U.S. Readies $11B in Tariffs on E.U
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Cutting regulatory corners is a lot more complicated than “buying cheaper uncertified Chinese aircrafts”, and it’s completely invisible to the general public until an incident occurs.
The level of trust in the US aeronautic safety agencies can be summed up in other countries explicitly requiring non-US investigators.
That is the long term impact I'm talking about - it seems entirely plausible that this will become the norm rather than the exception it is now.
In the EU GDPR was a response to the abject failure of companies to actually self regulate - there was an actual consequence of a failure of self-regulation: the GDPR adding financial penalties for abusing consumers.
If the companies had actually self regulated, and actually self-limited their collection of data, and if only they hadn't sold off everyone's data to anyone and everyone, then they wouldn't have to deal with the GDPR.
So if the companies think it /is/ too aggressive, they've only got themselves to fault.
Personally, I'd rather have tariffs than income tax. At least then I can choose what to buy.
Some products which can be produced in US will benefit from tariffs. But the whole point of not having tariffs is to buy cheap labour from outside and move your own country up the value chain.
Also, no one is going to start manufacturing these products because the next President is going to remove the tariffs and destroy the advantages, if any.
Just my 2 cents.
I understand that in theory they can be used to capture externalities to level the playing field, but I find it hard to believe anyone can really figure anything close to the real amount of "unfairness" (for lack of a better word)
If you start taxing luxury goods, all you do is put creature comforts further out of the reach of the majority. That is regressive.
That...doesn't sound fair at all. It's equality but not equity.
FWIW we’ve already got regressive taxes in the form of payroll tax, which kick in from $0 and cap out once you earn enough. So unless you’re unemployed, you’ve paid taxes even if your marginal income tax rate is 0%.
I understand that goods and services acquired with currency can experience diminishing returns. But unless you think the rich and poor should be paying different amounts for every good and service (for example a cup of coffee), then I don’t think this is a consistent, principled argument.
And once again, let me point out that GP’s comment on a flat tax would STILL mean the rich give up more value than the poor, and it would still not be a truly ‘fair’ tax. And on a side note, ‘progressive’/‘regressive’ are made up terms used to play rhetorical games by leveraging the negative connotation of the term ‘regressive’. A better set of neutral terms would be ‘uniform’ or ‘fair’ or ‘flat’ versus ‘non-uniform’ or ‘unfair’ or ‘graduated’.
The dictionary definition is quite clear: A progressive tax is a tax in which the average tax rate (taxes paid ÷ personal income) increases as the taxable amount increases. [Google]
A regressive tax is a tax applied uniformly, taking a larger percentage of income from low-income earners than from high-income earners. It is in opposition to a progressive tax, which takes a larger percentage from high-income earners. [Also Google]
As such, Medicare taxes are regressive because they are capped at some amount of earned income, whereas the ordinary income tax rate is progressive because your marginal rate increases as you earn more money.
You are correct that a flat tax is neither progressive nor regressive with respect to dollars, but it is regressive with respect to marginal utility of those dollars to the earner. "Fair" is a value judgement and colors the conversation.
The dictionary definitions you are quoting are in existence simply due to common use in modern times, but I am claiming they are nevertheless bad definitions that were engineered to color the discourse on this topic.
We're both kids. I have 12 marbles. You have 24 marbles. We need to give up some marbles for the common good. We could debate whether us both giving 6 marble is fair, or wether you giving 8 and me giving 4 is fair. I can see both arguments.
However… in no rational world is it fair for you to give 10 and me 2.
Let's replace marbles with hamburgers. You and your buddy Steve lay out your food for the day. You have 2 hamburgers, exactly enough to meet your daily caloric needs. Your buddy Steve has approximately 10 hamburgers. Dramatically more hamburgers than he needs to live. More than he could eat if he tried.
Now, we need 1 hamburger for the common good. If you take that one hamburger from the guy with 2, he's hungry, and if you keep doing it, he may die. Steve, on the other hand, can't eat all his hamburgers one way or the other, so taking one from him makes much less of a difference.
Now how does that change the equation? It's fair for Steve to donate 0.8 burgers and you to donate 0.2 -- this represents fair distribution on a marginal value basis. So yes, 10:2 is completely fair. In fact, 10:0 is fair if I'm making millions and someone else is making a handful of thousands per year.
I'm personally in one of the top tax brackets and I think it should be higher. We already pay 50%-ish marginally in California, so moving up to AOC's 70% isn't really a big difference. I should be paying more, because we live in a community and I want that community to be nice. I don't want to live in a world where I have nice things and walk by people with nothing, on the ground, doing heroin like I do on my way to work every morning here in SF. All because it's not "fair" to take a burger from me, when I have more burgers than I know what to do with.
Many? Most? People earning (say) $500k+ dodge their income tax, legally and illegally. There's a whole industry of it. Yes let's clamp down on that as we've been trying to across the world for decades. Not likely to eradicate it by next year though, right?
So you tax consumption at a flat rate /in addition/ to income tax. You ensure the people earning less get a tax break or a transfer payment increase to cover the consumption flat tax and then some.
All those wealthy people are now paying that base rate on their consumption in a way that is basically unavoidable.
So for your progressive taxation, the initial bracket cannot be avoided. People in higher brackets still should pay more.
By using consumption to tax the initial bracket the poor get an increase in after tax income. The rich (on average) get a higher tax bill.
Yes it depends on the modelling and getting the implementation right as all tax regimes do. Yes it is progressive.
When you see consumption tax as necessarily regressive (as I did once) you are missing the most important thing about them which is they really aren't. They're the best way of getting a big tax revenue increase at the expense of those who cheat. I like that, myself.
The solution isn't to invent a whole new parallel tax system so the dodgers pay a little instead of what they owe, the solution is to get the tax money back from the dodgers. The unpaid taxes on the amount of wealth squirreled away offshore by the wealthy right now would pay off the entire US national debt.
without a source i call BS on this.
us debt: 22 trillion. assuming 25% as median tax rate means that people in the US have more than 100 trillion USD stashed in offshore.
to put this in context, top 50 US companies have around 3 trillion USD in offshore.
[1] https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2018/01/20/trillions-dolla...
As someone in Canada it's been disappointing to watch the massive internal subsidies given to Boeing (from the US government) help sink Bombardier - though the company also did under-perform.
The EU has especially stringent rules against this, making (for example) shenanigans such as Amazon's HQ2 race-to-the-bottom impossible. That's also what got Apple and Ireland into trouble. It's effectively a cartel of countries pooling power to counter multinationals' ability to offshore profits to the cheapest jurisdiction.
The are exemptions: The EU and US massively support agriculture with direct payments. Canada does the same with milk quotas. (These two systems are somewhat incompatible: allowing subsidised US milk to be sold for Canada's protected high prices would amount to double dipping. Hence some disagreements across that particular border).
Aircrafts are a rather special beast: there's a national security angle, they are objects of national pride, and both the EU and US have one large manufacturer. Airbus is also diversified across many EU countries, assuring them wide political support.
Defense related industries are typically pretty pretty high on the subsidy list though, for all the obvious reasons.
I really wish both groups (the NYT and HN) would be more nuanced when it comes to Trump. Otherwise, we all end up justifying Trump's and other Alt-Righties' claims of bias.
The reasoning you want to see in the headline is in the first paragraph.
If you're interpreting the headline as "Trump is unilaterally fucking up the world order yet again" then that is something that happens entirely in your head.
It's somewhat bold to fault others for an error that is entirely yours.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629918
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629960 (now deleted)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19629995
I think wrt NYT, the facts are all true but purpose should also clearly be a part of it. Imagine a headline which said "Trump kills man on White House lawn with Colt .45" and the man was attacking him with a machete.
When many (most?) people are aware of the prior tariff tirade by Trump and not everyone reads the meat of an article, I think it's irresponsible to not include the _why_.
On another note, I think your headline is fine. After all, surely the secret service is capable of non-lethally incapacitating a man with a machete. But even if not, it's false equivocation.
We're experiencing that in Canada too with the dairy cartel getting cross-party support from both liberal and (mainstream) conservative parties because it helps a few local farmers stay moderately-wealthy while 100% of the population has to pay more for dairy products.
<!--
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Kingsbury, Katie <katie.kingsbury@nytimes.com>
Date: Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 2:30 PM
Subject: Rollout
To: Bennet, James <james.bennet@nytimes.com>
James,
Here’s a line up for the launch tomorrow, all of these will be online before Sunday:
• A.G.’s publisher’s note about The Times
• Manjoo on household items that track us
• Wu on the history of privacy
• Jeong on A.I. and insurance
• Metzel on genetically engineered babies
• Warzel on tech CEOs in their own words
• Fr. Martin on privacy and faith
• Emily Chang on privacy as a feminist issue
• Douthat on our post-privacy order
• Swisher on privacy regulation
• Irby on what’s funny about all this.
Plus, of course, your piece if you can actually get it done in time.
Next week, we’ll drop the piece about how we turned a public camera in Manhattan into a facial recognition equipped surveillance machine and who we caught with it.
The vanity URL is locked in as nytimes.com/privacy-project and the social team has spun up the @PrivacyProject account.
Katie
-->The URL posted in the email nytimes.com/privacy-project redirects to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/opinion/internet-pr... and there are articles that are published on 4/11/2019 whereas it's only 4/10 as of me writing this comment.
I think the US has been self-centered for quite some time, and there was a hilarious thread in a different article that went into the idea that America is the world-policeman that everyone wants but... yea, for equal treatment and to avoid regulatory capture - one needs to avoid that dying empire.
>> works against the interests of the United States though
FTA: "“Our ultimate goal is to reach an agreement with the E.U. to end all W.T.O.-inconsistent subsidies to large civil aircraft,” Mr. Lighthizer said."
As a US citizen I don't see anything controversial about this stance.
The general idea of protectionism is less controversial - I think it is generally bad[1] due to the economic effects of it. But if you're in favor of protectionism you can check any claim you have to free-market economics or de-regulation for growth at the door, protectionism is basically the Ur-form of regulatory capture and state-capitalism so being pro-Boeing subsidies and then claiming that the US becoming "socialist" is terrible is just logically inconsistent.
[1] I'd leave the notable exception of when it's used to specifically stimulate economic sector growth - propping up a robotics company in TN to create a labour pool that enables other companies to grow out of the labour availability is a pretty good usage.
>> Your tax dollars are going to prop up a failing company
Anyone who suggests that France is not 'France first' or that Switzerland is not 'Switzerland first' etc. etc. has not been paying attention.
/s
I learnt in the third grade that that approach doesn't work.
All nations are 'selfish' in direct trade terms.
In terms of Geopolitics, there's an enormous degree of material goodwill added by the US following the WW2 and the creation of the NWO and not all of it is 'repaid' to them. The entire framework of global trade relies on the US, even today. Most of the free world still depends on the US for defence, at least partially and in some very 'lynchpin' ways.
The US's negotiations with China are reasonable.
The negotiating positions on refiguring NAFTA were mostly reasonable, although I don't think it will make a difference.
And FYI it's the EU that's constantly skittish, changing their minds, and arbitrarily taxing and back-taxing US companies often for their own, self directed problems (i.e. Irish/Dutch/Luxembourg taxation).
Even though Donald Trump is a huge political jerk, making noise for the sake of making noise, there's little on the table that is entirely unjust. The 'bad noise' is mostly rhetoric.
Edit: They are getting tax through fines by said ridiculous laws not by direct tax.
According to this page: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/europe... it's rather balanced. Whoever upsets that balance might need to reconsider, but the US would definitely have a problem if less stuff comes in from the EU. For the EU, however, it's less of an issue: http://trade.ec.europa.eu/doclib/docs/2006/september/tradoc_...
Yeah, no thanks. I do not at all what expansive intellectual property laws to be spreading all over the world, and hurting creators like that.
Creators benefit way more when it is easy to share and use and modify other people's content.
But if it did: those lows are for the EU, not the rest of the world. Same goes for GDPR. Nobody is required to trade with the EU, or sell to the EU or buy from the EU. But if you do, the rules of the agreements that are made apply. This is nothing new, and works the same way for trade or interaction with pretty much any country. Imagine trying to sell stuff to China with Taiwanese flags...
The law in question includes things like a link tax, which is pretty ridiculous, IMO, as is the copyright fines that they have.
The rest of your comment is merely a "the law is the law!" kind of justification.
Yes, the law is the law. And I gave reasons as for why these laws are ridiculous, as per the original comment.
I can recognize that a law exists, and also call it a horrible law, that deserves retaliation from the US.
I sincerely hope that the US and everyone else uses trade laws and tariffs to cause economic damage to the EU, specifically because of these horrible laws.
Fair is fair, yo. US trade tariffs are also the law, and are a good way punishing bad laws passed by other countries.
Except they aren't. WTO treaty obligations for equitable treatment of other nations (MFN obligations) supersede local laws. Overriding arbitrary local laws is the whole point of the WTO, and of every other trade treaty.
The only way these tariffs work is Trump pulling the "national security emergency" card -- and obviously 'punishing' the EU for building better planes isn't a national security issue worth dismantling the WTO over.
So it is the law then. Too bad, so sad, but the law allows this.
It sounds like you just disagree with the law. But that's the law!
> worth dismantling the WTO over.
And nothing is worth dismantling the free and open internet with oppressive copyright laws.
So, I can use that exact same argument against the EU's horrible laws.
That fact that you seem to believe the rest of the world is abusing the US is more about a misplaced belief that the US's abuse of other countries is perfectly acceptable.
If the US wanted to lead by example, it could do what NZ did a drop subsidies and tariffs on agriculture. But that's not what you want.
Are you seriously suggesting the EU took the trouble of implementing GDPR, causing significant disruption to European companies as well, for the sole purpose of fining FAANGs and making money out of it?
If you an office in Europe then I guess you are subject to additional taxes? But you are operating in Europe, so how is that unreasonable?
None of that has anything to do with these tariffs, btw.
Banks just don't want to deal with that shit, if they can avoid it.
What do you think the US does when I start a business here, say a webshop selling legally allowed recreational drugs, also targeting US consumers?