The traditional US way to change the rules: get other countries together to back up your position, suggest a principled approach, be willing to make concessions in other areas. The new way: flip the table over.
Commercial recipients know about brokerage fees and can estimate how much the surcharge will be, but Joe Random has no idea and will complain.
I'm having trouble imagining what positive result could come out of this that outweighs the downside of fracturing the global postal system.
We're the most powerful nation in the world, not a toddler. "He made me do it!" isn't an argument for adults. We're responsible for our own actions. China may have made a bad decision, but that doesn't give the US a pass for making an even worse decision.
Yeah, china "made the US do it" in the same way that a car dealership "makes you not by a car" when they don't give you the deal you wanted, but I don't really see why that means the dealership is doing anything wrong.
I'm not familiar with it personally, but an adult sometimes has to say "No, it's not fair, but it's not that big a deal, and the damage caused by throwing a tantrum over it isn't worth the sop to my pride."
"According to the Postal Regulatory Commission, the independent agency that rules on postal rate proposals, the loss to USPS attributable to terminal dues reached $134.5 million in fiscal year 2016 and $170 million in fiscal year 2017"
Spending over $170 million a year (and rising, especially with the massive yoy increases of packages shipped from China) and making it easier for your largest (by far) economic rival to sell in your country than companies that are established in your country is pretty terrible, I would argue.
You can't weigh two options if you only know the weight of one of them.
Either the price different isn't a huge deal, and China should just pay the cost of the shipments, or the price is a big enough deal that China finds this extremely unfavorable, and "the US should just keep doing it because it's not a big deal" no longer applies.
It may well be that there's no major downside for the US, or for anyone except China. If you can show me evidence of that, I'd love to see it! But this administration has a history of rash, unconsidered actions based on nothing more than pride, so I don't think it's unreasonable to want to see that evidence before I take them at their word.
That's true, but this is a discussion about what the US should do to protect US interests, not about what China should do to protect Chinese interests.
This is exactly the childish "well they started it!" attitude I'm talking about. China is not going to look out for US interests, nor even should they. The US has to look out for US interests, and the US needs to do that by weighing our options and choosing the ones that make sense, not by blaming China and trying to exact petty vengeance.
I don't know what the right thing to do here is, but the only way one possibly could know the right thing to do is by comparing the costs of our options, and there's a complete lack of information on this thread about what the costs of leaving the global postal union are. If you don't know what those costs are, you aren't informed enough to have an opinion on whether we should leave, period. And whining about what other countries do should have no place in deciding what we do.
Have some pride for god's sake, take responsibility for your own choices and stop blaming other people.
Of course the US should look out for its own best interests.
It is far from clear that leaving the global postal union is in our best interests, however.
> China refused to negotiate, believing that the US would never pull out and that they had all the leverage.
Given US dependency on Chinese products, I don't think we can clearly say that China doesn't have all the leverage.
> Keep subsidizing packages for their main economic rival? Sit back and do nothing while China continues to benefit?
Keep in mind that subsidizing packages from China is also a subsidy to US consumers of Chinese goods. Americans benefit from this too. And leaving the global postal union affects a lot more than just our relations with China.
So yes, maybe continuing to subsidize packages from our main economic rival is better than leaving the global postal union.
I don't have all the facts here, so I am not sure I know what's right, but I have enough facts to see that only looking at how fair or unfair things are doesn't give you the whole picture.
The only downside you have mentioned explicitly is that "US customers may pay more for shipping" is clearly false. The money for that subsidy has to come from somewhere and it has been coming from US customers paying more for domestic shipping.
Well, given the number of products we buy from China, this sounds like it's going to make things more expensive for US Citizens.
> If you aren't getting those products from China, they'll come from somewhere else.
...for a higher price, probably, which we will pay.
So no, it won't make things more expensive for most consumers. There's a high likelihood that you've never received anything from China by mail.
I'm just saying that it won't have a large negative impact on consumers or overall trade volumes. If anything I'm defending.
This is extremely tiresome.
And further to the point of impact on trade volumes: a good number of those purchases will instead just happen on amazon or wherever, and will still be of products originating in China: they'll just take a different path into the country and potentially be more expensive.
By your logic, the entire postal system is a "niche" in the overall economy. That doesn't mean you should ignore it.
Stuff shipped from China through the postal system isn't a "niche", it's an enormous volume of mail, and it's the very reason our postal rates are so damn high.
>they'll just take a different path into the country and potentially be more expensive.
How exactly is this a problem??!! The whole problem is that it's unfair trade for postal customers to be subsidizing people buying stuff on AliExpress. If someone wants to import shipping containers full of cheap Chinese stuff and resell it within the US, that's fine: it's way more efficient and ecological than drop-shipping from China. It doesn't work right now because the postal rates are so horrendous for domestic postage, but if we stop subsidizing Chinese shippers, then that should change.
Why are you all so defensive about this?
C D
C (5, 5) (1, 7)
D (7, 1) (0, 0)
Sometimes credibly threatening to perform an action involves actually following through with the threat.
Let's stick to looking at the situation in front of us instead of imagining ones that don't exist.
It may or may not map to the situation here, but IMO that's irrelevant. Personally, I think it maps pretty well.
No, I sure wasn't.
Obviously there are situations where flipping the table is the right choice. This probably isn't one of those situations.
That's the tie-in with prisoner's dilemma, you see? Only by making the other party aware that negative consequences are dire, certain, and soon can an equitable outcome for both parties be achieved.
I would note that China has already leveraged government borrowing power to the hilt in order to artificially support their stock market prices, leaving them almost no room the maneuver.
You argue that this it is childish for us to force the issue. No. Wrong. It's game theory. Do you want a good outcome?
I feel like I should point out that the example I posted differs from the classic prisoner's dilemma by making the differential utility of moving to the defect, defect state negative for both parties. Normally, defection improves the defector's utility, so that space would be something like (3,3).
Still game theory though.
No, I don't argue that at all. I argue that it's childish to say China is forcing us to do this.
I also said it's foolish to only look at the cost of continuing to subsidize Chinese imports, and not ALSO look at the cost of leaving the global postal union. Your post shows that you continue to only look at the former costs, and have yet to even acknowledge that the latter has cost.
Incidentally, looking at ALL the possible outcomes to choose your action is exactly what game theory about, so don't cite game theory as if it proves your point when in fact you're refusing to actually use game theory.
Which is why the correct response to all requests for a contract re-negotiation is "Great - let's meet, because I also have some terms I would like to see changed."
That really depends on the economic and other consequences of flipping the table. Dies a single, albeit large, bad actor like China warrant a table flip? What proportion of mail comes from them and what from developed nations with whom we'll need to come to new agreements, drastically increasing the friction of overseas shipping to everyone involved?
I'm not sure this is the wrong move, in fact I think it might be the right one, but that's my gut. It doesn't seem like a real economic impact analysis has been done though, and that is problematic, making this seem much more politically motivated than from a position of careful consideration of what's in our best interest.
I purchased a temporary replacement phone via a website that claimed to ship domestically in the United States when it was actually shipped from China. There were several issues with the phone, but to return the device I would have been on the hook for over $100 in shipping. The credit card company refused to help through their purchase protection coverage because I had not returned the device.
How was it ever in our interest to force our e-commerce retailers to subsidize shipping for Chinese e-commerce retailers?
That's actually pretty hard to answer it seems. I can't find any straightforward chart from either USPS, or other research that would show the packages volume by year and country. Does anyone know of such source?
I don't see the problem here, nor why the proportion matters at all. The simple fact is that shipping from the US to anywhere else in the world costs a fortune. So flipping the table can't possibly make it any worse.
These are negotiations, not flipping the table.
That is to say, we should be looking at the results of leaving the global postal union, rather than just reacting because it's unfair.
This was years ago. I believe that the man now has anti-depressants to help him control his emotions a little bit better.
This isn't some whim of the current administration. The United States has been trying to correct this for decades.
It might have been in the works for decades, but the current administration is why it is actually happening in 2019, instead of getting perpetual postponements, hoping to resolve things amicably, without major economic disruptions.
I'm a bit surprised they haven't moved toward recognizing Taiwan as independently sovereign, and I'd bet that someone is carefully redacting any allusions to the fact that Taiwan exists from all briefings, and begging Fox News daily to keep any mentions of it off the air.
Trump wants a trade war, not a real war.
One only has leverage if the other side thinks one might flip a table, which requires a periodic demonstration.