Temporary suspension of acceptance of mail to the United States

edit: someone changed it to a cropped form of the page title that's even less informative. I tried.

I had to redo the headline a bit to fit and accurately represent the overall picture.

Some key details copied from the post:

>> "Therefore, starting August 27 (Wed.), in line with other national postal operators, we will temporarily suspend the acceptance of postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) to the United States that contain the following items:"

>> "Individual gifts with a content value exceeding 100 US dollars

>> "Goods intended for sale for consumption"*

>> "In addition, we will continue to accept letters, postcards, printed matter, EMS (documents), and postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) containing gifts between individuals with a value of less than US$100."

>> "As an alternative to the above suspension of acceptance, our international courier service, UGX (U-Global Express), can handle shipments in compliance with U.S. customs regulations: UGX (U-Global Express)" [1]

[1] https://www.post.japanpost.jp/int/UGX/index_en.html

This situation feels dumb. I feel like I am watching idiots cheer on someone doing parkor and that person getting his teeth smashed on a wall. Like, what is the point?

The implementation is also needlessly fumbled. All these shippers are suspending their service temporarily because this is all so rushed. Normally there would be larger lead times for changes like this and shippers and importers could adjust their processes and businesses with less friction.

And that's not even accounting for the fact that there is little reason to believe that many of these changes might never actually take effect or be rolled back soon. So much cost that could have been avoided!

It is. The original claim was that De minimis exceptions were being used to ship drugs into the USA from (insert hand wavy racist statements here about anything South of Texas). Then it was "because unfair". Then they terminated de minimis for all countries.

I don't think anyone is cheering. At least most of the people cheering are starting to realize it's actually their face planting into the cement.

You can still send letters- this is a big deal but it’s not -quite- as bad as I first thought since my ballot is mailed in from abroad…

India has done the same as well

https://www.business-standard.com/immigration/india-post-sus...

De minimis allows people to evade tariffs by simply drop shipping each individual product all the way from China or wherever, so long as the retail price is below the threshold. I’m skeptical of tariffs in general but if you’re going to have them, it makes sense to close the loopholes.

Sounds like the Japanese commercial carriers are going to get a bump in business since they're not interrupted.

We should have something like the federal reserve, but for trade policy. A board of governors nominated and confirmed by the senate in 8 year rotations. Politicians cannot be trusted to craft economic policy. I am dubious that they should be crafting fiscal policy either since theyve shown they cant be trusted with that either

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard."

- H. L. Mencken

Unfortunately, Americans chose to elect an administration which is either unwilling to learn why a federal bureaucracy has to move slowly sometimes, or who is actively leveraging that precedent to undo it.

I don’t see why we should allow 0% imports but be shut out of exports. Yes yes according to some chart this is actually a good thing but I find it unfair.

For centuries the theory was mercantilism which is the highest imbalance of trade in your favor is good.

The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.

I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal. Using tariffs where imbalances exist, especially when countries arbitrarily lock your goods out of their markets, is a tool for fixing this.

One reason the US is so fucked up for the lower and middle classes is our global reserve currency and how it provides increasing pressure on the dollar and slowly deindustrializes our society. This has been pushing us towards ever more radical politics

Remember, he’s ending mail-in ballots…

Why not just have a dictator?

And several European countries: https://apnews.com/article/us-tariffs-goods-services-suspens...

> "we will continue to accept letters, postcards, printed matter, EMS (documents), and postal items (small packets, parcels, and EMS (goods)) containing gifts between individuals with a value of less than US$100."

So no, "mail" is not suspended. More accurate headline please.

That's not within his power to do.

DHL's announcement

"Temporary restrictions on postal goods shipping to the U.S. for private and business customers"

https://group.dhl.com/en/media-relations/press-releases/2025...

Neither was tariffs

Switzerland as well: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/trade-policy/swiss-post-tempora...

Trump has tried to do plenty of things that aren't within his power, like ending birthright citizenship by executive order.

But at least ensure you can then get paid... Which seems to be hang here. Failure to tell how to pay those tariffs...

"The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter."

- Winston Churchill [disputed]

It's the price of uncertainty.

Business can plan for low tax or high tax regimes. Not so much when it's just "unknown".

Similar across Europe https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/aug/25/postal-serv...

AFAIK the proposal is to go back to absentee ballots, rather than the blanket free for all today

This is power explicitly reserved for Congress, which is being extra-constitutionally seized by the President (on the pretext of "national security") with no public support. The problem here is electing a lawless president and putting the Congress in charge of a GOP which is full of unprincipled cowards from top to bottom, not the institutional framework.

So does any other shipper (UPS? Fedex?) allow shipments from India?

So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.

This needs to be repeated. Tariffs are a tax on ordinary citizens. Unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not progressive and therefore benefit the wealthy.

These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer. And then turn around and complain that rich are getting richer and they are getting poorer.

Semi-related: I make orders from Amazon Japan a couple times a year - shipping to the US isn't cheap but it's nice that Amazon has always handled import taxes/customs/everything else involved in international shipping. Other than taking longer, it's basically the same experience as ordering from Amazon domestically.

It's a shame that the ending of the De Minimis Exemption and other tariff-related stuff from the current administration is going to basically kill off Amazon Japan deliveries to the US.

From my understanding, once De Minimis ends, the delivery guy may ask you to pay import duties when he drops the goods off at your house. This is impractical for so many different reasons - what if I'm not home? How do I verify the import taxes? If I miss the carrier and don't pay, what happens to my order?

It's like letting the idiots on here claiming you can build twitter in a weekend run our country.

Anyone who spend 30 seconds thinking would understand that spinning up the logistics to collect hundreds of millions if not billions of payments would take some real doing. Instead, we're gifted mr "it's obvious and easy".

Yeah dodge the steel tariffs in small envelopes!

> That's not within his power to do.

Trump has the power to do anything that people (especially Congress) does not push back against.

> 1. Do not obey in advance.

> Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

* https://timothysnyder.org/on-tyranny

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Tyranny

What's your alternative?

I'm serious.

(Mine is multi-member ranked voting (NOT IRV)).

It wouldn’t matter. The Supreme Court has allowed this administration to do whatever they want within the executive branch with the very narrow exception of messing with the Federal Reserve. And tariffs are squarely under congressional authority, but the party currently controlling congress has decided to cede that power to the president.

This is one of the larger effects of Trump's rule-by-EO approach that I think people are coming to realize:

The US government moves slow and the US is big. Big-and-slow can be planned for. Big-and-fast cannot be planned for and is, in fact, hugely disruptive.

Apart from all other parameters, the US does poorly with tyrannical-style rule because it's bad for business.

Trump's tariffs are already illegal and unconstitutional (though the right-wing Supreme Court won't care). Tariffs are within the purview of Congress. He's been doing all of this through "emergency" declarations.

Title is not accurate. They're allowing personal shipments under $100, and the rest can be shipped via their UGX service.

It sounds like JP doesn't want to deal with the customs paperwork at scale (edit: also the deposits).

Silicon Valley is in a mad panic, left wondering if bulk shipments of Tenga Eggs will be affected.

Didn’t it already end for China? They just add the tax on top of the shipment price and pre-pay it.

De minimis is used a lot more by individuals than by corporations. People shouldn't have to pay tariffs on necessary medicines or any other items for personal non-commercial use.

Tariffs aren't even justified, as they're anti-free-market, anti-capitalistic, and the government provides no extra services. It's equivalent to an illegal federal sales tax. If anything, the government has been cutting major services.

Another reason is the weird fetish for pumping the spoils of the strong dollar into medical middlemen and tax cuts for billionaires.

Has he "ended" it? Does he have the discipline, intelligence, and patience to do the work to end things legislatively or just make executive orders that will be tied up in courts for years and rescinded as soon he's out of office?

Austria, too. I know somebody working there in mid-management. They say the don't care about high or low taxes on the parcels they transport, but they need a straight forward way to execute, and there just is none.

Neither was starting “military actions” in the past. Laws need to be enforced to have any power.

If it's through Amazon they would probably just add the import taxes to your order.

Otherwise, you'll get a notice from USPS/UPS/FedEx in advance to pay the import tax online (or at post office), and then they'll deliver it.

One alternative that has been tried (and is, arguably, still being tried) is Constitutional Republic.

The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process. That counterweights the populist "half of everyone is below average" effect.

Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment. A city wants to yank guns from people because everyone is panicking about shootings? Second amendment. Disney wants copyright to last forever because they're Disney? "securing for limited Times" phrasing in the Constitution. And so on.

It has its own weaknesses but one advantage is that change comes slower. This can be a problem when the past is on the wrong side of history, but it's a nice-to-have feature when the political temperature turns up and the odds of moving fast (and breaking things) increase.

It's probably a good thing that no matter how dumb any given American is, they can't legally sell themselves into slavery (even if they can get damn close).

I was wondering how this would affect the programmer that was sending people Japanese candy packages back in the day, but apparently they shut it down already due to postal restrictions and related increases in postal rates during Covid. Now I'm curious who survived that but is shutting down due to this.

My middle school 7th grade civics class told me that this conversation happens in Congress in Congressional hearings.

I get to hear my Rep ask questions. There is a Congressional research office that acts as a kind of neutral arbiter of truth allowing for evidenced based instructions. Then, after weeks or months, a consensus builds and Congress passes a law and tells the President what to do (hence Congress=Article ONE -> two).

Now, I get to watch a single person dictating tax rates and dumb twitter threads doing a horrific job replacing what I described above.

I could debate you on the merits of your comment, but my real point is that before you wreck the lives of millions of people, you should make sure most people are onboard with all the consequences (1st order and 2nd order effects).

I don't know what Amazon specifically will do (didn't know they allowed international shipments to begin with!), but the customs process via any normal carrier is that you get a bill when your items arrive at the port of entry.

You pay the bill, the item is released, and you get it a few days later. FedEx, for example, does the whole thing online.

I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.

How we redirect money to the medical system is so completely insane it must be the #1 place politicians get their graft from. It’s just so insane

>Trump has the power to do anything that people (especially Congress) does not push back against.

Elections are run at the state level, so it's not like Trump can direct state agencies to stop counting mail-in ballots. That said, the fact that elections are run at the state level, and the fact that only a handful of swing states matter means it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.

If the answer to a lawless president is a cowardly and corrupt congress, then god help us. Economic policy simply cannot be trusted to politicians whose only incentive is re-election and serving campaign donors

>and rescinded as soon he's out of office

If

Do you think that cigarette taxes should be repealed then?

It's his standard procedure over and over again; works great for him.

Talk it up. If it keeps him in the headlines, great.

Throw it against the wall and see if it sticks. If he gets sued, fine, there's a decade of suits piled up in the queue, no problem. If there's an injunction, maybe ignore it and try anyway (queue full). If he's truly blocked, it's the commie judges and he'll make that better soon. OTOH if he gets away with that, more outrage and more PR for him, success.

Early stage fascism thrives on outrage fatigue to slim opposition. Do three more outrages today. Repeat tomorrow.

> I see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. Taxes are literally brakes on financial transactions. The number 1 way to slow down your economy is to tax every transaction possible as highly as possible. It is an interesting thought experiment to eliminate income and sales taxes, and try to only finance the government via tariffs.

Then you don't actually see an argument for tax cuts everywhere. What you want is a tax that you agree with, that disproportionately affects people you don't care about.

Trump is able to this this because the other branches of government are not stopping him, because his party has control and he is a very strong executive.

A prior historical US example would be FDR, who my teachers growing up simply adored, who strong armed many aggressive executive policies through and radically reshaped America for a century.

It is if you live in a state controlled by a GOP governor and legislature. Trump also doesn't have the power to gerrymander Texas, yet he commanded it, and then it happened. Which means he actually does have the power.

While technically true, f.ex. Finland has stopped all mail shipments[0]. I guess the airlines were not set up to dealing with the hassle of making sure all the shipments are “allowed”. Or maybe just lazy, dunno really.

[0] https://www.posti.fi/en/latest-news-at-posti/%20/news/trump-...

That's true for every aspect of US government and society; having policy set by an elected legislature answerable to the people is how democracy works. If you want things to function better, start electing people who behave honorably and act in good faith and start demanding accountability from your representatives when they don't.

(Also, don't get your hopes up about the Federal Reserve in the current climate. Just like the Supreme Court or the FBI or the EPA or the NIH, the Federal Reserve is only as good as the people in charge, and Trump is doing what he can to seize control and abuse its powers for personal gain.)

The current system was up for debate in the last election.

Feels over reals got us this result where Republicans specifically in Congress refuse to step in to stop the President from violating the emoluments clause, tax authority, and impoundment.

At least the last administration knew they had to pass Congressional legislation to spend money and that impoundment was absolutely illegal. And there is clear evidence Democrats will cull the herd of politicians who stray off.

My state does all elections completely by mail, which means all paper ballots. It seems to work perfectly.

Not really true. In this case he doesn’t have the power to do it because the federal government doesn’t operate elections. He has no lever to pull.

At most he can convince some friendly state legislatures to ban mail-in voting, but even that may not be an automatic process (e.g., maybe some states have requirements to change the constitutional or put the item up on a ballot measure).

Every Trump policy to this point has involved some kind of lever that the executive branch has had power over: tariffs, national guard deployments, and even in the case of ICE enforcement, Trump had to go to Congress to appropriate additional funding to make that viable long-term.

As an aside, I’m not personally too worried about the mail in voting as a hot button issue. I don’t think Republicans will touch it significantly because they need turnout, too, and they need it from key demographics that use absentee ballots like older voters and military members.

Some research seems to show that mail-in voting doesn’t really benefit a specific party.

https://www.dw.com/en/us-election-mail-in-voting-biden-trump...

My preferred way would also to be to eliminate expenditures, but failing that, redirecting taxes in a way that grows the US internal economy as much as possible, and incentives the re-industrialization simultaneously, is an interesting experiment.

Which is good, as that is easier to fraud/tamper with. If you can’t be arsed to move your pistruie to a voting section come Election Day then you shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway.

there is a literal energetic meaning to borders and frontiers and barriers IN GENERAL

from mitochondrial gradients pushing ions through a hole to make a protein complex spin so to chain double phosphate groups in ADP molecules into triple ATP molecules thereby storing energy.

all the way up to an international entities controlling flows of goods and people across borders with the goal of maximizing corporate and government profits (storing/collecting energy)

i.e. utilizing the energetic gradient caused by citizens and people and families trying to meet each other across the border including sending each other goods, flavors, candies, etcs

Untrue, Congress gave that power over to the executive branch.

Neither is ending birthright citizenship, dismantling USAID, closing the department of education, firing the heads of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board (independent federal agencies) without cause, impounding funds appropriated by Congress, etc.

Nevertheless, Trump has started process for all of those, and has been successful at many due to the slowness of the courts.

He wasn’t allowed to end the r&d system in the us, but nobody stopped him. He wasn’t allowed to create export tariffs, go nuts with import tariffs, rip up senate passed treaties, …. As others have said, somebody has to stop the process and to date it’s not been stopped.

They're not nearly as bad as income tax which would have to be raised if we didn't do tariffs.

At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.

here in Canada, ordering from the states was already a royal pain, as the dutys were applied more or less arbitrarily at the border, but getting some camera part or other little doohicky from china, is cheap and reliable, if wierd and of completely unknown delivery date. I cant imagine ordering from the states now, selling to maybe, but it would be a pay up front no returns, buy some insurance and pray kinda offer.

I couldn't find a way to fit all that in the title, so I got 99% there and clarified in the first post. The title still has more resolution toward the full detail than the original title.

> So execute it for China alone. The issue is that these blanket actions are lazy at best and exclusively populist.

Same argument. If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US. It's the same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center.

Setting aside judgment of the tariff policy and the chaotic implementation, it does make sense to make them blanket actions. Much of the byzantine nature of our existing supply chains is due to gaming of international tariff policy.

I think it's quite the opposite. Tariffs are flat taxes on corporations AND can't be avoided with the tax shenanigans all big corporations use and many small ones can't. Implementation and motivation details aside I'm in favor of small tariffs for all but the most equal trade partners.

Corporate taxes have the problem of small business paying much more proportionally than large ones and a flat tax on businesses that rely on cheap foreign labor and goods is deserved.

Trump doesn't get to define all of my opinions by me needing to oppose exactly everything he's done.

The problem with the current political situation is the establishment in both parties w were too cowardly or useless to address real problems which are now actually being addressed by objectively stupid fascists.

And that is the lesson to everyone, get stuff done or get replaced by awful people doing awful things.

Ecommerce of millions of people are facing a huge disruption.

Think of Brexit. Commerce still happens between the UK and Europe, but there is a massive show-stopping level of friction now because people need to do Customs. That is a lot of paperwork. Millions of people are not used to this and many small businesses will get wiped out.

FedEx in my case paid the bill to customs, shipped me my item, and then secondary sent me a bill to pay for the customs fees after I had already received the item.

They don't want shipments stuck in port because storage there is expensive.

Japan Post is a commercial carrier, the biggest one.

It's only temporary, due to the uncertainty. What a waste of resources this whole thing has been.

Unless they're declared as gift <$100 or sent via Express.

Insane that we have tariffs with Japan of all countries, America's most important strategic ally by far.

Thank you. And to further clarify, Japan Post provides a way to ship packages with the appropriate customs declarations.

In the long run, tariffs basically all fall on the consumer because producer and distributor behavior is near infinitely elastic. Econ 101 predicts that the party who is less able to adjust behavior in reaction to the tax pays most of the tax.

In the short run, this isn't true: firms have goods they need to move.

And this is worse than Brexit. As in that case both sides had very clear rules and processes already in place. It was significant new overhead and there might not have been border capacity. But at least how everything could be done was clear.

False dichotomy.

What "far left" is it that you think you are hearing here?

Mr. D just does not know that.

Yeah, they'll do that up to a certain amount. Obviously, they're taking a risk that way.

WSJ had a nice article on this today: https://www.wsj.com/personal-finance/taxes/corporate-income-...

That’s not Whataboutism. Cigarette taxes are excise taxes, very similar to tariffs, and often implemented to encourage behavior by raising commodity cost.

In the case of cigarettes and alcohol they are partially “sin taxes” to discourage negative behavior.

In the case of the Trump emergency tariffs, they are seeking to pivot the entire economy.

So there’s a nuance and multiple ways to look at it. If you’re GM, the ability to make better margins on shitty cars is a net positive. If you’re in the technology or medical field, well, you’re fucked.

False choice. The poor and middle class don't have to be stupid to be manipulated.

Not all tax is the same. The left prefers progressive taxation (if you make more income you pay more tax), the right prefers regressive (if you buy or use goods or services you pay tax on them). Sales taxes and tariffs are in the latter category.

If I were to pick a place to tax, the addictive, harmful substances seem like a good option. But that’s easy for me to say because I don’t smoke. I do like sugar though. Imagine the impact on our health if there were a sugar tax.

Eliminating US government expenditures would obliterate the entire economy overnight.

Corporations don't pay taxes. They pass them on to their customers: us.

And applying tariffs to tools and raw materials when you're supposed to be trying to bring manufacturing back to your country is... well, let's just say any government stupid enough to do that isn't likely to improve things in any other respect.

Yeah, it's literally the same as the title on the page so I get it, but unfortunately it's a hot-button political issue and people are eager to misinterpret.

I'd suggest something like: "Japan Post stops accepting US shipments over $100."

Also, the ultimate court seems to favour his actions. Hell of a backup plan.

We are in a world economy which actually needs demand more than supply. This is your missing analysis.

I don’t think anyone here has yet come to the realization that ending rampant consumerism is the whole damn point of the tariffs.

>Tariffs are flat taxes on corporations

The OP said tariffs are not progressive taxes. You are agreeing with them while believing you are disagreeing.

Further tariffs are not specific to corporations. Individuals pay them. Small business pay them. Large businesses pay them.

This model predicts much higher prices overall than actually observed, especially on the goods deemed most essential (like food). There are many reasons that companies cannot simply charge "what the market will bear".

China isn’t the only country that drop ships.

If you're honestly asking what's the point, the literal answer is the entire federal government has realigned itself to support Trump's ego. That's literally its entire purpose now, without exaggeration. If something is bad for Trump's ego, it will not happen no matter how good it is for the country. Conversely, if Trump wants something to happen, it's going to no matter how bad it is for the rest of us. Or at least that's how they see it.

Tariffs are happening because it's an idea he came up with 40 years ago when he was in his prime and it stuck to him.

And no one is doing anything to stop the tariffs, despite everyone knowing better, because the people in power can't tell him "no", because that would hurt his ego. You see what he does to people who hurt his ego? They get mocked on social media, deported to a foreign gulag, they and/or their spouse gets fired, their company gets investigated or loses grants, or their house gets raided by the FBI.

So everyone has to go along with it no matter how dumb it is.

No, that's surely not the point of tariffs. Maybe a silver lining, but for sure not the intention.

The font rendering on this site is crazy, I guess traditional Japanese fonts like MS PGothic always render bitmaps at smaller sizes. It's fine when zoomed in (or on HiDPI displays i guess). Is it just assumed that Japanese users have better fonts installed?

One impact I’ve seen is small businesses who can no longer afford the tools/supplies they need, which aren’t manufactured in the states, so they are forced to increase their prices on good they sell or go out of business.

How can you be an American and not be embarrassed by this? Is stopping the "woke mind virus" really that important to you?

This is not whataboutism. The argument described in GGP would apply the same way to GP's case. Cigarette taxes are a sales/consumption tax (specifically one aimed at discouraging consumption, but cigarettes are addictive) and they are necessarily, inherently regressive, for the simple reason that people with orders of magnitude more income and wealth cannot feasibly spend proportionately more on cigarettes.

Lol, are you serious? Can you elaborate on your thinking here? Are you suggesting Trump imposed tariffs out of some altruistic goal of reducing waste or the social impacts of consumerism?? That can't be right. What is the motivation in your mind?

Tariffs like this is a market regulation that the people pays for.

It doesn't "benefit the wealthy" because it's not progressive, it benefits the wealthy that have investments in the tariffed industry by distorting the market to their advantage instead of having to be competitive on a level playing field.

The rest of the wealthy are equally annoyed by the tariffs as everyone else, possibly more so as they see their investments tank.

The "point" of the tariffs is that Trump likes tariffs. There's nothing more to it than that.

> or, more realistically, the conservative ghouls which are parading his corpse around, Weekend-at-Bernie's style

I don’t know what reality you’re from but that is not even close to true in this reality. Maybe you’re thinking of the last guy.

> Someone convinces a whole bunch of people that maybe slavery is actually super useful sometimes? Thirteenth amendment.

Actually the thirteenth amendment explicitely allows slavery to exist in a case a whole bunch of people (maybe even yourself) think is super useful.

Every morning I wake up and check to see if it's happened yet.

> The problem with the current political situation is the establishment in both parties w were too cowardly or useless to address real problems which are now actually being addressed by objectively stupid fascists.

> And that is the lesson to everyone, get stuff done or get replaced by awful people doing awful things.

I don't think that the establishment who benefitted from the status quo actually cares nearly as much as they pretend to while the poor and eroding middle class bear the brunt of the suffering. I doubt rich reagonites and clintonites who made a killing off of deregulation and cheap overseas labour have many regrets.

According to who? That's not the most common justification provided for them, the more common refrain a bag full of lies about what a tariff is and what a trade deficit is.

I'm sure Japan, and other countries doing similar things, don't like the tariffs either. Hopefully actions like this will change voter behavior, either at the polls or to embolden voters to do whatever it is they can to tell their elected officials to revert these changes. Maybe this is a drop in the bucket, but on the other hand, maybe Japan doesn't want to/can't make a bigger a splash.

In any case, it is rare that Americans face consequences for bad behavior of American foreign policy. Hopefully Americans get more engaged and introspective this time around.

It’s disingenuous to consider one’s total income when weighing the fairness of a tax like sales tax. The thought that a sales tax is somehow benefiting one group over the other is ridiculous far left extreme thinking.

You pay for a service and that service has a rate. To think that the only good kind of taxation are those that are progressive is the dumbest thing I ever heard.

I would not literally eliminate expenditures but as we cut the total taxation we similarly reduce spending 1 for 1

This fails to understand both the "far left" attitude towards taxes (many forms of taxation are accepted and even eagerly pursued; frankly, very few people actually have politics that treat "tax" as a single coherent idea) and the opposition to Trump (roughly, half the country, just as with every other president in a two-party system).

Can’t get into details in a forum comment, but I’ll say that whatever we have in most of the Western world ain’t very democratic. It is a spectrum, that currently skews very hard towards plutarchy.

The positive thing about having a king is that there was only one head to cut when things got out of hand.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44887634

I’m no monarchist, but it’s about time to have a serious discussion about political philosophy instead of hiding behind the “Western representative democracy is the best we can do” cliché.

I did that with a slight change: "Japan Post to temporarily stop shipments to US over $100"

To emphasize that it's not in effect yet and that it's to, not from.

edit: Someone went and reverted it to something less clear than everything else

There is no "level playing field" when you are competing with literal sweatshops though.

Frankly tariffs get a bad rep because of from who and how they are implemented but can absolutely serve a purpose.

My brain just leaked out of my ear.

It benefits the wealthy by applying to a smaller percentage of their spending. You can easily avoid all tariffs on a 100 million dollar yacht built outside the US, and you don’t pay it for a personal chef etc.

>it benefits the wealthy that have investments in the tariffed industry

If only they invested in venture-backed mass surveillance apps instead

"Democracy" is the form of government; you are speaking of voting systems, which are an implementation detail, and not in the same natural category. "Alternatives to democracy" are things like despotism, monarchy, communism, fascism etc.

Then you would agree that all corporate taxes are not progressive and are eventually paid by all consumers thus all corporate taxes should be abolished.

Automation consistently outcompetes sweatshops.

What’s missing from these discussions is the idea of competitive advantage. It is inherently more efficient to grow crops in climates where they thrive, tacking a tariff to protect domestic production means intentionally lowering the standard of living of everyone both domestically and abroad to favor some tiny group doing something wasteful.

There is in some places. California has a hefty sugary-beverage tax, for example. I'm intuitively "for" things like this, but I'm curious if it's been long enough that we've been able to collect data showing any effects.

Same in the Netherlands. PostNL halted all box shipments to the US last Friday. Only allowing envelopes to go through.

They planned to support the new regulations before, but pulled the plug last Friday.

The Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which is still current statutory law, empowers the president to set tariffs. There’s an argument that Congress didn’t have the power to pass that law, but they did.

> Hopefully actions like this will change voter behavior

It won't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93United_States_tr...

I bet the worst part of him getting shot, for himself, would have been ruining the final photos with an open casket

> If there's a country that doesn't get tariffs, that country will very quickly become the leading global exporter to the US

No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight. Maybe measured in the order of years... in which case the policies can be adjusted. They clearly think this works for taxing Americans given how huge the tax code is.

> same thing for the "penguin island" that everyone mocked: if you put high tariffs on every place but penguin island, it will soon be Penguin Island Logistics Center

Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.

Everyone has been repeating this for months but inflation remains relatively normal so prices are not rising. Maybe it's a delayed effect that we won't see until later in the year, but at this point it is a theory and far from a fact, not something that needs to be repeated.

We have already observed that the opposite does not hold - in 2017 we slashed corporate income tax by 14% across the board, roughly the same as the tariffs but with far more surface area, and yet prices did not react and the benefits were not passed along to the consumer.

All we _know_ right now is that this is going to negatively impact economic growth by hitting corporations, the same way slashing corporate income tax positively impacted economic growth by benefitting corporations.

Invisible hand forces prices down.

If tarrifs on imported goods are high then people choose non imported goods (which might be substitutes for goods which can’t be made in America) as there are no tarrifs.

They are dangerous though. If country A stops selling to US it sells cheaper to other countries. It also stops importing from the US (and chooses subsidies).

Overall everyone loses out - at least in theory, as everyone uses worse substitutes.

This is the issue for postal systems.

In every country in the world, you could send a package by post and the receiving country’s customs will assess duty/taxes/admin fees and charge the recipient as the default procedure.

As of later this week, the US will not do that procedure (or allegedly charge some absurd flat rate, like $50-$200 on even a $1 package).

Sending postal systems don’t want to deal with the aftermath of rejected/refused packages. And it’s unknown if US Customs and US Postal Service is even capable of charging that flat rate anyway.

There hasn't been a far left leader elected in US, even on a state level.

Secondly,the point of a tariff in a normal political climate is to bring manufacturing back home. This won't happen in the current administration.

And don't confuse liberals with far left.

Yeah gilding the Oval Office really drives the message home.

“Trump calmly reminds nation that desire is the truth of all suffering” - Onion

This is a ridiculous attempt at sanewashing. When has Trump or anyone in the GOP EVER stated that they want to end consumerism?

Americans going to be receiving a lot of $99 gifts!

Best part is, I don’t even have to pay it on the work of the personal chef I import!

No learning, and if fact, no stable control, is possible without negative feedback.

Voters are bound to a make serious mistake time to time, and make conclusions from the outcome. This negative feedback is vital, as long as it's not fatal. (That latter seems to be needing serious attention lately.)

It's absolutely insane.

I know we don't want HN to devolve into political bickering, but this is a deeply important meta-observation about what's happening in our country right now. Trump's stochastically random decisions are so inscrutable, but his following is so cult-like, that his followers are forced to flail around to try and find any plausible justification for these actions.

You'd think that at some point the sheer effort of this would trigger some sort of introspection, but it never seems to come. Someone, somewhere, latches onto an explanation that's catchy enough, vague enough, and impossible to disprove enough, that the tribe can take the explanation at face value and latch onto it, no matter how thin.

This will be studied for a long, long time.

Yes, but you won’t like the pricing.

> Elections are run at the state level, so it's not like Trump can direct state agencies to stop counting mail-in ballots.

Trump asked Texas to redistrict that they were all for it.

He has codified massive funding to ICE in the BBB, which he has direct control over.

So he can order people to be detained and deported, knowing that the legal system can't handle the appeals of that many people.

Furthermore, the only way he will leave office is if his disease gets bad enough to where he can't function. And then the assumption is that the crazies he has hired aren't going to basically take over the government completely. If he is able to function in 2026 and 2028, US won't have real elections.

Companies have reserves, local stock etc.

Fixed prices are a bet on TACO and hoping to avoid the orange rage: see what happens when you blame price increases on tariffs.

Lots and lots of bribes have been paid. This is yet another.

Automation is not replacing sweatshops, they've just made the sweatshop workers more productive (economically) while requiring them to be less productive (in activity).

So all that's happened is an exponential increase in the output volume of sweatshops :/

And New Zealand

> At least tariffs tax consumption rather than production. Taxing production/income is horribly evil and in better times (such as when the country was founded) people who insisted on it would have been shot.

Not true. Producing almost anything in the material world requires raw materials. If any of them are imported, they suffer from tariffs.

IMO, if a consumption tax is what you're looking for, then value added tax (VAT) is a more suitable solution.

You can support some of trumps policies while thinking the insurrectionist peadophile should be behind bars

You can also support tarrifs in principal but not support the way they have been implemented (club not calpol, used as a political weapon or to extract mafia style favours)

> only one head to cut when things got out of hand.

History has been showing time and again that it's an illusion. Bad governance structures and corruption get entrenched, and gladly plead allegiance to a new king.

Thailand too: https://www.reddit.com/r/Thailand/comments/1mx1m9r/no_mail_s...

> No it won't lol, that's not how international logistics work. You don't just flick a switch overnight.

I didn't say "overnight". But if you don't think it would happen, you haven't been paying attention: it has been happening for decades. It's not a crazy thing to consider when establishing a tariff policy.

> Penguin island was stupid because it reflected how lazy the policies they applied are. It clearly showed that the Trump administration doesn't fundamentally understand what trade deficits are nor does it have an actual, well thought out plan. The only thing Penguin island has in common with this is that both actions are incredibly lazy and superficial. The Trump admin needs to get serious.

Flinging names ("lazy", "superficial") is not an argument. You've obviously decided that these actions are stupid -- maybe they are! [1] -- and nobody is going to convince you otherwise, but I just gave you a plausible reason that you'd choose to do it this way.

[1] I don't personally like these policies, but I'm willing to admit when something I don't like as a whole makes sense in part.

> These are the sort of things the poor and middle class voted for. To make the rich, richer.

Experts show saving 7.1337% at Walmart is worth losing your job to offshoring!

I haven't seen meaningful change for poor or workers with a decade of Democrat policy, so pardon me while I ignore that and vote for some tariffs.

We will definitely see but it's still a theory at this point, and one that has not played out the other way in the past with a reduction on corporate tax _across the board_

> Fixed prices are a bet on TACO

Having been part of some of these conversations it's mostly a bet that democrats will win back control sometime in the next decade and do a full reversal. When that happens, you don't want to be caught out with less market share because you adjusted your prices to maintain your bottom line. Same logic as startups burning VC cash on offering free compute, 80% discounts on tokens, etc. to grab market share.

If you're in an elastic market, your priority is not to maximize profit, it's to make the market inelastic.

I don't want to compete with pollution, child labor, slaves, extreme hours, and poverty-tier living conditions

The post being replied to says "the tarrifs", clearly referring to the current set of tarrifs implemented by this admin, not the concept of tarrifs in general, otherwise they'd have just said "tarrifs".

Aristocratic republics have been doing quite well for some time: Florence, Venice, Genoa in the Mediterranean, much of the Hanseatic league and places like Novgorod, and later the Dutch Republic, in the north.

In theory, most countries are signatories to the Universal Postal Union and World Customs Organization (branches of the UN) to keep the post/customs system humming along.

I tried to read up on their “rules” on this topic and it’s a bunch of wishy-washy hot air other than some standardization of customs declaration forms, and I guess HS codes.

Otherwise the only way you get everyone to agree on something: by getting them to agree on nothing during their junket meetings.

That's mentioned in the second part of my comment:

>it only takes a few pliant election officials to change the outcome of the election. eg. if Georgia's governor caved in 2020.

The taxes will have to come from somewhere. Tariffs are a regressive tax because money spent on goods will increase sublinearly with income. The % of total income spent on tariffs passed onto the consumer is therefore higher the lower your income is. It's not "ridiculous far left extreme thinking", it's basic math.

Yes, but that is not what is happening here.

I hate that this is somehow is still viewed as political, when the topic has moved far past that to the point where you are arguing with conservatives that can't comprehend actual reality.

Like this is philosophical more than political.

By what legislation?

I was handwaving around the exception for criminals, but I concede your point: it's an oversimplification to say slavery is strictly illegal.

(One can also make some interesting arguments around the notion of the draft).

Main thing is uncle Donald gets his beloved chaos and unpredictability. God forbid anything could be predictable or knowable without his direct personal approval. After an appropriate tribute, of course.

There was chatter about this in one of the NYC subreddits over the weekend.

Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are.

There's a frustratingly long list of goods that the US decided to put requirements on in previous generations, and then stopped maintaining. Sunscreen is one; other countries have invented sunscreens that feel better on your skin than the old styles, but aren't yet approved in the US. Motorcycle helmets are another. You may have seen the MIPS system - the yellow slipliner that's become popular in bicycle helmets. Scientists have realized that rotational impact leads to concussions and similar brain damage, but prior helmets only protected against naive impacts. Europe now requires helmets to protect against rotational damage. The US requires that manufacturers self-assert that they meet a very old standard that ignores rotational impact. They do not recognize Europe's new standard.

Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now. Protectionists are going to see this as a win.

More background on helmet standards:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BUyp3HX8cY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76yu124i3Bo

Went from #1 on the frontpage to >30 in under 10 minutes, impressive: https://hnrankings.info/45016517/

It's not a theory -- every business that imports product from international sellers is staring at their current import prices and their remaining pre-tariff inventory numbers right now. (See the huge import volume burst pre-tariffs)

What they're trying to decide is (a) do they eat the cost of tariffs in margin or (b) do they raise prices?

That's a decision that doesn't need to be made until they burn through warehoused inventory, but for high-volume businesses (read: retail) it's measured in months at most.

Once that hits, either (a) or (b) will be chosen, and neither is great for equities markets / the economy.

Moreover, there's no "hiding this under the rug" once publicly traded companies begin to report quarterly financial results AFTER burning through their pre-tariff inventory. They can't not explain to their shareholders why they've taken a hit to profitability.

Best possible case is retail prices rise, once, by the amount of tariffs, and that's that.

But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.*

* See the reaction part of Amazon got when they "accidentally" line-itemed tariff charges as evidence on how dangerous the administration sees transparency around tariff costs

Tariffs don't inherently cause inflation.

The noise about inflation is very likely propaganda trying to focus people on something that the government can control. (Yet, it looks like the US government is giving up on controlling it.)

Instead, tariffs have complex effects on the real economy. Universal tariffs do cause the concentration of wealth the GP was talking about (but it's way worse than the GP's claim) and deindustrialization. Inflation may or may not happen, it's not a given.

You could rule by EO and just have them take effect further out, no?

i appreciate you mentioning MIPS - i had no idea there was a new, better standard, and i'll definitely get one for my next helmet (motorcycle)

Bernie removed the section on his website about tariffs being necessary for a healthy economy...

Tariffs are a populist thing, and people seem to think it's just a Trump thing.

MIPS is actually pretty rare in motorcycles helmets. I know Bell makes a helmet with it, but the premium helmets tend to come up with their own solutions to the same problem.

ECE 22.06 is the standard to look for for rotational protection in 2025.

> I'm a white upper-middle-class military veteran professional landowning (mortgages don't count, buddy) male

If you don't own a stable company, you may still be too poor to benefit from those ones.

thanks!

This comment was very informative, thanks. It's really disappointing to see a seemingly new wave of people cheering on isolationism/protectionism.

Maybe some have valid concerns for certain products that we don't make ourselves (e.g. semiconductors) but Trump and his cronies are not the solution to that at all.

There are a few situations where tariffs are beneficial:

1. To preserve strategically important domestic industries (historically: food production and mechanization industry)

2. To shield domestic industries while they're growing to take on already efficient and scaled global competitors

Benefiting labor or saving jobs is probably the stupidest use of tariffs, if one of the above isn't also in play, because it'd be more efficient just to offshore it to low COL countries and instead refocus internal labor.

The slippery slope, of course, is that industries will claim to be included in one of the above, but instead sink their tariff-protected excess profitability into shareholder/self-enrichment instead of business investment.

It'd make more sense to require domestic industries in tariff-protected sectors to invest {near tariff} percentages of their revenue in R&D and/or capital expenses (or be heavily taxed).

Otherwise the government is simply artificially inflating their profitability, at the cost of any consumers of the product.

You’re mixing up two different questions. "What the market will bear" is a monopoly pricing story.

Food is messy because it's a commodity with a whole lot of substitution-- consumers have a high elasticity as a result.

We are talking about elasticity's prediction for the share producers and consumers each pay when there is a cost structure or tax change. Incidence theory is well validated and fits observed evidence remarkably well, including in 2019 studies of the effects of the 2018 trade war.

Ignoring the massive political elephant that exists in all of this stuff -- isn't this a good trigger, as demand for the "updated standards" products will force these companies (or resellers of these products) to either validate their products for sale in the US or force the US to recognize these EU standards?

I suppose an immediate counterpoint is that the US Consumer seems unwilling to clamor for high-quality products. :/

"We need demand more than supply" is a macro diagnosis.

But tariff incidence is a micro question. Elasticity analysis doesn’t care whether the world has a demand shortfall or a supply glut. It asks: when a tax raises transaction costs, which side is less able to change behavior? In the long run, suppliers usually have more flexibility than consumers.

This was always a completely insane loophole that the item on Amazon was much more expensive than the exact same item on Temu.

There’s many industries that have moved beyond sweatshops due to automation.

Pepsi can’t get glass bottles from 3rd world sweatshops at anything competitive with a highly automated factory. In the vast majority of industries it’s just a question of levels of automation and climate control inherently makes automation easier by reducing variability in temperature and humidity. Of course the original distinction around climate control that created the term sweatshops is dying as such operations are largely dying out, but that only reinforces the notion of automation killing off the inherent advantages of unskilled cheap labor.

I can't believe I'm going to look like I'm defending this but here it goes:

The market 'offering' the most demand to the global economy right now is America, by far and away, with a distant second of Europe and Middle East. America has chosen to use tariffs in an attempt to 'tax the demand offered' to the global economy in order to stop the localize debt accumulation of that demand, along with other justifications (rightly or wrongly) of stabilizing global trade and currency.

This is at least the THEORY on Tariffs. Its makes a bit more sense than the 'grrr 1950's trade imbalance' story media keeps spinning, but whatever I'm not going to defend it any more than that.

> Apparently ending the de minimus exemption is closing the grey market for e.g. sunscreen; places that used to sell Japanese sunscreens on American shelves no longer are.

Stylevana, where I go for my Japanese/Korean sunscreen and skincare, is still shipping to the US as far as I can tell.

> That's not within his power to do.

What rock have you been living under for the past eight months?

I don't get the $100 threshold they're setting? What's the logic behind accepting small packages when suddenly everything is above de minimis?

I'm not talking about trade imbalance. I'm simply saying, tax incidence is predicted by elasticity, and in the long run suppliers have very high elasticity.

You can possibly improve trade imbalance with tariffs (though retaliation makes it hard). But it's hard to escape your consumers paying most or all of the costs of those tariffs.

Food production isn’t some homogeneous entity, it might make sense to subsidize some level of staples but direct subsidies are more transparent and can be more easily limited. But, obviously industry doesn’t want the government feeding through to stop simply because the’ve scaled vastly past domestic consumption.

Similarly, military procurement can subsidize relevant industries without impacting the wider economy. In other words you can maintain some domestic steel production etc without impacting the cost of goods.

Everybody wants to reindustrialize yet I don’t see a lot of people signing up to work in a factory. Why don’t you go be the change you seek?

Under $100... by what measure? I'm going to Japan soon and was planning on shipping a bunch of clothes, books, etc to myself. I'm not going to sell any of it, I just want to send a bunch of stuff back without having to deal with checking another bag. So as far as I'm concerned, there's no dollar value. I'm buying stuff in Yen for my own personal use...

But I suppose I'll just check a bag or use a different carrier...

Hot take: good

The de minimis treatment has been abused beyond original intent. Specifically by China, but you can't fix that without fixing the general case.

Fast fashion and other low-value drop air shipping across oceans is ecologically insane: as a planet we literally can't afford to keep doing this. And the US, by virtue of population + relative consumer wealth, is the biggest customer for this.

Furthermore, the inability to reliably screen low-value packages is a problem. To wit, I should not be able to order illegal drugs on the internet and have them delivered by the federal postal system to my door without inspection.

Unfortunately, the way to actually address this requires thoughtful regulation (Congress+customs), modernization and funding of enforcement at scale (Congress+customs), and doesn't produce a quick win... so isn't going to be done.

More likely, it's used as a bargaining chip in trade negotiations, then the problem is declared "won", then it's back to business as usual.

I don't understand the argument that it's bad that the government is suppressing grey markets in goods that aren't approved in the US.

I get it from a selfish point of view, as in I want a particular helmet and I think the design is safer, so I'm upset when I can't have it at the price I want it. I don't understand it as a political argument. If our government isn't meant to do anything, shut it down entirely. Don't have processes and subvert them so everybody can do what they want when they want.

Who would you vote for to get rules broken whenever they stop you from doing what you want, and why would anybody else vote for that person?

That being said, I deeply understand that the science and regulation around any sort of helmeting in the US (also in the case of motorcycles) is completely compromised by the people who sell helmets. The way you fix that is by fixing regulatory processes, not making rules easier to break for connected, smart, wealthy people. If you think fixing regulatory processes is an absurd, naïve impossibility, shut the government down and stop complaining about trivialities.

That's an interesting way to approach regulation.

This. It’s well past time to fix this. We can live without Temu for a little while.

In my understanding, this is only applicable when "an article is being imported into the United States in such quantities or under such circumstances as to threaten or impair the national security". But "national security" is pretextual in this case.

The funny thing about MIPS is that it makes the same helmet safer, but it might have been a garbage helmet to begin with.

Throwing away your non-MIPS helmet and replacing it with a MIPS may be a safety-reducing decision, unless you’re buying the exact same model.

Well this is how Chinese shippers on Amazon were able to sell goods so cheaply; in addition to the U.S. subsidizing Chinese mail costs. This will lead to a more fair and just system in the future. While the halt may seem like a bad thing, the dictation of global commerce means it's really symbolic. They can't withhold mail forever

MIPS isn’t a standard, but an enhancement (and there is some argument that its benefits are overstated: e.g. you’ll get some beneficial slippage in your helmet if it isn’t as tight as possible, if you have hair, or if the thing you hit is more slippery than asphalt)

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018181

I think we agree if I'm understanding you correctly, yes the Suppliers have more elasticity and must ultimately absorb this.

I'd say the remaining problem left in our analysis is massive inequality in America leading to enormous consumer elasticity in a small ultra-wealth portion. This I can't figure out

I think that under-appreciates the slippery slope of political leverage. There's a reason Iowa is so hell-bent on keeping their primaries first.

Without explicitly and financially tying subsidy-fueled gains to modernization efforts, market participants begin to consider the subsidies as business as usual, plan around them, and get lazy.*

It removes a primary incentive to maintain pace with global technology improvements. Domestic industry whispers in politicians' ears that their global competitors are unfair for reasons X, Y, and Z, and they really need more subsidies to protect them.

{Benefit from politically driving new tariffs / subsidies} must never be higher than {benefit from investing in efficiency increases}.

* Lazy as measured by peak international efficiency, not work. E.g. a farmer who works their ass off manually farming is economically inefficient compared to one who mechanizes most of their work

Small D2C packages aren't necessarily worse ecologically than a big US retailer importing a bunch of junk to store in warehouses and maybe sell to customers (else landfill).

And, indeed, it could be argued that past administrations have done that. Congressional deadlock has been an issue in the US for quite some time, and the administration has to go on anyway. Off the top of my head, I am reminded of Obama essentially ceding control of marijuana policy to the states by making it clear to the ATF that prosecuting federal possession crime in states that had legalized the drug was legal, within their authority... And a short path to locking in a desk job at their current level indefinitely.

But when previous administrations did this, they (usually, as far as I know) consulted with domain experts on predictable consequences and set timelines to factor that in. This administration seems to have "effective immediately" as the only timeframe it's aware of.

> I’m open to the experiment where targeting a balanced trade with all countries as the goal

Do you mean balanced trade as a whole, so it would be OK to have deficits or surpluses with individual countries as long as the total surpluses match the total deficits? Or do you mean trade with each individual country should be balanced?

> This needs to be repeated. Tariffs are a tax on ordinary citizens. Unlike regular taxes, tariffs are not progressive and therefore benefit the wealthy.

No, people need to stop repeating it, because it's an extremely stupid anti-tax argument. Tariffs are meant to onshore production and raise wages. Telling half the story is simply lying. You might as well complain about buying food because it costs money. You might as well complain about all consumption because consumption is regressive.

The problem isn't tariffs, you can send that money to poor people. The problem is that nobody cares about poor people, including Trump. A lack of tariffs isn't going to make America moral.

One of the only things Trump is doing unbelievably well on is trade. Tariffs haven't been damaging at all. They should be more damaging, but the US is so dependent on foreign poverty that we have to leave any tariff scheme as filled with holes as swiss cheese. The fact is our manufacturing is so based in the exploitation of low-rights and low paid workers from other countries that entire industries would immediately start failing if we ended up in a real trade war with e.g. China.

> To make the rich, richer. And then turn around and complain that rich are getting richer and they are getting poorer.

These are Koch brothers policies you're advocating as if they're social justice. The reason why every capitalist you know is complaining about tariffs isn't because they make the rich richer (by some method yet to be explained.)

Wrong question, it was by inaction and not doing their jobs.

I'm worried that this could have unforeseen knock on effects or create havoc. Fukushima knocked out global supply chains for parts on cars so for a couple years there were no Honda fits for example (they were missing a necessary but small part). Is there any risk of domino effects having to do with business closures or is it just moronic and annoying?

> Closing these de minimus exemptions is making it harder for discerning consumers to buy higher quality goods than are currently available in the US right now.

Everything has a trade-off.

On the other hand, it also prevents companies from dumping artificially cheap and crappy goods (TEMU) on US markets and making it nearly impossible for others to compete.

Unsuspecting consumers buy a super cheap (subsidized) crap product on Amazon or Temu or Shien or wherever - probably a knock-off of an American product, have it shipped to the US, then it disintegrates after a couple of uses or stops working, and we wind up with pollution, additional landfill, and relentless consumerism that's harmful to the country all so we can help a certain country whose name starts with a C keep the lights on and keep factories running so that they don't see unemployment numbers tick up.

Legitimate businesses selling higher quality products where they exist will be able to figure it out. Or not. It's not a big deal if your sunscreen is slightly worse than the Korean version (which I use). Maybe it just hasn't been approved because they haven't done the work to apply because they can get around working with our government and making sure their product meets our safety standards because of the de minimus loophole?

There's also safety concerns, which I think the CBP did a good job of overviewing here: https://www.cbp.gov/frontline/buyer-beware-bad-actors-exploi... . Send drugs or guns or illegal animal products to the US, get caught, who cares you live in (not the US) so you can just spin up another sham company and do it again.

It’s very, very basic economics - the marginal utility of money decreases, so progressive taxation is better than regressive taxation.

Pretty dishonest. There is nothing about curbing consumerism there. Just telling people that they will HAVE TO buy less if consumer prices increase, in order to hurt China.

This is specific to mail service, it does not impact private carriers (fedex, dhl, etc)

I looked it up. Sending a regular smallish package (2 kg, 35 x 25 x 10 cm, think small laptop) from Germany to NYC is about 25 EUR, now only available for gifts under 100 EUR. Sending it as express, which is what businesses now apparently have to do, is about 80 EUR.

As did Thailand

That's my point, they didn't give the power to the presidency. The presidency is arrogating power to itself without regard for legality.

Declared value. When you ship, they ask you to list the items you're shipping, and what they are worth. These go on the customs forms. Boxes can be opened and inspected, so lying is a gamble, but there's obviously a lot of wiggle room here.

The changes are to the commercial de minimis rule, so AFAIK, the personal $800 exemption when you bring something with you still applies, and you might not have anything to worry about at all. Also, when you declare something as "American goods returned", they are not subject to either de minimis rule, even if you send them by mail.

Things you purchased outside the US could qualify as well, if you can prove that you owned them for more than a year while living abroad. But realistically, nobody is going to make a federal case about a box full of old books and underwear...a box full of Louis Vuitton bags and Moncler jackets with tags, on the other hand...

There's a very thin possibility window where the inefficiencies of individual packaging + shipping don't outweigh the efficiencies of bulk importing, even accounting for bulk wastage.

If we want to argue the former, I'd say we need to start with non-negotiable 100%-biodegradable, 0%-plastic packaging.

Sure. You can support these exact tarrifs and not support trump in general

If you have to be against everything Trump does to be against Trump that’s a problem, and you’d be a hypocrite (like Trump)

The government can't solve for everything at all times. That's why free markets exist and are important. You could have the best most awesome helmet safety regulation get passed on Friday and have it completely blown up by a new discovery on Monday. How long will it take for regulators to catch up?

> The way you fix that is by fixing regulatory processes

Well, that kinda hand waves away a lot of the roadblocks you run into with government and elected officials. In an ideal world, yes, we have regulatory and legislative bodies that can react quickly and do the right thing everytime but that isn't reality.

For anyone who wants more data, Virginia Tech runs a helmet impact testing lab and publishes results and rankings: https://www.helmet.beam.vt.edu/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html

Our middle school 7th grade civics classes taught us a heavily simplified version of civics suitable for 7th graders. The canonical story of how legislation works bears no resemblance to, for example, the process around NAFTA when some of us were in 7th grade - Congress was not invited to participate in negotiations nor permitted to substantially amend the agreement.

Using tariffs is A common way to protect local industry. However it is a dangerous weapon, which has downsides. In history tariffs have show to lead to high prices on the domestic market and products which are subpar to globally standards. Domestic companies don't have pressure to innovate, while global market has more competition.

Consequence of that is protection by product group for key products one wants to have locally and not per origin on all kinds of goods.

This can lead to short term wins, but backfire after a while.

> The last century was Keynesian “deficits don’t matter” where taken to its conclusion, the worst possible imbalance is good, because that means they have to reinvest their dollars which supports the US, blah blah.

You're blaming the wrong economist. Keynes believed that trade deficits are a big problem and tariffs are an effective policy to remediate them.

Two things are happening at the same time.

On the one hand, government is broken writ large. It's been dominated by politicians who care more about power than improvement for as long as I've been alive. The problem becomes worse and feels more intractable every year. I'm not convinced there's anything individuals can practically do to help resolve it. (Those in power would ruin your life if you actually did a good job at making the world better in a way that impinged on their power.)

On the other hand, technology is enabling rules to be enforced in a more automated way. You see this with speed cameras, and now also with these stricter shipping requirements.

These rules were written to have an exhaust valve: for speed limits, that's police discretion. For imports, that's the de minimus exemption. Nobody cares what individuals do; they care what markets do (which is part of why bans are usually bans on selling, not on owning).

I touched on this a little bit about self-driving cars the other day too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44987516

The ratcheting of rules into automated policy is dystopian.

It's a spectrum. If we're being pedantic, the US is already not a Democracy, but a Democratic Republic.

Australia too

Baby, bathwater. For every person abusing it by splitting shipments (easily detectable and prosecutable) I'd bet there are many more taking their first small steps into entrepreneurship with goods or parts worth $100 or $500.

If he has passed on ?

If motorcyclists had the power to demand common sense policy improvements, filtering would be legal everywhere, and cities would start adding PTW (powered two-wheels: motorbikes and e-bikes) lanes alongside the current acoustic bike lanes.

It's a relatively small constituency. Most politicians don't want to upset the status quo to advocate for them. A lot of non-riders have enough negative experience (hearing scary stories or being startled by delivery drivers working within the current system) to actively add friction to the conversation.

For instance, NYC's current chief-of-police is a nepobaby. Her mom is a high society type who is afraid of bicycles, so the police have been actively abd specifically harassing cyclists this year.

For some people yes, no matter the cost, as long as cruel things happen to people they don't like, it's worth everything and if you asked them whether or not this matters, they will tell you no, because America doesn't need anyone else.

> But a 15%+ price hike is going to be an uncomfortable narrative for those in power who insist tariffs won't raise prices... so I'm not betting that conversation goes logically.

As someone selling on eBay from notUSA, the cost increases won’t just be the tariff, but some additional fixed and variable fee for the privilege of determining the tariff and potential loss of the cheapest shipping options.

Friction begets friction!

> and we wind up with pollution, additional landfill, and relentless consumerism that's harmful to the country

But that happens regardless of whether or not you import manufactured goods, doesn't it?

It's basic economics in the sense that it's an oversimplified toy model. In the real world, every country I'm aware of gets a substantial amount of its tax revenue from consumption taxes, and indeed the US's lack of VAT means it's currently much more dependent on progressive income taxes than peer countries. (https://www.oecd.org/content/dam/oecd/en/topics/policy-sub-i...)

Consider that the people who believe in “woke mind virus” aren’t intelligent enough to know what a virus even is, then they’re too unintelligent to understand why they should be embarrassed.

The DOT standard isn't good, but the US doesn't disallow helmets that meet other standards. You can buy Bell and Alpinestars MIPS helmets in the US today, no gray market needed: https://www.revzilla.com/mips-motorcycle-helmets

That's not even what's being argued here.

What's being pointed out is the retcon that "the whole damn point of the tariffs" is to end rampant consumerism. It's clear that the grand^{n}parent poster is flailing about and desperately trying to find the comfort of some coherent and intentional narrative behind a set of inherently incoherent and unintentional actions.

You're not going to get new clothing for TEMU prices without the de minimis exception. In theory, the higher price of these goods will decrease the amount they're purchased and lessen impact of pollution.

As others in this thread point out, though, there are other casualties of this change.

Americans don't fully understand what a pain in the ass it is for people in other countries to buy whatever they want. They are always paying some additional amount, if it's even available.

In the EU a flat fee was introduced to deal with the workload and a system to send predeclared items.

The difference is that it was communicated well in advance without any uncertainty.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Import_One-Stop_Shop

De minimis makes no sense and the EU doesn't have it either - in fact they recently managed to even make the Chinese properly fill out the tax forms and in most cases prepay it.

Most wealthy people are not billionaire wealthy.

Billionaire wealthy pretty much manage to avoid all taxation, progressive or not, so the comparison is moot. They just trample on everyone else.

With great power comes great responsibility. Is as simple as that.

Is true when you are a strong man, is true when you are a family father and is true when you are a rich person.

> Tariffs are meant to onshore production and raise wages.

Both of which would still lead to higher prices on the consumer.

> One of the only things Trump is doing unbelievably well on is trade. Tariffs haven't been damaging at all.

I don't know whether to laugh at the absurdity of this statement or to cry because someone could actually say it with a straight face.

Yeah, after I posted (and disappointed a few people apparently) I was thinking about just how sticky this stuff really is, and how our political system is a "broad brush" system. It seems to muddle a lot of the smaller sensible details.

Thought-provoking for sure. I'm glad I ride in a filtering-legal state :)

If we used a similar methodology for testing cars, we’d be blasting watermelon heads from a cannon against windshields and sacks of potatoes against steering wheels.

We’d benefit from more realistic models. But I guess our helmets would then cost $500.

Temu should already be paying the tariffs on China-origin goods. De minims for China origin stuff ended May 2nd.

Unless they’re sending it all via China Post and US CBP is letting it pass through anyway. Anecdotally, most of their stuff in major cities is arriving by Gig couriers or from US warehouses (ie: not postal imports) = tariffs applied.

Where Temu and big retailers win the game is that they can structure it to exclude last-mile delivery/logistic cost in their tariff calculations, and that’s a lot of the price.

For sunscreen, they just make a separate less effective version for the US market. The market of people who would say "well, I won't buy sunscreen at all unless it's as good as foreign variants at blocking UV-A rays" is pretty small.

Details matter. Tariffs CAN promote domestic manufacturing and raise wages. But a few things need to be true for that to happen:

1. Targeted specific tariffs aimed at industries we want to protect. Not a flat across the board tariffs on all / most things coming in. The latter IS just a tax on the consumer.

2. Other policies aimed at promoting the said industries. e.g. CHIPS act.

3. Consistency, predictability and stability of policies. No one is going to move manufacturing to the US if they aren't sure if tariffs are going up or down or will get removed entirely on short notice at a whim.

We have none of the above.

The shops you're thinking of are less of a sweat shop than, say, Amazon in the US. Theres no good wages, but factory jobs don't really pay well anywhere.

They're mostly just a lot more efficient at scale, with a few plants managing close to the whole worlds supply of random shit. Almost all microwaves by all international brands are made by the same Chinese company, all prismatic LiFePo battery cells come out of one of two factories in China, and so forth. Economy of scale on turbo steroids.

Imagine having to compete with Ford by making cars in a garage. Now imagine Ford as the garage shop vs. these factories.

The sweat shops you're thinking of is stuff like clothes manufacturing in other third world countries than the usual suspect. That shit is nasty - breathing and handling acid with naked skin nasty.

Oh they do, and you probably have several of them installed...

If non imported goods were price competitive with imported goods then tariffs won't be needed in the first place. Tariff's are there for artificially force imported good to be more expensive so the previous more expensive domestically produced products become price competitive.

Trump effectively saying "deal with it, you'll live" is not even remotely evidence that the primary goal is ending rampant consumerism.

Just… stop.

That’s a big part of why it happens, but every industry wants subsidies the idealized place of “farming” in the American public’s perception make this significantly easier.

That helps explain why chips, cars, airlines, banking etc get subsidized but PVC pipes don’t.

Corporate taxes are paid on profit. In theory they should not change consumer pricing in a perfect market. They can be seen as a tool to encourage companies to spend more on R&D and capital investment rather than returning profit.

It’s not a flat fee though, it’s the VAT rate and an admin fee if you don’t go the IOSS route.

When I sent an unpaid item, I think I paid 5 EUR/pkg for processing to France customs on top of VAT because I paid online after France assessed it, but before delivery.

US is saying any parcel arriving without duty paid would be charged $80-$200 flat fee solely depending on which tariff rate applies. IE, from a “bad” country, a $1 item could have a $200 fee. Or as low as a bargain or $80.

They’re basically treating every parcel like it’s work $800 item.

https://www.valueaddedresource.net/trump-ends-de-minimis-exe...

Anecdotally, many Canadian shippers have reported that China item containing parcels have just been getting returned to sender. No American has received a bill at the door for postal imports.

I read an article in Foreign Affairs that calls this "personalism."

Do they use Japan Post?

My counterexample is that I sell mid-high end vintage bicycle parts.

There’s about a 0% chance of Shimano or Campagnolo bringing that production to the US because they haven’t made this stuff in several decades.

I’ve now jacked my US shipping prices to account for tariffs. I’ll probably lose all US sales.

US buyers probably won’t realize that ~5-10% of its supply has disappeared for these parts. They also may not recognize that US sellers can/will raise their prices accordingly but they will have that increase in price.

Heck, I know some Canadian sellers that set up their supply chain well enough that they put down a US location and buyers think they’re buying domestic. Those will be toast (or have to vastly inflate their pricing).

Tariffs based on worker and environmental rights would be great, but Trump's are based on entirely irrelevant things.

We've heard ad nauseam that the rich need to pay their fair share.

This goes for importers as well. Pay your taxes.

The real substance of these complainers is that they can no longer dodge import fees thru de minimis exemptions. Tough luck. Pay your fair share.

Why is English on Japanese sites frequently rendered with that font?

Not really the case in at least Europe and the gulf states

>the Korean version (which I use)

Beauty of Joseon?

> Consider that the people who believe in “woke mind virus” aren’t intelligent enough to know what a virus even is

A lot of HNers are gonna disagree with you on this, Paul Graham is one of those people very concerned about the "woke mind virus".

You can have either a free market or a market tightly controlled by a government plus all the cronyism that entails.

We generally refer to the latter option as "communism"

Why cut off your thinking there? I can think of many reasons why he would like tariffs. Two off the bat:

- Allows claiming various benefits like onshoring production, or reduced taxes. This is for the voters.

- Allows threatening other countries' industries with tariffs unless they invest in his friends' enterprises. This is for him.

This one I presume? https://www.foreignaffairs.com/world/new-dictators

Notice the date -- 2016. This has been brewing for a long time, and I will never forgive / forget that the people who recognized it and called it out early [1] were mocked and ridiculed to no end. They were shunned in their professions, called alarmists, and liars. But they were right the whole time, they were just ahead of the curve. If we had just listened to them, this could have all been avoided.

[1] https://medium.com/@Elamika/the-unbearable-lightness-of-bein... (also from 2016, as far as I know the first person to make the connection between Trump's narcissism and his inevitable attempt to become a dictator. She predicted January 6 five years before it happened just by pattern matching his personality disorder to dictators of the past).

Billionaires still pay property taxes etc so it’s worth separating how regressive various tax schemes are.

I bought a pair of motorcycle boots this way. It was a brand that isn't routinely imported into the US. The seller was a dealership near the Canadian border. It was something like they stocked them in London, Ontario and sold them from their Detroit subsidiary.

Yea that’s what I use!

I would be interested in balancing trade with each individual country, with magnitude of deficit taken into account (i.e. a tiny island country would have vastly less impact than China).

Tariffs artificially increase costs of goods with another country. That should incentivize purchasing the goods from other countries, with the cheapest being our own. Of course we have very high labor costs, and lack a huge supply chain, and on and on. But China only 50 years ago had very little of the same, and America systematically de-industrialized, teaching other countries, moving the kit, and so on, until we lost the ability to make things at scale cheaply ourselves. But the same thing can happen in reverse, there is nothing inherently impossible about having Americans build and run factories, with the benefit of robots and AI and all the latest tools.

You're on a tangent of a tangent, but:

Old school helmets use the philosophy that in a crash, you want your head to be harder than its opponent.

New school helmet use the philosophy that a helmet should absorb or deflect as much energy as possible, so that energy doesn't get translated to your brain.

They are actually diametrically opposed. Fortnine (the same channel I linked earlier) has a video on the SNELL standard. Its origins are as a beefier version of the DOT standard. They recently found themselves at a crossroads where it's impossible to both meet SNELL and meet ECE 22.06 (today's state-of-the-art standard). They ended up bifurcating SNELL into two standards: one that meets old DOT-based SNELL, and another that basically says "if it's 22.06, they can call it SNELL variant B." It was the only way they could keep the SNELL brand alive across both halves of the transition.

National security is one of the primary motivations for wanting to protect American industry in the first place; it’s hardly pretextual. And even if it was, the law states that whether or not national security is threatened is up to the judgment of the Secretary of Commerce.

Splitting shipments is different from drop shipping. Splitting shipments would be if, instead of moving a whole container of goods from a Chinese warehouse to a US warehouse, you just mail each item over by itself. Drop shipping is when you mail each item directly to the end customer.

They don't really. They misreport the value for tax purposes, they own it through some other legal entity that is all negative, they own it through a company that negotiated tax rates to have some other business happen there, they own it in countries that don't to property taxes, etc. etc.

You can be damn sure they're paying at most a tiny fraction if not zero of any tax rate you'd be paying for that asset as they'd much rather pay very good lawyers, accountants, and most importantly, politicians to not have to pay tax.

You don't need progressive taxes. You just need everyone to pay it equally, without loopholes. Fewer less complicated tax rates are harder to work around.

Also true of vinyl records and pottery out of the UK and EU. The people I buy from are just not doing it. Some stuff I've already paid for and now I'm having to pay the difference.

Technically, it's not tariffs on the records. But DHL isn't caring about that at all. To just staff up essentially overnight, the records are going from ~$20 shipping to ~$80 shipping. 4x! And I have to pay them, not the company. No telling how long it's on the docks either.

The potter in the UK that I like is just plain not dealing with it as it's a 1 man shop. Can't get it no matter how much I want to pay.

Just so disappointed.

The toilet paper shortage during covid lockdowns came from people switching from the stuff stocked in offices to the stuff they buy for home. People switching to alternate carriers could have a similar impact.

Grey markets aren't the same black markets. Ideally the government would be omniscient, efficient, and benevolent so that it could properly regulate things to the benefit of the masses, but in practice it government isn't very responsive and in many cases has to consider different viewpoints on an issue. Even worse, regulations usually create winners and losers in a way where even if it's beneficial to change the regulation, whoever would lose out will automatically be opposed to the change. Americans - mostly working and middle class, not wealthy - bought 50+ billions of dollars of goods imported this way last year. The American people have voted with their wallets but the government is not responsive to their desires in this case.

Is this to help private shipping companies like FedEx and UPS? Sometimes you have to do something even if it’s expensive

I’d hold judgement on that. The American empire is built on global trade. We tax the world with the dollar, and we’re killing the golden goose.

Not sure what you mean, but me too.

I responded to a comment that called progressive taxation a crazy “far left” idea - I’m not sure the second and third order details of taxation policy are really relevant here…

But ok - yes, sure, in real life it’s a mix and the mix is worth debating. Note also that consumption taxes often have exemptions/reductions to offset the most severe regressive effects.

That's the opposite of how tax incidence works.

Elasticity means you can change your amount produced in response to changes in price.

Producers can’t easily change output, so they bear more of the tax burden themselves. But in the long run, producers can reallocate or exit until they’re producing at minimum(average total cost), which makes supply more elastic and shifts most of the burden onto consumers.

This is stuff that's covered in week 4 of a basic microeconomics class. It gets a little fancier with imperfect competition or heterogenous agents, etc, but predicting tax incidence is basically dominated by this even in advanced microeconomics.

> The difference is that some things get hammered into a Constitution and are indisputable without a significant process.

Yes, but there's an alternative 'significant process' which is to simply have a political party capture the body which interprets the constitution, and then an elite group of powerful insiders captures the political party, and then you're just an oligopoly but with additional steps.

Definitely. But, for what it's worth, that's a process that takes decades and requires an electorate profoundly asleep at the wheel. Like one that fumbles an election during a pivotal year that decides the timbre of their judicial system for a generation.

Certainly not impossible though.

I don‘t think it is a spectrum either (if we are even more pedantic), or at least no a linear scale spectrum, but rather a system of government where democratic institutions ensure certain rights and privileges to common citizens and residents. So maybe a multidimensional spectrum where if you fail to meet a vaguely defined and constantly evolving threshold you are not a democracy.

The USA today will probably (and hopefully) not be considered a democracy by some future standard. Disqualifications may include:

* limited suffrage,

* limited or unequal access to health care and education for a significant portion of the population,

* convoluted voting system where certain demographics have little to no chance to pursue public office,

* large constituencies,

* non-state territories/districts with little to no representation at the national level,

* unincorporated populated areas, with little to no representation at the local level,

* a lack of clear separation of power between the different democratic institution,

* failure to enact popular policies,

* police violence,

* the death penalty,

* a large wealth gap,

* a lack of consumer protection,

* a lack of worker rights,

* failure to prosecute the rich and powerful for their crimes,

* a large nuclear armed military which constantly engages in imperialist actions,

* failure to respect the sovereignty of other states,

* etc.

I think describing this system as a Democratic Republic offers no insight into whether it is democratic or not (or how democratic it is on this spectrum). Republic just means that there is a president which holds some the executive power.

There is far more insight into calling the USA a capitalistic aristocracy, a two party state, a militaristic imperial superpower, a flawed, unequal, and underrepresented democracy, a police state, etc.

Thanks for sharing info about MIPS, it looks great.

Short animation of how it works for anyone else who's unfamiliar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvyoSzAPIBE

> reason why every capitalist you know is complaining about tariffs isn't because they make the rich richer

…which capitalist is complaining? These tariffs are a regressive tax that rewards political proximity and power. They are also a massive subsidy to our services sector, which is dominated in compensation by finance, insurance, real estate and tech.

> They misreport the value for tax purposes

Regular people also commit fraud which can make some differences here. But in general it’s the state who decides what something is worth for tax purposes not the individual.

> they own it through some other legal entity that is all negative

Unpaid property taxes result in forfeiture, so again the state’s getting paid here. It’s financial voodoo around other taxes which causes such structures.

> they own it in countries that don't to property taxes

So do regular people, the important bit is where such property is located not who owns it.

Yall missing the point.

If your manager at work acted like a legit insane person, but said one true thing, you wouldn't be there saying that he/she is smart in that particular area.

If by some chance in hell tarrifs actually work, its due to pure luck, not due to any strategy. Which is what the original person I am replying to made it seem.

Is the methodology that bad? What's wrong with it?

From their test protocol (https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/5e7...), it looks like they simulate a fall (with a model head inside it) against a target at an oblique angle, at six different impact locations and two speeds each. They go through 4 of each helmet model for the rest.

It seems a lot better than nothing (which is what we had before them, at least outside of manufacturers own private tests). Their research was initially funded by the IIHS, the group that does the highway crash tests.

How would you like to see it improved?

I recall my left leaning economics professor arguing for the abolition of corporate taxes along similar lines actually. You don't really deserve the downvotes other than perhaps for the aggressive tone.

(I'm not committing myself to the idea, only that it isn't obviously outside the norms of economic thought)

It's bringing up an entirely unrelated topic as some sort of "gotcha". Cigarette taxes were not part of the GGP's comment. I.e. a red herring

> The communication intent is often to distract from the content of a topic (red herring). The goal may also be to question the justification for criticism and the legitimacy, integrity, and fairness of the critic, which can take on the character of discrediting the criticism, which may or may not be justified.

Ability to send in a ballot (preventing such, that is) is being addressed by the supreme leader via another "initiative"

Nah, that's unfair! "Two weeks" seems to be a very popular timeframe as well.

Crash test dummy on a mechanized bicycle falling off/hitting stuff.

"The Snell Helmet Standard is Meaningless"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76yu124i3Bo

Everything does not have a tradeoff. This philosophy alone is bullshit.

The UK sugary drink tax caused a reduction in sugar consumption, and reduced obesity and dental problems in children.

https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/09/uk-...

I don't see how balancing with each individual country makes sense.

Suppose for example the US needs to buy some natural resource from country X, which the US uses to build something that it sells to country Y at a very large profit. Suppose that the US doesn't export anything that country X needs or wants.

Balancing trade with X would mean cutting back on importing that natural resource, which would cut back on how much the US can build to sell to Y.

There will almost certainly also be loops in the graph of imports and exports. Things like A exports to B exports to C exports to A, with A, B, and C all having net balanced trade, but with each have a trade surplus with one of the others and a trade deficit with one.

If they all tried to force balanced trade with tariffs they just all end up paying more with no actual change in trade except possibly a reduction all around in the volume of trade.

Exports have a country of origin declared.

If I post something from Denmark to Canada, they want to know the origin of the goods. If it's China, the China tariffs (if any) apply rather than the Denmark/EU ones.

If the declaration is incorrect, the goods can be siezed or returned.

Penguin Island is a nature preserve (the whole thing), no one is building anything.

The European post services are complaining that there's not yet an electronic system set up for them to pay these tariffs on the recipient's behalf.

The tradeoff here is “pay the middleman markup tax” for the most part.

Instead of getting cheap Chinese made clothing for $5, you now get to pay Walmart $17 for the same thing.

If we are going to outsource production in order to save on consumer goods costs, the consumer should be the one reaping the surplus - not capital. Properly informed buyers were quite capable of getting quality product out of China for a tenth of the cost of exactly the same thing stocked on major retailer shelves here.

While there are certainly abuses of the current system, it would be best to close those loopholes vs. just give a bunch of profits to giant companies for effectively doing nothing more than having scale and volume. If you’re lucky they may do some curation too.

Not everything was Temu or Shein. Plenty of smaller factories basically going direct to consumer in a win win sort of scenario. They get paid more, and the customer doesn’t pay any middlemen.

Turns out if you subvert, mock and disenfranchise people long enough at some point they have enough.