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Comment by slowmovintarget | Hacker News Reader

Do the difficult thing. Stop buying from China. As consumers, buy things with a transparent supply chain. Look for ESG reports on the companies you buy from.

The hard part of this is it requires consumers to be educated and act. This almost never happens unless the costs for not acting are built into the prices of goods. Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.

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>The hard part of this is it requires consumers to be educated and act.

Agreed 100%.

>Doing that requires political will. It's going to make a lot of people very angry; and we're not talking indulgences in the form of cap & trade, either.

Also an astute observation. It may be the case that this is ultimately a problem with our political system first and foremost.

But economic sanctions alone will not halt the manufacturing base of an economy the size of China's.

China and India need to get on board for real. Asking politely is not working. I'll never advocate for the initiation of force, but something is going to need to change in a big way to convince these countries to join us in a fight that will strip all of us of a little short-term prosperity, if we want to leave a planet that our great grandchildren can safely habitate.

Really enjoyed reading your writing. Do you have any other outlets?

I do not, sorry if this comes as a disappointment.

I might suggest the slightly less difficult thing that I think could be reasonably politically accomplished. Introduce carbon tariffs on goods imported from dirty countries to make their products less competitive and provide an incentive to clean up manufacturing.

Great baby step. I'm all for it. Let's just make sure nobody is under the impression that this is anything more than a baby step - far more will be needed, ultimately.

I want to go one step further than this idea and introduce carbon tariffs on imported goods coupled with price ceilings so corporations can't pass off the tariffs to wealthy people and still profit. The corporations should be paying these taxes and their bottom line should suffer if they're selling dirty goods. They should not be able to make the profit margins they're making today by manufacturing cheap trash in China and selling it for insane markups in first-world countries.

The price ceilings should be set based on some amount of maximum profit margin companies should be allowed to make. If they want to make bigger margins they're going to have to move manufacturing to cleaner countries and then they can apply their insane markups.

I'm actually quite in favor of, essentially, a minimum VAT tax. The US demands that good manufacturing pays some reasonable level of VAT taxes (let's say 10% as an example). If Apple builds a laptop in China they value at 300$ (paying 45$ in VAT to China) and then ship it over to Bermuda to "endow it with their brand" adding 1700$ to the value and paying a VAT tax of .5% then, once it arrives at US shores, we simply bar the good entry until 9.5% of 1700$ is surrendered to the US government to account for VAT dodging.

It's an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.

So, an import tariff that is waived against imports from countries with sufficiently high taxes on production, provided those taxes are characterized the right way?

Seems like a monumentally bad idea

> It’s an incredibly easy way to close a whole bunch of tax loopholes at once.

I don’t think it closes any tax loopholes.

Tax compatibility is a pretty solved problem - countries frequently coordinate to make sure income and other taxes don't end up being double counted so it's not like this would happen accidentally[1]. And the point isn't so much that the US should collect all this revenue - it's just to make tax havens moot and unnecessary.

Why spend money shipping laptops to Bermuda so you can put a sticker on them there if you aren't saving any money?

1. There's a positive incentive here, if you work and live in country A and are considering working in country B either country B can craft their tax system so that you won't end up paying the same taxes to both country A or country B... or they can not do that. If they fail to make their tax law compatible they lose out on your tax income (it instead all goes to country A) since nobody wants to be double taxed - if they make their tax laws compatible then they essentially get some free income and another earner. Digital nomads pulling down six digit salaries in low cost of living countries also injects a whole lot of money into the local economy and generally just makes things better - and the country retains the right to limit visas if they ever have any issues with it.

> Tax compatibility is a pretty solved problem

Tax compatibility with VAT only is a sensible concept where the destination country has a VAT itself, which the US does not. Otherwise, a minimum VAT on imports is just a global punitive import tariff, and has nothing to do with compatibility.

Even where its sensible, it still has potential problems that can be introduced through other parts of the tax system, but…we don’t really need to consider that in this case.

So, don't buy anything containing electronics?

Produce political solutions that steer the market towards developing electronics domestically again, or reducing the need for such electronics in the first place.

what political solutions do you envision that would reduce demand for electronics in a meaningful way?

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