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Trump Tells Apple To Make Products In the US To Avoid China Tariffs (thehill.com)
hackingbear writes: President Trump acknowledged in a tweet that "Apple prices may increase because of the massive Tariffs we may be imposing on China," but suggested the issue was not with the tariffs themselves. "There is an easy solution where there would be ZERO tax, and indeed a tax incentive. Make your products in the United States instead of China. Start building new plants now," Trump wrote. The U.S. is threatening to impose 25% tariffs on all $500 billion worth of Chinese imports over issues such as intellectual property theft.
While Apple et al are still making their products in China, Trump didn't offer Apple a place to find the millions of laborers needed to make their products, given that the official unemployment rate is at a historic low of 3.9%. Manufacturers also need to compete in the labor market with garbage companies who need to find American laborers willing to recycle their own trash -- a job once imposed upon China as a condition to enter the World Trade Organization and enjoy advantageous tariff rates. China is gracefully giving back those jobs as the U.S. is complaining of unfair trades.
While Apple et al are still making their products in China, Trump didn't offer Apple a place to find the millions of laborers needed to make their products, given that the official unemployment rate is at a historic low of 3.9%. Manufacturers also need to compete in the labor market with garbage companies who need to find American laborers willing to recycle their own trash -- a job once imposed upon China as a condition to enter the World Trade Organization and enjoy advantageous tariff rates. China is gracefully giving back those jobs as the U.S. is complaining of unfair trades.
Some electronics require rare earth materials to manufacture, which currently are sources from China or other countries. Those have export restrictions from China: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , and they ask the products to be manufactured there.
US now asks products to be manufactured here, and will add additional taxes (tariffs) if this request is not complied with.
So Apple and other manufacturers are split between two bad choices. They will have to weigh which one is less worse, and go in that direction. In all cases it will most likely be the consumers that suffer.
Video 2000 was kinda wonky with it's reversible tapes which could store 8h in SP. The other fun thing about it was that the write protect tab could be switched on/off instead of just broken off like in VHS. Of course that probably made it hideously expensive to manufacture.
given that the official unemployment rate is at a historic low of 3.9%
No, no it isn't. The current U6 unemployment rate as of August 2018 is 7.40, and even that fails to count many people. Anyone who reports the U2 unemployment rate is repeating a blatant and willful lie, which makes them at best an accessory to that lie. Do your research.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
It's a free market and therefore this is an easy answer: you pay them more than your competition to get superior workers.
This whole article is a dumb concept: there are not millions of workers at Apple's [third party] factories. There are thousands of workers though.
And do not confuse angst with illegal immigration with anti-immigration. Any person worth talking to is for immigration, but of people that will improve our country by bringing skills or ideas that improve it. Chances are, if you have no ethical dilemma with breaking a law as literally your first act of "joining" a country, then you are willing to break other laws that may prove to be inconvenient. Beyond that, the path to becoming an illegal immigrant is horrific. Encouraging it is literally encouraging more rapes and money going to criminals.
Bringing in cheap, easily replaced, effectively slave labor is not the superior position: it's only a slightly less racist position than people hating immigrants because they're "other" races (or wholly based religions). The pretentious attitude that pro-illegal immigration proponents have is miserable. The idea that we "need" these people to come into our houses to be our maids and field workers is despicably racist. All immigrants regularly start at the bottom of the food chain, but it is disgusting to effectively see that is their end goal.
We should want immigrants to come in and assimilate. At that point everyone wins. With illegal immigration, the only side that wins is the people employing slave labor that they will discard if the wind changes direction.
Seems he wants everyone else to pay more for domestic labor than he does. Most people feel the same way - in theory they want to support American workers, in pratice they don't want to pay for it either. Can't have it both ways.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-hire-40-foreign-workers-mar-lago-1011011
You literally have no idea what a tariffs are, do you? If you understood tariffs you couldn't have written this sentence:
Philips got the EEC (precursor to the EU) to put massive tariffs on Japanese machines to make them cost the same as Phipps' ones, but all that did was increase profit margins for Japanese companies and relieve price pressure on their manufacturing.
An EEC/EU tariff is a tax the EEC/EU collects as certain goods cross the border, the funds collected do not go back to the manufacturer, For example, a US tariff on iPhones manufactured in China collects an amount of money equal to 25% of the cost of the item and puts it in the federal government's coffers. The 25% tariff does not go back to China, Foxconn, or Apple.
The purpose of a tariff is to increase the price foreign goods allowing domestic producers to better compete on price, agree with it/disagree with the intention, your statement belied a complete lack of understanding of how tariffs work.
Ken
It took decades to destroy the US electronics manufacturing industry. The workers in it were high school grads. Today, they work at Burger King. It would take at least a decade to build a functioning consumer electronics industry.
What is lacking is not labor, but knowhow. Knowhow is the stuff that is not in books or journals, but resides in the heads of people who know how to actually build stuff. It can take decades to build knowhow, and that's exactly what the Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, and Taiwanese have done, at the expense of the US. Lack of knowhow is why the US is currently incapable of building the Saturn V rocket, despite having all the documents ("blueprints") that specified it.
Rare earths are only a temporary problem. Rare earths are not rare, but you can't build a mine overnight.
The real problem with Trump tariffs is that they were done without thought about the strategy of rebuilding those industries. If the industries cannot be rebuilt, then all the tariffs do is increase costs.
You don't understand the situation in the EU at the time. Often the manufacturers owned the retailers too. Panasonic and Sony both have their own chain of shops to this day.
The sale price was wholesale price + % margin. If the wholesale price goes up the sale price goes up. And these were not cheap items, VCRs back the were in the 500-1000 UKP range.
This is basic economics. The margins on items at he cheap end of the scale are almost always lower. By keeping prices high for every machine on the market with the tariffs the Japanese manufacturers felt the inevitable price pressure and VCRs became more and more commoditized later than they otherwise would have. There is a lot less pressure on price and margin at the 500+ level than at the 50+ level.
By 1984 even Philips were making VHS machines, and getting screwed by their own tariffs.
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