cheaply won't be hoarding of money or stuff, it will be the ability to have a one-parent, 40 hour a week working family. Trading free time for stuff that doesn't enrich your life anyway.
Oh man, think about the cheap 3D printers!
You don't need any productivity increase just because you have more people, because productivity is defined as output per something, and absent indication to the contrary that something is an hour of labour.
tl;dr every mouth that needs feeding comes with two hands to work.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That wasn't a typo, it's covfefe's brother.
Seriously, though, T is confusing and confounding other nations because of his flip-flops, surprise "temporarily exemptions", vagueness, etc. Today's proclamations maybe be irrelevant tomorrow via a new Tweet. Most world leaders are relatively careful, systematic planners and don't know what to make of his style.
I'm not going to even say T's unpredictable style "doesn't work"; for it's too early to judge. I'm merely saying that it's baffling the h$ll out of world leaders and negotiators.
Maybe there is a method to his madness. I wouldn't bet on it personally because it resembles trolling to me, but can't rule it out yet. It's an interesting experiment; I just hope us lab-rats survive it all.
Table-ized A.I.
You don't know what the word "authoritarian" really means (in a political context). Trump is gentleman compared to a real authoritarian.
:).
If you keep calling everyone a "nazi" or "authoritarian" then everybody will get the idea that nazis and authoritarians were not that bad really.
Btw you will know what authoritarian means when the state starts confiscating succesfull businesses and politicians/journalists get some exotic poison or just plain old get killed in their elevator.
And also, quite true about Trump being accidental environmentalist
there's the folks who want to keep economic and physical resources on hand and maintain and develop manufacturing capability to ensure self sufficiency.
That's not quality-of-life; that's your local economics market. Back before manufacturing was big, America had this huge dialogue about how evil manufacturing was encroaching on the good American way of life where 90% of the workforce was in agriculture.
Quality-of-life is how people live, not how your nation's means of production are composed. It's about the people. It's about being able to eat, about being secure and not becoming homeless, and about having access to hygiene and medical care and social mobility.
On one side, what happens if international trade goes to hell?
Your nation has already fallen.
If we lose stable electricity for a day or two, our entire logistics system falls apart. We rely so much on communications and on shipping from town to town--much less across the states or to other nations--that we can't even keep stores stocked without trucks showing up every single day. After five days of high-speed communications being down across the nation, this nation isn't recovering; it's already over, the Constitution is no longer and shall never again be in force, and there is no capacity to maintain order and domestic tranquility.
Trade with other nations is a mechanism of stability. It gives us allies who are vested in helping us stay in one piece, and severely reduces the likelihood of war because neither side could sustain it.
why live like a Great Depression survivor when that crisis may never come?
In which case your isolationist nation is getting invaded by someone with the military prowess of Canada.
As with most things, the most successful strategy is probably a middle ground between the two extremes.
That assumes either side is an extreme, rather than that we're simply not leveraging mechanisms we should use. Holding your breath every 60 seconds could be said to be a middle-ground between breathing and not breathing when faced with, for example, air pollution.
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Things will be more expensive, but there will be more jobs
No. There will not be "more jobs". Look, protectionism isn't a "new" idea. It has been tried over and over throughout history. In fact, it has been more the norm than the exception. It hurts the economies of both importers and exporters, and leads to job losses and lower living standards.
I think this was more about having the ability to have one parent work and the other stay home.
This is a problem because if gets wrapped up in so much religious conservatism/nostalgia for the 50s where a woman's place is in the home. Why couldn't it be both parents having to work less overall so they had more time to actually raise their kids?
Kids from two-parent homes do end up doing better, but they do way better when both parents actually have time to spend with them. If both parents could work a flexible 25 hour work week instead of the old-school "Your butt must be in the seat from 8:30 to 5 every weekday" then things would be better.
I live in a reasonably affluent area and we have a mix of families -- ours and many others are 2-income FTE families, in some cases one parent is a doctor or lawyer and just has the spouse do all the childcare, and in others you have two total workaholic parents with high-pressure jobs. That third group has similar problems to the single-parent kids because even though they have tons of money, the parents don't have time to spend raising the kids or are too exhausted to do anything when they get home.
Look, protectionism isn't a "new" idea. It has been tried over and over throughout history. In fact, it has been more the norm than the exception. It hurts the economies of both importers and exporters, and leads to job losses and lower living standards.
Tell that to the Chinese as they've been using protectionist policies against the US for decades and engaging in tactics like flooding Western markets with super-cheap goods by "dumping" products at artificially-low prices subsidized by the Chinese government at a loss with the sole purpose of destroying US industrial and commercial sectors.
The Chinese have in effect been waging a trade and economic war against the US for decades. This response is long overdue and relatively mild in comparison.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Trump didn't insult Xi Jinping's mother. What he said is that he's not going to let us be screwed over by unfair trade practices. I don't think the car dealer salesman is necessary, but if one insists in that analogy it would be more like letting the salesman know that unlike the last guy, you don't intend to lay sticker price.
What the timing does is it frames the negotiation, allowing US negotiators to "give" something to China during the negotiations, to relent on something, by easing the tariffs and restrictions. We can give them something they want, and get something in return, simply by going back to the same policy we had last month! :)
Now the *starting point* of the negotiations is that China wants something from us - easing that policy. Otherwise, the starting point was we wanted something from China - their help pressuring North Korea. In a negotiation, it's always better to be on the side being asked for something, rather than be the one asking for something.
It's confounding only because most business negotiations are done in secret. When it leaks out it makes a lot of sense.
Trump has done a few things differently than most presidents. First, he's refused to divest himself of his businesses - usually a president puts their business in a trust so any decisions they may won't have potential conflict of interest.
It's why Russia is a big deal - it's one of the few countries where his businesses have done really, really, really well.
Or why ZTE suddenly deserves a lot of support (China dumps a half billion into a Trump hotel).
Next thing you know, Mexico will build a Trump hotel and it'll be "wall? what wall?" or if Mexico wants to build stuff using American equipment, "NAFTA GOOD!"
The problem is, these negotiations are done in private and under the privy of no one, so what looks erratic really turns out to be negotiation tactics to get a better deal.
Trump bends the way the dollars flow.
the wealth out of the country that was created in no small part due to protectionist trade policies in the beginning half of the 20th century.
Right, because massive destruction of infrastructure and manufacturing capacity in Europe had nothing to do with it.
shush!! since when the reality is important! when trump says that he is getting poor... err... sorry, ignore that! the USA are getting poor, it must be true!!
The sad part is that while the US economy increased, most of the profit went to the top 1%
Higuita
This remains a joke. Trump restored ZTE because China gave Ivanka a trademark that she wanted. There has NEVER been such a corrupt president in office as trump. If he wants to be fair, he will put the same tariffs/vats on CHinese goods that they put on western goods. Likewise, he would require that all factories with chinese owners to have 50.1% American ownership. In addition, no more deals will be allowed in china for moving manufacturing over there. IOW, when we develop a product here, it will not be allowed to be manufactured in CHina, or for that matter, for ownership to be transfered to any chinese company.
Not sure how to deal with their subsidies, dumping, and manipulation, but even this would be a good start.
Then allow China to deal with it as they see fit. If CHina removes an items, so do we.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.