This is slightly off the tax plan topic but touches on price of imports. I am not an economist and so I can only offer my observations about imports vs domestic products.
Example 1: Recently I bought a pair of sunglasses online for less than $3. They are exactly what I wanted (John Lennon style, blue tinted mirror lenses, yep!) and they were sent directly to me from China. Got them in less than two weeks. I had been looking for a similar pair for a long time in local stores to no avail, (even the styles I didn’t want were no cheaper than $15). How any company can manufacture and ship product that cheaply and make a profit is beyond me, but I know a domestic company couldn’t do it.
Example 2: I have seen heavy iron manhole covers that were marked “made in India”. How is it possible to manufacture and ship such bulky items all the way from India at a better price than they can be made domestically?
I do know tariffs can lead to trade wars etc. but something seems out of whack here. No wonder our manufacturing is suffering. What gives?
Ah yes. What they want is to give the big breaks and not have anybody pay for them till down the road, when nobody will remember exactly who’s responsible.
This way, the prices would go up at the big box stores and their right winger peeps would finally wake up to something real and punish them.
They worry that it will increase the cost of imports, raising consumer prices.
I don’t see what their problem is. Decreasing corporate taxes will increase corporate profits which in turn will increase dividends and stock prices for the benefit of the investor class. Passing the cost on to the plebeians would have no political effect, an incontestable fact proven by the number of people who reflexively and dependably vote “R” against their own best interests.
Turtle man supports any bill that sticks it to the middle class!
Not just the middle class. As @26degreesrising pointed out the prices would go up at the big box stores which sticks it to the working poor who don’t make enough to pay any state or federal income tax. A tax plan that benefits the “job creators” and investor class at the expense of everybody else is a classic GOP win/win.
I expect Repiglicans to pass an unfunded tax giveaway for their rich owners. After all, deficits only matter when D’s are in power.
Doesn’t it make you wonder after all these year that the Republicans, at least the ones that have been around for at least a decade, have no idea on how to accomplish what they most dearly want? (This is part where I beat the dead horse) So now does anybody on here not think that Hillary would have binders with plans on how to make her policies come to fruition? Is this our cosmic battle, planners vs. hogwash promoters?
I’m not an economist either, but I have listened to many of them expound at length on these topics.
By not paying their workers very much. The cost of the raw materials in something like a (non-prescription) pair of sunglasses is maybe a few pennies. The main cost is getting someone to shape the materials and put them together in the desired form. And if you can do that in a place where you can pay a laborer the equivalent of a few dollars a day, and for long hours under shoestring conditions, you can keep the labor cost per unit pretty low.
Example 2: I have seen heavy iron manhole covers that were marked “made in India”. How is it possible to manufacture and ship such bulky items all the way from India at a better price than they can be made domestically?
Because it is absurdly cheap to ship things worldwide in the current, mostly fossil-fuel-based, transport economy. Very very large ships are in constant motion across the world’s oceans, and a single one of those ships may carry 11,000 standard shipping containers.
Again, this means that the cost of transportation, divided across all of those containers, is rather small per unit. Small enough to not matter as much as the labor cost differential, at least in many cases.
Want to save American manufacturing? Work to unionize the Chinese and the Indian work forces.
Have the geniuses thought that other countries could do the same thing regarding U. S. exports?
They mostly do that already with VAT taxes.
Trumpy doesn*t give a shit PROVIDING he gets his cut .
I wanted to see one thing from this bastard, an import tax, any import tax. I wanted it to put people in areas decimated by imports back to F**KING WORK. You cannot take away the livelihoods of vast swaths of a nation and expect to retain the social contracts that have bound this nation together.
Start with fuel, there is no goddam reason we can’t make our own fuel and mandate that people use it. Worried about carbon? If you are taking it out of the air, using it, then taking it out of the air again at least it’s better than taking it out of the ground where it was sequestered for millions of years. It’s $4 a gallon, so what? Currently we fund our own terror through energy purchases, when you factor in national security whatever we might pay is a bargain.
This may be a naive question–but how would this be functionally any different from a tariff? (I suppose from a technical standpoint, a tariff is more targeted toward individual countries, I guess). And why wouldn’t it lead to taxes on imports from the US by other countries? Are there other countries that do this?
I think there’s something of the Million Dollar Apple Effect as well.
*How much is the apple, little girl?*
A million dollars.
Well, you’re certainly not going to sell very many of those!
I only need to sell one.
Go into most stores and look at the difference between regular prices and sale prices. A lot of merchandise is dramatically over-priced, by at least 50%. To take another example, the “entrepreneur” who spiked the price of a drug 1000% because he felt like making more money. The fact that your doctor will charge you a fortune for lab work, but will happily accept a few pennies from the insurance company for the same work.
I think the Chinese take a longer view of business. Selling a million apples at a dollar profit each gets the same fortune.
And builds a strong manufacturing sector.
Doesn’t work for the oligarchs, where the country is nothing more than a private protection force (racket) for their enterprises. How many oil companies that are operating in the US are foreign owned? BP (which bought Amoco), Shell (which took over Texaco), and my favorite, Lukoil, a Russian (hi Vlad!) company to name a few. Keystone XL will carry (Koch) tar sands from Canada to Texas to be refined at a tax free refinery and loaded on tankers to go to China. Add in my own state, where Marcelles shale gas will be moved through a pipeline now taking right of way through eminent domain under the argument that’s a utility shipping the gas for residents of the state. Except it’s headed to be refined and loaded on tankers headed to foreign markets.
Don’t get me wrong, this is international, borderless business, but Americans are putting out the cash, public resources and vast military spending to protect profits which go into the pockets of the rich. Who are paying to keep their hold under the “freedom” banner. A con game on the highest level, now with a conman in chief and his minions all in on doing the oligarchs’ business.
If it increases the cost of expensive imports for the wealthy no way it will pass.
If nothing else, the GOP is predictable. Faced with a tough mid-term cycle, they are calling for Nordhaus-type tax cuts, making the fiscal management of the country less credible. Yet they cannot, and should not, expect the central banks of the world to continue to allow this through infinite quatitative easing. Liftoff, the return to a more normal monetary environment after 4 decades of easing, and remarkable easing since 2008, is coming. The Fed, with some very small hikes, is already testing the water.
“I’m still confident that we’re going to stay at the table until we solve that problem, which is how do we stop U.S. jobs from continuing to leave the United States,” Brady said. “We’re going to remain open to the best ideas on how we do that.”
No, the real issue is that you don’t understand the actual problem! The actual problem is that in the thinking of out corporate masters there is no such thing as a U.S. job. They recognize no U.S. companies or foreign companies, there are only corporate masters with varying levels of control over us.
Yet, you politicians continue to believe corporatists have any sense of patriotism.