USA Vs China Trade(Government Taxation) War

RainbowSingularity · Apr 2, 2018

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-43614400

China has imposed tariffs of up to 25% on 128 US imports, including pork and wine, after US President Donald Trump raised duties on foreign steel and aluminium imports in March.

The tariffs affecting some $3bn (£2.1bn) of imports kick in on Monday.

Beijing said the move was to "safeguard China's interests and balance" losses caused by new US tariffs.

China had previously said it did not want a trade war but would not sit by if its economy was hurt.

Mr Trump, however, has insisted that "trade wars are good", and that it should be "easy" for the US to win one.

The American authorities have already announced plans for further targeted tariffs for tens of billions of dollars of Chinese imports, the BBC's Chris Buckler reports from Washington.

They say that is in response to unfair trading practices in China that affect US companies but it raises the possibility of yet more action being taken in what has become a tit-for-tat trade battle, our correspondent adds.

i have a few questions.
1. will apple phones & apple computers have heavy tariffs put on them since they are made in china ?
2. who gets all the money made from the Government Taxation in a Capitalist society ?
3. what would "winning a trade war" look like in an ecconomic working example between USA & China ?

birch · Apr 3, 2018

1) apple would fight this or just move their manufacturing elsewhere.
2) elites
3) bring back some manufacturing jobs that will soon be automated anyways so not completely a win.

this is all about the elites and corporate greed. people are merely a commodity. when further automation takes over, less people are needed. when less people are needed, the elites still attain the production/goods. there is no reason to bargain. this is actually both good and bad as it reduces the need for a larger population, therefore less pollution, and eventually less competition for resources.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/18/officials-thousands-of-skilled-jobs-are-going-unfi/

otoh, americans do have their advantages. they have pawned the dirty manufacturing jobs to other nations but demand those unskilled jobs back. do they want to bring back pollution and inflation to their shores just so they can buy their own products? or is it that the general population is too stupid to fill these positions?

it doesn't look that way as most of these can be filled even by those with less than a bachelors.

billvon · Apr 3, 2018

RainbowSingularity said:
1. will apple phones & apple computers have heavy tariffs put on them since they are made in china ?

They will get a break since Apple is a "US" company.

2. who gets all the money made from the Government Taxation in a Capitalist society ?

The government. Which then goes into things like buying bombs, paying government workers and soldiers, paying for medicare/medicaid etc.

3. what would "winning a trade war" look like in an ecconomic working example between USA & China ?

From whose perspective?

sculptor · Apr 3, 2018

if you like pork and bacon you should save a few $
Thanx China

billvon · Apr 4, 2018

sculptor said:
if you like pork and bacon you should save a few $
Thanx China

Unless you are a farmer, steelworker or trucker, that is.

sculptor · Apr 4, 2018

Yeh
The iowa hog farmers are hoping that the chinese will still want pork

(some of them seem to be in denial)

RainbowSingularity · Apr 5, 2018

birch said:
1) apple would fight this or just move their manufacturing elsewhere.
2) elites
3) bring back some manufacturing jobs that will soon be automated anyways so not completely a win.

this is all about the elites and corporate greed. people are merely a commodity. when further automation takes over, less people are needed. when less people are needed, the elites still attain the production/goods. there is no reason to bargain. this is actually both good and bad as it reduces the need for a larger population, therefore less pollution, and eventually less competition for resources.

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/18/officials-thousands-of-skilled-jobs-are-going-unfi/

otoh, americans do have their advantages. they have pawned the dirty manufacturing jobs to other nations but demand those unskilled jobs back. do they want to bring back pollution and inflation to their shores just so they can buy their own products? or is it that the general population is too stupid to fill these positions?

it doesn't look that way as most of these can be filled even by those with less than a bachelors.

very simply....
it appears the product prices have not included the required cost to pay for the labour to build them.
thus the corporate entity has sub-prime-mortgaged the cost of labour out to collapse the market.
now the cost of making the product is more than what the corporates want to pay and they have poisoned the market in pricing with no return to the market with profits to maintain the market health.
its been dying for a while, so it appears.

between the outright liars claiming free-lunches are perfectly normal in the global trade market to the conspiracy nut jobs hell bent on watching the entire global economy collpase its hard to see if there is anyone talking facts in the public domain.

RainbowSingularity · Apr 5, 2018

sculptor said:
Yeh
The iowa hog farmers are hoping that the chinese will still want pork

(some of them seem to be in denial)

china has cheaper pork and chinese wont pay more for US pork so its all over ?
china likes cheap stuff too.
china can also expand its own pork production it a much lower cost than US pork and has absolutely no need for US pork at all ?

birch · Apr 5, 2018

china has other plans. it's trying to move it's manufacturing base to africa. the positive is that they pay market price instead of exploitation and to help build infrastructure. it's a win/win for both.

iceaura · May 10, 2018

https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-thats-cost-americans-millions-of-jobs/

It’s this adjustment that is the crux of economists’ misinterpretation of the health of manufacturing. There’s nothing wrong with accounting for product quality. But most economists and policymakers have failed to take into account how adjusting for quality improvements in a relatively small subsector skews the manufacturing output data.
- - - -
This has grim implications for what had been assumed to be healthy productivity. As with real output, productivity growth comes mostly from the computers subsector’s quality adjustment—which means that the apparently robust growth in manufacturing productivity is mostly a mirage.

The takehome for me (this article and others) was that the professional economists advising the governance of the US actually didn't know that the US manufacturing labor force had been hit as hard by job loss to other countries as it had been. They weren't dissembling and misleading - they actually believed that US manufacturing productivity had been rising overall, that the US was automating as fast as the other major economies, rather than just bleeding jobs.

Might be relevant.

iceaura · May 12, 2018

Another factor: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-09/american-factories-have-one-very-big-problem

Since 2011, manufacturing productivity—that’s the value of output per hour of work—has risen just 0.7 percent. That’s not per year. That’s the total growth over the entire period.
- - - -
But total factor productivity actually fell 5.8 percent in the five years ending in 2015, the most recent available data, Feroli says.

Apparently, "total factor productivity" - the aspect of productivity accounted for by higher quality work and better management and streamlining of production and so forth, not by invested capital or improvements in labor - has actually been falling. All the automation and labor pruning and so forth has been just barely keeping up with the loss of performance and capability in actually doing the work.

That's scary, because there is no obvious fix. You can't throw money at it, you can't throw effort at it. And it's not true of China, or afaik any other First or Second World industrial power.

And it's not the situation the US wants to be in at the onset of a trade war, or unsettled situation of any kind.

exchemist · May 12, 2018

What I find so surprising about this is the apparent economic illiteracy of the people behind this policy. Surely the reason the US has a trade deficit is that it is spending more than it earns. The recent tax cuts will make this worse, not better, by putting more unearned money in people's pockets. If the administration demands China artificially restricts exports to the USA, the US economy will just suck in the equivalent imports from somewhere else, including places to which China will have diverted the exports they can no longer sell to the USA. It seems quite self-defeating.

Or have I got this quite wrong?

iceaura · May 14, 2018

exchemist said:
Or have I got this quite wrong?

Not wrong, but possibly misdirected: The recent tax cuts were targeted much more toward wealthy people, who spend significantly less of their income on imported consumer goods from China either directly or indirectly.

And the people who do most of the buying from China are not doing it with "unearned" money - they were paying their taxes with earned money, as well.