Wednesday, November 06, 2019

I bet China never imagined in a million years that Americans would have accepted Trumps' trade war. And if everyone is being honest - Americans would have never believed it either. They have to be shocked that he hasn't been pressured to stop it.

It's sort of is a silent coming together for the good of the nation. Which is very unlike us.

5 comments:

  1. Wooooow. That was super long. But I did watch it. I think we all tolerated a lot of stuff China did because we believed we were making them less communist. In the thinking that capitalism would change them for the better. But clearly over the past couple of years they are reverting to old behavior.

    I agree with you that what Trump is doing is not a perfect solution. But our previous leaders solution was just to placate them more. It seems as though there are no good solutions at this stage in the game, but at least he is trying. I mean, no-one was even going to try to put a stop to them taking our IP. They were like - HERE. You can have it all. I can't tell you how many conferences I went to that startups were forced to go to China to get VC money. It was written into the contract.

    Some of the stuff China is going is pretty freaky. It pretty much went unnoticed over the summer that they had supplied Cuba with a shiny new rail system. That buys a lot of favor since I'm sure they feel completely neglected. I guess China is in it for the long con for real.

    Here.

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  2. I cant speak for others but ive suffered greatly from the tariffs both froma loss of customers who left the country and from costs to acquire goods that aren't made in the US. Meanwhile Amazon is offer $19 an hour locally if you use your own truck for deliveries. I would rather have a president who will make amazon pay tax then one who interfers with the natural flow of the markets by imposing tax on the small businesses downstream. DF

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  3. I understand your frustration, but calling what we had a free market is a bit of a lie don't you think? The trade rules were set in place when China was a developing nation, and were heavily skewed in Chinas favor. Don't you think the rules should be skewed in our favor? Or at least equally because China is pretty much an equal now.

    For example the corporate tax rate in China is something like 25% which is why Trump lowered it to 21%. This in turn makes companies like Amazon pay no taxes. Again - there is no real perfect solution to these problems. People focus on the outliers, but it's really the people in the middle that get crushed and get put out of business. I would rather our government give the advantage to American companies so they can make things in the US and we don't depend so heavily on other countries.

    Some companies like Apple get the privilege of paying 1% tax in other countries. This is not a new phenomenon. Perhaps people should wish we were all more free by not wanting to tax everyone out of existence. Life is not fair. No matter what rules you make, some people are going to benefit more than others. But there is just no perfect solution. Someone has to do something to stop this negative feedback loop. You aren't going to put companies like Amazon out of business if you have a higher tax rate, but you will prevent smaller companies from even the hope of trying to get a leg in. That is really what we want.

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  4. Sometimes my memory doesn't quite get me entirely all the way to a link, so while I had something to point out, I figured it would be better if I had something to go with it ...

    Let's look at The Official Opposition.

    Marxist professor David Harvey points out that China may have saved Western capitalist countries from bigger crashes.

    The theory here is that the more that a country traded with China, the less awful the effects of post-2008 were for that country.

    As far as the US corporate tax rate goes, you don't have to look any farther than North America and Europe to see where the competition was.

    The UK was at 20%, it's at 19% now, and it'll be 17% next year.

    Their competition: the EU, where it's roughly 19% right now.

    When you take into state and local taxes as well as other considerations, the real US rate is around 27%.

    That's KPMG's numbers, not mine -- there's a spreadsheet page out there somewhere with relatively recent numbers ...

    Canada's around that (now) at 26.5%, but prior to Trump's changes, even Mexico's roughly 30% blew the US out of the water.

    So the US had to do this because at the time, the US wasn't competitive with pretty much anybody, even regionally.

    China's 25% corporate tax rate was lower than the US's effective corporate tax rate of around 40%.

    But the US doesn't have to worry about China as much as parts of Europe that actually want to be competitive for parking corporate residency, such as Switzerland and Liechtenstein.

    And as far as the US/China "trade war" goes, it's not hurting some of the players in China that the US government appears to want to hurt.

    The CEO of Huawei flat out told everyone that he doesn't give a fuck about doing business in the US, with the US, etc. because his profits just went up by roughly 25%. He still buys supplies from the non-US-based subsidiaries of US companies, but Huawei doesn't buy any US chip tech anymore, meaning no more big economic transfers from China to the likes of Qualcomm.

    Even ARM Holdings looks like it's been partially cut out because of IP cross-licensing issues with the US, and they have a zero fab business model.

    I think Huawei's probably going to be OK, but I don't like 5G because of what the RF technology, its frequency allocations, and the related technical limitations imply. (Once again, you are not paranoid enough.)

    "It's sort of is a silent coming together for the good of the nation."

    I don't see this at all.

    What I see is the standard cycle of "news product consumption" in which non-stakeholders once again believe they might have meaningful stakes as a sort of "teamplayerism" effect that's like people rooting for the outcome of sports events, but without actually having any meaningful stakes.

    When that's not happening, then there's the standard cycle of "aspirational entertainment consumption" that involves worship of people with celebrity status.

    Want some people to blame?

    Try the Nixon administration since it was their idea, but before you do that, consider this: the US would have had to compete with China directly, without even a pretense of access to Chinese markets or access to capital there, back at a time when OPEC was beginning to give the US a huge wedgie over energy supplies.

    This wasn't a two-front war that the Nixon administration thought it could win.

    Macro-economics has micro-economic implications and often vice versa.

    So I'm not one of these people who's cheering.

    It's looking very, very likely that the new HQ will be a mid-grade tax haven country, not one of the super-cheap ones, but somewhere like Liechtenstein or Switzerland.

    I could go for either one, actually, if I have to stay involved.

    I know where I can get a really great coffee in the center of town in Vaduz. :-)

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  5. "Marxist professor David Harvey points out that China may have saved Western capitalist countries from bigger crashes."

    He might be a marxist - but I think he is generally correct. I think most people accept that as true. China saved the world in the last recession due to their rapid growth. It also helped that Obama fostered maliase in the US and continued the status quo.

    As for the tax rates in other countries - I think it ridiculous that you have to go overseas to gain a better tax status. Which is why so many companies left. If our politicians let us thrive they would get more tax money. But instead they are constantly trying to penalize people.

    "The CEO of Huawei flat out told everyone that he doesn't give a fuck about doing business in the US, with the US, etc. because his profits just went up by roughly 25%."

    China says a lot of stuff as do their subjects. We will see if what they say is true. I always thought it was odd that Huawei had a building literally right next door to Nvidia. This is before Trump got involved or became president. When they were accused of spying or something. I generally have no opinion about them. We will see if they don't need us.

    "So I'm not one of these people who's cheering."

    Oh, I'm not cheering I think the whole thing sucks. I pretty much hate that we are in a spot that there are no good solutions. Only sucky ones. That our government and Silicon Valley pretty much passively did a wealth and IP transfer to China. We have a lot of problems here. China has beautiful cities. We have shit holes. I don't like the tariffs at all. But China plays us. They know we are pansies and can steam roll right over us. The only way you are going to get them to respond is with money. But I am wholy shocked that when I talk to almost anyone - the tariffs are a non event. It doesn't even rate on their meter.

    And reasonably I can't really blame Nixon who served when I was barely alive. There have been many presidents since then. Honestly I think Bush and Obama deserve most of the blame. China has only had a middle class for maybe two decades. But they both had pretty weak backbones. They were willing to let this whole country get hollowed out.

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