Jason wrote:showa58taro wrote:In other words, you can’t argue with my point so you pretend to just be superior de facto. Cool. Cool cool.
Well, ok. You asked for this...
You've pretty much gone out of your way to say that the nation of Japan doesn't even take in any revenue on the cars they make because they sell them within the U.S. and the U.S. takes all the revenue. It's impossible to argue with you. You will say off-the-wall shit, convince yourself you're right and never bend on the issue. It is undeniable (but of course, only you will find a way) that allowing foreign nations to sell their shit in America at competitive prices without any repercussions takes money out of the American economy. While you might not believe facts, slapping a tariff on Japan for exporting into the U.S. would provide a ton of economic relief in the U.S. This is completely undeniable, and you are denying it. You clearly have at least basic knowledge of how these things work, but you're leaving out the most important parts and tweaking things around to suit your preference and pretending that's the only way it works. It's disingenuous, and you know it.
I realize your bias, your hate for all things great in America, but be honest with yourself here and stop trying to win an unwinnable argument for the sake of not conceding.
In other words, you have nothing to bring.
Because to be absolutely clear, a tariff is paid by a US company, to import goods. It is not paid by a foreign company to sell into the country. So all tariffs and import fees that are imposed on Japanese goods, be it cars, beef, or steel, increase the domestic price of steel and make it likely that supply chains will look elsewhere for their steel, creating a non-competitive position for the company. But it does not create money going from Japan to the US. It makes US companies poorer and the US Government richer. That's all that happens. Your previous point about "Jepahn git money 4 car" or whatever condescending bullshit it was completely misses what you said to start which was "Japan is not charged import fees." There is no charging Japan import fees. That is not how trade works, you can't charge import fees on countries for anything anywhere. You can set tariffs that make your economy favour or disfavour certain types of product because your companies have to pay too much for it from foreign companies. But they are companies, not governments. The Japanese Government doesn't pay over a single cent for Honda to do anything. At its most basic your entire understanding of tariffs is equal to that of Donald Trump's, which is to say non-existent. At no point does he seem to grasp who pays tariffs and neither do you, as illustrated by your very clear choice of "Japan is not charged" as if this was a thing that can be rectified. Japan doesn't get tariffed. Japanese products can get tariffs levied against them to be paid by you, to you. There is no relief here on a single transaction, and any benefit comes from supply chain restructuring, which only works if there is a supply chain alternative within the US that can avoid having tariffs, which is what tends to not work very well when you start talking about anything other than raw products used in manufacturing, since there are not as many equivalents of finished goods. Someone wanting a sweet Honda vehicle won't settle for a shitty Dodge just because there are Tariffs. Instead they have to pay more for their Honda. Hence it being hugely counterproductive.
It also betrays your equally poor understanding of corporation tax in the US, even after Trump's massive hand-over of billions to companies to buy back their shares, and which has resulted in staggeringly low investment and only served to increase volatility and improve dividends. It did not significantly alter the continued investment. Because my point is that the US Government gets its share of Honda money for Honda cars sold in the US. No entity can sell their products in the US themselves without having a body in place to do so, and that body will be taxed on profits and pay the usual federal and local taxes (like sales taxes) exactly as any mom-and-pop local store would. Honda pays the same taxes as GM and Ford, on the same profits. I mean your choice of Honda is doubly stupid because Honda also manufactures cars in the US and has a pretty big production base and staff in the US. But pretending it was a company that just made stuff in Japan and put it on a boat to be sold in the US by some third party manufacturer, then again there is no revenue for Honda in the US and so it would not pay any taxes. But it also wouldn't affect the car sold to Mark in your example as Mark bought from some US dealership of exclusive foreign-only cars and they make a profit and pay tax on that profit. So you'd probably get a bigger share of the money here as the incentive to increase profits would be higher for that model of vehicle retail owing to the increased fluctuations in demand and a lack of risk diversification. So higher prices to cover these risks means higher profits and more taxes for the US. Plus jobs jobs jobs, which seems like a thing you'd care about.
I mean at its core one of your points was the tax breaks that help American companies, but you don't have a tax code that only prioritizes American companies. Instead it prioritizes all companies that do business in the US through any subsidiary, associate, joint venture or as a sole trader. Which means that Ford gets a tax break, but so too does Honda, and Toyota, and Ssanyong. They all get to pay the same taxes in the same regime. The tax change was not to favour "buy American" just as the tariffs are not ways to make other countries pay you money to get to access your market. The lower tax doesn't create incentive to have American jobs in American towns as a result of the tax regime. It's designed (badly) to allow repatriation of profits abroad and to restructure company portfolios and parent/subsidiary groups to recognize a greater proportion of revenue or expenditure in a specific country most of the time. What it actually has done is allow an influx of one-off transactions into the US to increase share buy-backs, thus increasing the share price artificially as there are fewer shares in circulation and so the profits effectively go to fewer participants, increasing the value of each share as it now gets a larger proportion of the profits after tax and dividends. That's what you are seeing, and it was not a shrewd economic more, particularly, and has served mainly to reduce in general terms the robustness of the US government as deficits have soared. Not that conservatives care about that anymore, but you know, it's fun to see hypocrisy rear its head once more.
And just to recycle right back to your very first post about how Amazon pays employees well because of lower taxes, literally none of that makes any sense as high employee paybill is a simple way to keep a leg up on competitors whilst also minimizing your tax burden, and is why they have such high carry-forward losses to utilize. What lowering their taxes does is not "free up money" for them. That's not what any company does. I've seen the biggest, I have seen the UK reduce corporation tax consistently. What I have not seen is more employees and more factories just because of tax. Because all tax is on corporate profits after deducting all expenses, and is by far one of the more interesting areas of accounting. Lowering tax rates allows a lot of interesting corporate behaviour, but one thing it does not drive is increased investment in staff or factories. Because there is not a shortage of capital in any group. Expansion is a given at any point where the market requires more. Profits does not drive the market for goods, and so does not drive the expansion into these markets. Put simply, if Coke thought it could sell more bottles of awesome, it would crank that shit out, no matter what the profits and taxes situation. Nobody stops selling goods because they worry their corporation tax bill will be a big higher. No company in history was driving their investment schedules based on their tax liability. Hence why I can say so categorically that your take is nonsense.
I feel this has been worth starting up a second laptop for. I look forward to your "Tl;Dr' reply or "yeah, but you don't get basics" reply.
