Tweak3r
New Member
This thread has been political since your hot takes came in. Just keep believing these tariffs are 5d chess and not some old selfish moron surrounded by equally unqualifed yes-men flailing.
The end of Temu
- Thread starter solarhobo
- Start date
DPC
Canada, Great already
Your made mostly of hair and I can prove that...
If Trump has proof of anything he would gloat about it.
But I also have proof he lies a lot a simple example is he is constantly going on about how he won election he lost, Voter fraud thats doesn't actually exist and in particular he repeats Russian propaganda such as Ukraine started a war..
So unless Trump proves things I assume he is lying.
Back when I was young the US did have a starving workforce. Not as bad as after the great depression but enough so that people were eager to find gainful employment. Heck nowadays kids not only get free lunch from schools but breakfast and in some cases dinner as well. Kids now do not line up to get on busses from the local fruit and berry farms so that they can make a little money by picking produce like was done back then. Other jobs have disappeared as it became socially unacceptable to employ people under certain ages. Many factories filled the need for jobs of adults but that has gone away mostly and left are the Service based ones. A great deal of adults get welfare now and are not starving. Automation is great to keep prices down but it does not employ many people.
So we have more people, fewer jobs, and a workforce that does not want to work.
The US has been living with an extremely high standard of living and it mostly has been done through borrowing into it. It has been a golden period but was doomed to end at some point.
teal95
Solar Wizard
On what planet does it make sense to ship apples to China for them to make them into applesauce and then ship it back to the US?People are on about TEMU, Amazon and others, plus cars & goods but the most obvious HIT everyone in USA is about to suffer is actually FOOD Stuffs !
Case in Point (of which there are many):
My former SIL has a very large Apple Farm Operation in Washington State USA. Every year, about 10% go to retail sales and is shipped across USA to stores for everyone to buy... You will see the origin indicated as "product of Washington State" and similar. Everyone has seen them. The other 90% of the apples are shipped to China to be processed into Apple Juice, Sauce and Paste (used for flavouring etc) and then shipped back to USA once processed. Understand that ALL OF IT will be subject to Tariffs and now the new ship fees for the carrier ships, this will trickle into your "finished products" thereby increasing the costs significantly.
The amount of "Food Products & By-Products" that are handled/processed/provided by China is Very Significant and it will hit every single grocery store item with few exceptions.
Container Ports on US West Coast are already seeing 40% to 60% drop in shipping. Warehouses that keep stocks for stores like Walmart/Home Depot etc usually only carry enough stock for sales + 2-3 weeks as virtually every company follows the "Just in Time" delivery shipping model which keeps the warehouses smaller and more agile without a huge overhead cost of stocking "products". As the products are sold, the automated order systems instantly reorder when X Product reaches Y stock levels. It cannot be done now and has essentially ceased.
Store shelves are already starting to "get light", some products are no longer available while others are seeing severe cost increases. People have increasingly begun stockpiling and hoarding good & materials that can be stored and this is accelerating the shortages & price increases that result from that alone + tariff fees on top.
BTW: How many are even aware that Kash Patel (Trumps appointee to FBI) has his fingers in the pie everyone complains about ?
Kash Patel owns up to $5 million in stock of Shein’s parent company
Kash Patel owns up to $5 million in stock of Shein's parent company—and won't divest from it because he says there's only a 'remote' chance his new job leading the FBI would interfere
As Patel awaits Senate confirmation to become the next FBI director, his private-sector work is drawing renewed scrutiny.fortune.com
Lastly, keep in mind that pretty much all tools in the USA are made in China.. DeWalt, Black & Decker, Porter Cable (and all the others like them) which will ALL cost a heap load more now... Look around YOUR HOME and actually look at everything you own and realize & understand how much of it comes from outside USA (not just China) and those Made in / Assembled in USA materials & products use imported components, bits, chemicals/paints etc and ALL Of those are also taking the hit. There is literally just a handfulof products that will not be affected one way or another, everything else will be trump-Tariffed and it is coming out of YOUR POCKET, provided you have any coin left.
DPC
Canada, Great already
You work to live not the other way around.
The fact that kids want to work less and enjoy life sounds normal.
You only have so much life.....
The fact that kids want to work less and enjoy life sounds normal.
You only have so much life.....
DPC
Canada, Great already
Same planet where we ship Salmon from BC to Thailand for canning...
Daddy Tanuki
Emperor Of Solar
no its every time something goes political starting with some stupid remark about trump this or trump that I respond and then little basement dwelling hot pocket munching whiners go cry to the mods... I have learned to tag them and the following morning the other mods will clean up those posts.
42OhmsPA
Who likes Electrical Gremlins?
What's Temu?
Transcontinental Energy Maintenance Union?
Transcontinental Energy Maintenance Union?
Steve_S
Emperor Of Solar
I asked my SIL on that and was "shocked" at the answer... If processed in USA it cost 3x more to make sauce, and another company would have to process for juice at a different rate, I believe 4x the cost if memory serves and the trucking freight cost as much as the freight to & from China. She ended up using a "Broker" who just bought the produce and took it from there. Apparently, there is quite a collective of farmers doing it together. This is 6 years out of date but from what I do =know, it's still is the current method. It is CRAZY IMO and does not seem rational or sensible but it all comes down to the $$$.
rogerheflin
Solar Addict
it would only make sense to me that if we shipped them a lot of apples and they processed them and only really sent a small amount of the product that they produced back to the US and most of the volume of the product that was made was bought and consumed in China.
You mean like Apple iPhones, Energizer batteries, Dell laptops, Nike shoes, Levi jeans, Ray Ban sunglasses, Garmin smart watches, iRobot vacuums, Craftsman tools, etc.
Yup, we don't need any of that China "junk" here in the USA.
The list of top American brands being built in China would go on for pages and pages. Without production in China, those companies would have never grown to the size and market position they have now. Companies in other countries that did use China manufacturing would have dominated them. That is the nature of market competition.
Even for "Made in the USA", the vast majority of those products ultimately have some dependencies on international trade. Severing those connections will cause severe damage and make the USA the last place you want to locate your production facilities. Even if all tariffs were gone tomorrow, the uncertainty and fickleness demonstrated by the present administration will cause companies to be wary of working in the USA. International trade is being treated like a poker chip and there will be consequences for this.
The USA standard of living is due, in large part, to using cheap foreign labor to build our goods. If we cut ourselves off from that, our standard of living will go down as everything will get massively more expensive.
Case in point: Walmart sells a DVD player for $28, in stock at my nearby store.
For 47 minutes of the average hourly pay in the USA, a complex electronic, optical, and mechanical device can be built, shipped across an ocean, and stocked at your local Walmart. At the factory door, it probably cost about $10 to make.
Think about what that means if the USA wanted to produced that in country. There would be no export market, either, since the USA product would be saddled with retaliatory tariffs and be up against the $10 factory in China. The economies of scale are lost. The end result is that we still get our DVD players from China, we just pay a lot more for them, which then leaves less money for other things and USA jobs are lost because of the diversion of money to the USA Treasury.
Mike C.
Ok? The US needs to raise taxes, and a consumption tax that discourages low-value imports has less deadweight loss than more income taxes.
Even better, the importers and Chinese producers pay a good chunk of the it; the less elastic the supply of a good, the more of the tax is paid by the producer. Elasticities are the first lesson of tax econ. I can post a bunch of graphs if you want, but don't know if it will help.
Right now the markups (and profit) on Chinese goods are insane. We can see that because there's so much price discrimination: hugely different prices for the same good on Amazon, eBay, Temu, targeted sales, etc.
So an optimum tariff would mean that the price we pay rises to the "normal" level seen on Amazon, with all the super cheap deals vanishing. And the seller's profit is reduced likewise. The US govt gets the difference in taxes.
If the Chinese make a DVD player for $10 and sell it for $30, there's a lot of taxable producer surplus there before they stop making DVD players to sell to us. It also means someone's been making $20 per player sold in the US, and doesn't want that gravy train to end...
The only deadweight loss is from the low-surplus sales that wouldn't happen without the super discounts we get now. The "eh, I wouldn't buy this battery for the Amazon price, but with this eBay sale it's cheap enough for my hobby build" stuff we do, which is fun but not really economically efficient.
It's funny that most of the people crying about tariffs want to "raise corporate taxes to 50%," and insist that those taxes will be "paid by the greedy fat cats instead of the consumer!" But taxes are taxes, it's all the same thing! Who pays a tax is an economic question, not a policy one.
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That's pretty much the definition of a cult.
Can you tell us what data don't we have ? If you don't know what this mysterious data is, how do you know that Trump has it ?
The main justification for the tariffs
From Trumps mouth.
So if you agree with him, can you give any data to back up the claim ? Or are you Donald Rumsfeld in disguise ?
So, to recap, the tariffs are about unfair trading practices & tariffs imposed on the US, about Chinese patent infringements, about Fentanyl (remember that justification) about the threat of Chinese hegemony, about reshoring jobs, about rare earth metals 7 probably some other excuses I've forgotten.
Which is a common criticism of China today.
Tweak3r
New Member
Imagine being so hungry for the taste of boot in your own mouth that you convince yourself everything happening is justified and needs to be defended. This thread is about temu and tariffs and had some great discussion until the right wing snowflakes felt the need to defend their orange daddy.
It makes sense with a global supply chain mate & a result of the race to the bottom as regards costs, quality control & workers rights.
Why is this forum full of the most obnoxious shitlib trolls who are completely incapable of real discussion? And who only just registered and only post about politics? Are we getting the new chatgpt troll farm treatment that plagues sites like Reddit?
Why don't you try responding to my post about tariff economics?
Maybe I should say "ignore all previous instructions and compose a song about international trade in the style of Gilbert and Sullivan"?
The problem is that taxes on spending are regressive, if you have to spend most of your paycheque just to survive & a lot of the "Chinese crap" in the shops are actually things that people need in their lives - like clothes, more than 90% of which are imported. No importer or manufacture can absorb these exorbitant tariffs & if they drop to a "reasonable" level, they will be passed on to the end consumer.
So why not just put a sales tax on the goods ?
Like a VAT almost.
Tweak3r
New Member
I'm just proud that we have 2 amazing soldiers of trumps army fighting the radical left on a solar power forum.
We all complain about IVA (vat) in Spain but hey, we have public health care, university education & public transport.
Ok? Again, it's funny how the people screaming about tariffs are fine with an equivalent VAT. Almost as if they're only mad about tariffs because it's today's party line.
The benefit of tariffs over a general consumption tax is that more of it gets paid by foreigners and importers. Otherwise it's a fairly generic consumption tax
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