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Trump Suggests US Could Slap 10 Percent Tax On iPhones, Laptops From China (cnbc.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump suggested he could place a 10 percent tariff on iPhones and laptops imported from China, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal published Monday. He also said it's "highly unlikely" that he would delay an increase in tariffs from 10 percent to 25 percent on Jan. 1, just four days before a summit with Chinese President Xi Jinping. "Maybe. Maybe. Depends on what the rate is," the president said to The Wall Street Journal about the possible iPhone and laptop tariffs. "I mean, I can make it 10 percent, and people could stand that very easily."
Perhaps you missed the obvious, but he's already bailing out US farmers to the tune of $12 billion to compensate for lost sales to China.
Worse, he's paying it to Chinese owned companies like WH Group:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/chinese-owned-pork-producer-qualifies-for-money-under-trumps-farm-bailout/2018/10/23/154764da-d3ce-11e8-83d6-291fcead2ab1_story.html
And if he slaps a big tarif on Apple, they'll demand compensation too. Either directly or through the courts, since he's not within the Executive branches *limited* powers to kill ratified trade treaties wholesale. Apple can sue if they don't get compensated.
Also imagine how it would be if Apple does not get compensated, yet Chinese companies do get compensation from Trump?
IMHO, the US $ nearly collapsed after Bush did his 2004 monetary inflation. Here they're doing a 10% increase in money supply, gifted as tax cuts to rich people (around $1.5 to $1.9 trillion). That needs to be anchored in trade since you need China to need to buy US bonds to soak up the debt and force the retained $ value.
IMHO2: Ukraine is about to be invaded by Russia, and we'll get a lot of distraction like this.
Apple could easily afford to drop the price 10% too. I feel like they are at the top of what folks are willing to pay. Early on i would just upgrade when i felt the need... now i give it a lot more thought... and im sure im like most slashdotters, i can afford to upgrade unlike most of my friends and family. I say bring in the 10%, if that moves some of the manufacturing to the USA or even just North America its a win
If you're wealthy enough to purchase an iPhone, you're wealthy enough to pay this tax. If not, I guess Apple is going to lose a number of customers.
Plus, this effectively also serves as a corporate tax given that iPhones are fairly common for commercial use.
This may end up being a fairly progressive tax.
What makes China your enemy? I can appreciate if you don't consider them friends, but have they done anything which you would consider targeted against you?
... well pretty much everything?
If you want to blame someone for exporting American jobs, it wasn't China... it was Walmart.
Walmart actually forced their suppliers to move manufacturing to China and threatened that if they didn't, they would make a competing product themselves in China and undercut their prices. Walmart also bullied Chinese companies into working faster and cheaper. Walmart also manipulated oil subsidies by exporting small amounts of things to China on American tax payers money and used the fuel paid for by the Americans to transport massive chunks of cargo back from China on the return trip. Walmart also manipulated the American social services system to provide welfare to their employees to avoid paying them themselves... the savings are paid as dividends to their shareholders.
Pretty much every nasty thing in your head about China is actually Walmart. Walmart started it, now Amazon is continuing it, but Amazon will replace what few Americans are left in retail with robots instead allowing them to undercut Walmart and kill their business.
No... you're really hating in the wrong direction. You should be hating on opportunistic Americans who proactively destroy American lives in order to make a quick buck. And BTW... many of these great Americans who are exporting everything to China to make a buck... they are registered voters and supporters of the Republican party.
No China is not your enemy. They simply became rich while America became poor because American insisted on paying them to make stuff for them. Now that they're rich, they decided to buy the American dream but not export it back to the US.
P.S. My daughter and I take Chinese lessons every week and she's preparing to study in China instead of the U.S.. She wanted to go to MIT or Berkley, but is heading to Bejing instead because now China has built top notch universities.
What do you think it means when Europeans are looking east instead of west for
I hope Trump's tariffs help you out. I know that I just working towards shifting one of Europe's oldest and biggest Cisco partners to being a Huawei partner too. The dollar is too high and Cisco just isn't that good anymore... their latest generation of.. well pretty much everything is about as good as what we used to call "Cheap Chinese Shit" and the so called "Cheap Chinese Shit" has gotten about as good as Cisco claims to be.
I wonder if the clothes etc Trump buys in from China for his own golf courses will see a 10% tariff, same with the stuff Ivanka sells.... nah no tariff on their stuff.
And only the rich win from open trade and being able to screw the local workers.
So, since it's a lose-lose proposition for me, I'd rather see the rich lose too.
Also, people talk about how we should take care of the environment, governments pass laws that forbid dumping toxic waste into a river etc. However, you can always open a factory in China, produce as much CO2 as you want, dump as much toxic waste into rivers as you want, that will allow you to make the product cheaper and you will out-compete the local factories that have to use expensive equipment to clean out their waste and reduce their CO2 emissions. Being able to use child labor and no need to care about workplace safety is also great. After all, what matters more than the income of shareholders?
In summary: fuck American workers, I wanna save a couple bucks on my iCrap!
No, in summary: The globalization and automation genies are already out of the bottle, no matter how much you try to shove them back in, you can't.
So you can either realize and accept the current situation (by training well educated workers that are capable of doing more than what a simple pick and place robot can do), or you can pretend globalization doesn't exist and tell uneducated workers that you're bringing jobs "back" to them, when reality those jobs aren't coming back.
..with it's throttle stuck wide open.
For fucks' sake, I fully understand that China is so corrupt and screwing us (and other countries) over, in more than just trade (militarily, human rights [comma, lack of], and so on, and so on) but there's got to be a better way to handle this than this.
Of course you also have to admit: we're like spoiled-assed kids in this country. Our overall high standard of living is because everything has been so damned cheap for so many decades. You all complain about the cost of an iPhone, but if it was produced 100% here in the U.S. (from the smallest component on up), it would cost several times as much I'm sure, assuming they'd produce them at all (might be too expensive to produce in any quantity). Before anyone jumps my shit for that: without U.S. companies using Chinese companies for production, Chinas' economy would probably be absolute shit. So it is a two-way street -- but still there's got to be a better way to deal with this than what Trump is doing. He keeps trying to run a country like it's a business -- and he's not a good businessman to start with (vis-a-vis, all his bankruptcies and failures), and it's just a bad idea to run a country like it's a business anyway. He's achieving the opposite of what was intended: he's costing Americans money, he's destroying American jobs, and he's running American companies out of business. Do I have a better idea? No. If I did, I'd run for office. But someone else must have a better way to do this, and they're not stepping up -- or maybe they've been told to shut up.
Maybe pissing off the iCrowd will be the last straw.
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u