Posted on 04/17/2025 8:14:24 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
We were in China last month for three weeks. Rental prices are down there deals on various goods, I don’t know how much of that is attributable to the tariffs
Too bad you didn't stay there.
That's right!
It's how the whole mind control deal works, don't you see.
You flood the media and little minds with disaster and thug stories to get what you need. Think about the thugs we've spent $36 trillion of our hard-earned dollars creating, going back decades: Ho Chi Minh, Noriega, Ayatollah, Saddam, Slobodan Milošević, Gaddafi, Putin, and Xi.
Notice the pattern? First, create the monster and then attack! It works -- most of the time.
“I don’t know how much of that is attributable to the tariffs”
Appreciate the report. Probably a lot. They’ve been over-capacity and dumping goods in foreign markets for years. IMO they need to go thru a downturn to reset the domestic capital to sound economic activities, generating reliable income.
It’s the normal economic cycle of a production economy which the leadership can’t get its head around. So it will be much worse on the people than it should be.
The lengthy article illustrates beyond doubt that the writer has no clue about China. The author assumes Xi desires to maintain the status quo in world trade.
That is not the objective of Chairman Xi or the CCP. The economy must be completely destroyed, wrecked beyond recognition, before the new China Socialism form of purer Maoist communism can take control of it all.
The people of China must starve and literally die in order to achieve such a level of pain they cry out and welcome the CCP promised salvation and something to eat
Xi the Pooh is having mandarin red hats made up as we speak: MCNKA (Make China North Korea Again)
With a LOT of help from our own communist/leftist tyrants here in the U.S.
I heard a week or so ago that they were anchored offshore as during Covid.
In a Buyer/Seller relationship, who has the leverage? If the buyer can start manufacturing their own items, what is the implication to the seller?
F the ChiComs. We should have nuked Beijing in 2020.
Murdering bastards.
L
RE: In a Buyer/Seller relationship, who has the leverage?
Depends on the goods the buyer needs and whether or not the seller has them.
If there are alternatives to the seller, and the alternatives have enough capacity to replace the opposing seller, then the buyer has leverage. If the buyer can make them at a price equal to or lesser than the seller’s price, the buyer has leverage. But if it takes time for the buyer to create the business conditions to make the needed product, then the seller has temporary advantage.
Too many moving parts to make a judgment here, especially when it comes to critical minerals we need for defense equipment and other industries.
must be fentanyl causing your projection
# 2 and 3 pics not China methinks .
Politics in Asian countries resembles kindergarten. Saving face has the highest importance. This project failure is one epic face slap. Bringing it up often will help hasten the total tofu-dreg collapse of the CCP.
Everyone saw that building (to be) collapse.
I've been posting my theory for a long time (most recently here) that China is taking the long view with fentanyl in the United States.
I posted before that it's not just to destabilize our society, it's to kill our military before they become our military.I believe the fentanyl poisoning of our children is a part of the Chinese long-term warfare strategy.
Instead of fighting our troops in Taiwan and elsewhere in 10 years, they are killing off our future recruits today so they never get the chance to grow up and join the military.
They are strategically atrophying our military muscle by killing off the next generation of soldier. Then they will attack where ever they want.
-PJ
There's the rub.
Adding a price to goods purchased by people and companies that is given to a government is not a tax? Well. I stand corrected.In a fair-market economy, a tariff on a commodity that is under-priced (i.e., sold below cost) is not a tax, it is a fine.
Consider the case of the semiconductor-dumping from Japan in the 1980s, and then tell me whether you think the response is a tax.
In the United States it is illegal for a corporation to sell products below the costs to produce them in order to drive competitors out of the market. Large integrated corporations are not allowed to let the profits from one division (for example, soaps) offset the losses from another division (for example, paper products) in order to sell their paper-products below cost to drive rival single product paper manufactures out of business. This is called "predatory pricing" and is a violation of anti-trust laws.
In the 1980s, six Japanese semiconductor manufacturers (mainly NEC, Toshiba, Hitachi, and Oki) flooded the United States with cheap memory chips in order to drive American memory-chip manufacturers out of business and dominate the semiconductor market. They were essentially using American accounting laws against the American companies because they couldn't legally compete with the artificially reduced prices of the chips coming from Japan. In 1987, President Reagan imposed a 100% tariff on Japanese products sold in the United States, including televisions and personal computers until Japan changed their semiconductor pricing policies. However, by this time the damage to the American semiconductor industry was done.
Questions:
- Was the American consumer helped or harmed by the introduction of cheap memory chips?
- Is buying illegally priced semiconductors similar or not to buying a stolen piece of jewelry from a fence, for example?
- After buying illegally priced semiconductors from Japan, is it a "tax" on American consumers to bring those prices back in line with fair-market cost accounting practices or is it a fine on Americans who were purchasing illegally sold products in the past and are continuing to do so in the present?
Bringing this back to the present discussion, I'm not saying that BMW, for example, is illegally pricing their automobiles in the United States, though Germany is imposing a 10% tariff on American cars sold in Germany as a bar to competition in German.
The Chinese steel case is different. The Chinese government is subsidizing the cost of producing the steel, which results in predatory pricing of steel on the open market. Imposing a tariff on Chinese steel sold in the United States is not a tax on steel consumers, it is a fine on China for using antitrust practices against American consumers.
While the American consumer benefits from the lower cost of the subsided products, it is a form of stealing from American producers of similar products who, by law, cannot compete with the prices of steel from China. The tariffs are intended to penalize the consumers of these products to encourage them to buy different products instead, and failing that, to level the marketplace to keep American producers viable in the market until China can be convinced to stop their predatory pricing practices in the United States.
That is the essence of a trade war.
-PJ
Thanks for your input, but that begs the question— Is the US Government entirely free from the accusations of subsidizing certain industries like China is doing?
For instance, giving $7,500 in tax credits for incentivizing the adoption of electric vehicles ( benefitting TESLA of all companies ).
Also allocating $5 billion in taxpayer money for building a national EV charging network and additional funding for battery production and recycling.
The difference is that the subsidy is going to the consumer in the form of a rebate after the sale, not to the producer in the form of selling at a loss. In the former, the sale already occurred; in the latter, the future sale is speculative.
I don't think a scheme like that would work for a private company in China (if there are such things); this is a case of the company being owned by the government, so it costs what it costs and the losses are absorbed by the government.
When western governments subsidize industries with direct cash, it's usually to spur initial development of the industry where there wasn't one before in order to incentivize and promote its growth when it's in the nation's interest to have that industry. This is done to support a long-term desire to wean the country off of foreign dependency on that industry, not to drive competing companies out of business (despite those other company's eventual loss of market share). Once the industry becomes self-sufficient, the government subsidies are usually terminated.
Spending government money on infrastructure (like EV charging stations) might be a subsidy to promote the growth of EV cars (private oil companies built the gas stations, auto manufacturers did not), but I do think it would be better to subsidize the development of private charging station companies. This would likely be a new business subsector offshoot from the energy sector.
Whether existing oil companies add rows of charging stations next to their gas pumps (with the coordination of local utilities to provide the electricty), or new companies form to build standalone charging stations and related convenience stores modeled after gas stations to create a new subsector, this would be preferred to direct ownership of EV charging stations by the government. Subsidies in support of either model might be warranted, including working with electrical utilities to expand the "grid" to supply the electricty to for the growth of EV charging for either model.
Right now, Tesla built its own network of charging stations to promote distance travel. The government has been slow to build anything comparable. I'd like to see private charging companies grow to fill this need.
Just my top-of-mind thoughts...
-PJ
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.