Posted on 05/08/2016 8:34:01 AM PDT by detective
In an unusually strong protectionist action, President Reagan today ordered a tenfold increase in tariffs for imported heavyweight motorycles.
The impact of Mr. Reagan's action, which followed the unanimous recommendation of his trade advisers, is effectively limited to Japanese manufacturers, which dominate every sector of the American motorycycle market.
The action was exceptional for protecting a single American company, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company of Milwaukee, the sole surviving American maker of motorcycles.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
RedWulf wrote: “And they’ve been consistently wrong as working class and now middle class take home pay is in decline.”
How does increasing prices through tariffs improve the standard of living for those whose income has declined?
Re builds US industry, increases employment, and reduces welfare costs. Like most long term productive activities it will hurt in the short term and greatly enrich us in the long term.
Free Traitors™ can’t see past the next quarter.
Tariffs are fair if applied correctly. The problem (like anything else in economics) is that the politicians get involved and they start slipping at the trough.
The other issue with tariffs is when improvements are made outside of the US, there is no reason to enhance the existing products.
Does anyone remember how crappy the US cars were in the 70’s?
I must have missed the Times where people said they were the only true followers...
In the 70’s and early 80’s HD built a poor product. Today they are better but really don’t compare to Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha for cost/quality.
HD makes a good bike but charges more for the name than they do build quality and performance.
Polaris/Victory/Indian makes bikes that are of equal or greater value.
Yes, those tarrifs may I’ve saved an iconic American company - Quality control and innovation would have done it even faster.
Who among us believes we should buy a crappy product just to keep a business open?
GREAT FIND detective!!!!! GREAT FIND, I had forgotten this!!!!
The way I define the left and the right is by time preferences. Leftists always want things immediately with no concern for the future while rightist want things that bring long term benefits. Objectively this makes free trade a leftwing ideal and as one would expect some of its biggest pushers were left wingers like Marx, Trotsky, and Libertarians.
And before someone tells me that Libertarians are right wing let me remind you for most of the history of the movement they fought along side of socialists and Communists against Conservatives in places like Spain and Russia. They've always been left wing and would gladly purge any Conservative who got in the way of their hedonism.
Just like Communism, it would work if people where perfect!
>The other issue with tariffs is when improvements are made outside of the US, there is no reason to enhance the existing products.
This thing called the free market forces competition and if your markets are rigged free trade isn't going to help you.
>Does anyone remember how crappy the US cars were in the 70’s?
I do but I've also read up on why they were aweful. The federal government and EPA regulated the hell out of cars during the 70s and automakers had no decent designs to deal with the high MPG requirements and loss of function from the catalytic converters. While Japanese automakers had never built anything other than small cars perfect for the governments demands.
And at the same time the Harvard business school of management had taken over the big three and forced them to focus on costs while ignoring quality.
In a less regulated market 2 of the big three would have gone under and smaller car makers would have opened up to replace them but again government interference distorted the market.
We all benefited from Japanese cars nor because we couldn't make good cars, but because the US government was killing our ability to do so.
The difference is that Harley-Davidson wanted Americans to have jobs. These days, companies prefer to put Americans out of jobs in favor of Third World labor, while retaining free access to American consumers. Trump (the only candidate who will get my vote) better realize he won’t be up against foreign countries, he’ll be up against Corporate American Economic Traitors.
RedWulf wrote: “builds US industry, increases employment, and reduces welfare costs. Like most long term productive activities it will hurt in the short term and greatly enrich us in the long term.”
The tariffs on imported motorcycles have been removed so let’s go onto some tariffs that exist now.
We currently have tariffs on imported sneakers which raised about $2.7B from American consumers in 2014. There is only one sneaker manufacturer (New Balance) in the US. New Balance is fighting efforts to remove these tariffs to “protect American jobs”. New Balance employs 1350 people. Do the math. American consumers are paying $2M per year for each job protected. Do you consider that an efficient use of funds to ‘builds US industry and increases employment’?
Now as to reducing welfare costs, $2M per job pays for a lot of welfare, job training, etc.
Almost everyone likes the short term gains of cheap labor but in the long term we lose gains from building high tech equipment to build sneakers with fewer people thus increasing productivity and creating other manufacturing jobs. And eventually the trade imbalance kept afloat by debt will collapse and without the factories, supply chains, and skilled workers we'll end up paying high prices for imported good that we have to trade raw materials for, the curse of every poor nation out there.
Free traders chase the short term gain while ignoring the long term future. And before say everyone is doing it, the Chinese, Russians, and Germans are not.
Just out of curiosity, you expect Carrier to reduce its prices on its products from Mexico, but not to raise its price on products from the U.S. If a tariff is imposed? What give?
I believe Pat Buchanan was a free trader back in 1983 (if he was still working for Reagan at the time—I don’t remember when he left).
In the short run perhaps, but in the long run it puts Americans back to work... the benefits of which far outweigh the negatives of higher costs of foreign products.
RedWulf wrote: “If there’s only one US maker of sneakers then it sounds like tariff is too low to encourage US competition.”
You must not have noticed that we are paying $2M per job to save those jobs. Exactly how much would be too much to save a job? Or, how much do you want to pay for a pair of sneakers so some guy working for New Balance can buy a bigger TV? Wouldn’t you rather pay a lower price for sneakers so your children could have a larger TV?
“Almost everyone likes the short term gains of cheap labor but in the long term we lose gains from building high tech equipment to build sneakers with fewer people thus increasing productivity and creating other manufacturing jobs.”
Interesting that you would bring that up. FWIW, Nike says that the removal of these tariffs would allow it to introduce new manufacturing technologies that would add 10,000 new domestic jobs over ten years.
There is also this. Suppose we have a new manufacturing technologies that increase productivity. Do we implement that technology? It will cost jobs. Shouldn’t we ban that technology to save jobs?
“The other issue with tariffs is when improvements are made outside of the US, there is no reason to enhance the existing products.
Does anyone remember how crappy the US cars were in the 70’s?”
Exactly. If we had put 45% tariffs on Hondas and Toyotas in the early 1980s, we’d still be driving the X-car crap that GM was churning out at that time.
Why not attack the root causes of the problem, some of which I have named, to begin with? Sooner or later you have to do that, why not now?
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