Posted on 03/25/2006 8:07:17 PM PST by ncountylee
The Durabrand 10-inch portable DVD player available at Wal-Mart retails for $199.94. A group of senators would like to raise the price to $254.67. The Creative Zen Nano Plus 512-megabyte MP3 player seems like a bargain at $89.72; less so at $114.39, the price the senators would prefer that you pay. The price hikes would be the result of a 27.5 percent tariff on goods imported from China, a proposal sponsored by Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and is scheduled to come up for a vote in the Senate this week.
Schumer and Graham aren't crazy, of course—they know better than most that taking money out of voters' pockets is a sure way to be sent packing. In other words, that 27.5 percent price hike won't be coming to a retailer near you anytime soon. But as an attention-getter, it's pretty good, and attention is what the two senators, and a number of colleagues who support them, are after. The chief bogeyman they want to flog is China's communist government, which—according to Schumer and the rest—deliberately keeps its currency undervalued in order to sell more cheap imports to the United States and other countries. Reasonable economists differ on that question. The tariff, if you buy the argument, would bring prices on Chinese imports closer to their unsubsidized value, leveling the playing field for honest tradespeople in, say, New York and South Carolina, who can't possibly produce goods as cheaply as the Chinese and still earn enough wages to buy all the DVD and MP players that they need.
(Excerpt) Read more at usnews.com ...
And even less so at the price it would cost to make here. Face it folks the production is not coming back here unless the cost to make it overseas becomes high enough to justify it. Most consumers will see the price "hike" and shrug it off as typical inflation.
Most of the parts they assemble into cars in US factories come from China, Mexico and Canada.
Bought replacement brake parts for my GM car and Jimmy. In big bold black stenciled letters on all the cartons "Made In China". AND I DIDN'T BUY THEM AT WALLY WORLD!!!
GM sells many cars in China and is building more plants in China.. Buick is the biggest seller.
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GM is being *absorbed* in China.
Foreign companies do not own or produce anything in China. Foreign companies are required to go into business with Chinese partners, transfer production technology, then eventually leave the local factory in Chinese hands.
GM is selling the rope - yes, it's happening - that is very soon likely to send it into bankruptcy.
We need to stop playing make-believe about China. We're never going to sell a billion shoes to a billion Chinese. It didn't happen that way.
What happened, is the Chinese learned to make the shoes, then sold a billion shoes to us.
The same thing will happen with cars. Then with airplanes.
Then what?
When we have lost all capacity to manufacture anything anymore, will we design our armed forces on Lenovo computers????????????????????????
Not true, the Yuan was pegged to the American dollar but that ended quite some time ago. It is now based on a basket of currencies and is freely traded. the Yuan is now like the dollar, traders pay what they think is worth.
You're talking about taking away peoples money and choices at the point of a government gun.
That's the difference.
Now how about you try to explain to Pat how you wanted to take one of the freedoms he died to protect.
L
Well that is what Limbaugh and t he WSJ op ed pages say, but in historical reality, that is far from being the truth. Tariffs are in fact specifically mentioned in the constitution. Tariffs were used in pre FDR America, when the US govrenmnet in terms of economics was libertarian in nature. It is amazing how bankrupt mainstream "conservatism" is now.
I thought there wasn't much money to be made putting electronic gizmos together, that's why we have them made overseas. (?) Its kind of a goodwill thing. Isn't Korea taking over some of these electronics manufacturing from China (who got it from Japan)?
This is not Japan we're discussing.
China is a completely different animal. A rabid animal.
Why should they attack us when we're their best customer?
“If goods can't cross borders armies will.”
–Frederic Bastiat
I think I was way ahead of my time. In 1966 at UCSB, I had a sign in the window of my room on the 7th floor of San Miguel hall --- BOMB PEKING.
Japans problems were due to its corrupt political system, of having one party rule since WWII, with their banks making bad loans that caused its economic system to seize up. On the other hand, Japanese heavy industry still does quite well, just the ability of Japanese banks to provide capital to Japanese industry has been cut off because of the bad loans the banks made, mostly due to real estate deals gone bad.
Also, there was a de facto tariff against Japan thhat dated from 1985, and that was the Plaza accord, that reduce the value of the dollar against the Japanese Yen by almost 50%. From 1985 when the dollar was at almost 200 yen per dollar to 1988, where it went down to 110, the value it dropped was far bigger than any tariffs imposed against Japan in the past. On the other hand, the Chinese gov refuses to do anything to adress the value of the RMB.
Becasue they're Communists and thus they seek world domination. They seek to rule the world, every bit as much as the Soviets did. That's why they have nuclear warheads pointed at us right now.
Smoot-Hawley Tariff:
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/id/17606.htm
We still have a larger GDP but their GDP growth rate is three times as much. They also have a 1.3 billion marketplace where we have but 300 million.
The Yuan is not free traded.
The exchange rate is very carefully controlled by the government of China. At the moment it is approximately 8.03 to the dollar. That was "freed" from its previous peg among a blizzard of publicity some time ago, but is no more a free exchange rate than it was before.
The only change has been, it is now pegged to a basket of currencies, rather than just the dollar. The Chinese government still decides secretly what the basket is - and changes it very, very, very slowly.
Please stop dreaming about China. Be realistic at least.
We are being played.
You must have pulled a muscle with that stretch.
Ronald Reagan on protectionism.
Manufactures and regular American have known of intense competition since Lee Iacocca took to the airwaves to implore us to "Buy American". Sorry, protecting jobs at the expense of the wealth of their countrymen is an European idea, not an American one. Reagan knew that. Too bad too many people who claim to be Conservatives don't.
1966 Corvair, when I do drive. Most times I ride my Schwinn.
My ex drives a Windstar. And my other ex drives a Jeep. Thanks for asking.
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