Trump Tariffs started today, Some Countries Caved in early morning.

by liam 111 Replies latest social current

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  Anony Mous

  @joey: both of those instances went from concept to functional in 2 years - as in, hey we want to build a factory - should it be Texas or Georgia because California is screwing us over to rolling off the band. And those are megafactories. VW, GM etc all have capacities already that they reduced over time, I live not too far from a building GM still owns and operates but abandoned mostly for China, they use it now for small production runs, but nothing says they couldn’t just re-hire the 2000 employees they laid off under Biden and the 10,000 under Obama.

  There are many people who need assistance

  Not 40% of the population. Statistically (Pareto distribution) it should be <10%.
  

  The cops showing up at work, them fighting with their ex girlfriend, fighting with other employees bringing guns and threatening employees, stealing tools from the shop.

  So why are they not in jail and why are they collecting unemployment. Seems more like a management issue at both company and government level to keep enabling people like that. They don’t want to work, then go home and get nothing.

  All these problems have easy solutions, just stop giving handouts.
• 

  hoser

  Anony mous

  I just did that. Purchase a machine to replace the loser humans that bring their bs into the workplace and keep the people that want to produce.

  How the government of Canada wants to deal with the entitled population is not my workplace problem anymore. Someone else can deal with them

  It is no just lower class citizens that are the problem. Entitled, me first attitudes cross the entire class structure

  The middle class make terrible employees as well
• 

  Anony Mous

  @hoser: automation can solve some problems, but with all the automation we’ve seen the growth of jobs in other avenues from highly skilled service technicians to cybersecurity.

  The problem in your case seems to be Canada - the problem is that now that the US is going to stop paying for your medicine and imports, the government can’t keep going like it is. You now have a Trudeau-clone in power, and people think it is change, that is a problem with the electorate, you are quickly running out of other people’s money and people that don’t work for a living are indeed feeling entitled, because the electorate keeps the feel-good entitlement candidates in power.

  The US however can’t keep funding EU and Canadian welfare either, we collectively wasted all our money in the last 75 years doing welfare for ourselves and the world to the point China, which is for the majority still the definition a third world country, is passing all of us by.
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  hoser

  Anony mous

  Please explain to me how the United States is paying for my medicine and imports?

  My company barely purchases anything from the USA

  I have a few older American made machines but my main supplier has purchased the American side of the business and is moving production from the USA to Canada .

  Most of my competitors have switched from American to European manufactured equipment. It is higher quality and a lower price point.

  My artificial intelligence machine is assembled in China with parts from Italy and the UK. My supplier can build these machines in Canada if he needs to.

  Most of my consumable parts are made in Japan, Mexico or China. The United States has priced themselves out of the marketplace.

  Unless America can somehow devalue their currency they cannot compete as an exporting nation.
• 

  hoser

  Anonymous

  I also don’t see how the usa pays my healthcare

  I pay taxes which builds hospitals and pays doctors and nurses salaries.

  Dental care is a mix of private and social care.

  I pay for dental insurance that covers 80% of my costs the rest I pay out of pocket. I earn too much money to get the taxpayer funded dental but that is ok.

  I think most pharmaceuticals are available in places other than the USA so if the tariffs get too crazy our health care boards will purchase them elsewhere.
• 

  Balaamsass2

  I was googling "average factory wage" usa vs .....for a number of countries. Frequently $5 hr vs $20 hr. That is a big difference for a tariff to level out. Hoser has a point.
• 

  TD

  Heard and McDonald Islands are external territories of Australia since 1947 and would be treated as Australia proper for purposes of tariffs.

  --Assuming anything could actually be manufactured, mined or grown there which is extremely unlikely..

  These islands are very tiny, very inhospitable, they both have active volcanoes, the waters around them are treacherous and they are both restricted. You can't set foot on either one without permission from the Australian government and they're only giving permission to scientific expeditions once in a while.

  The inclusion of these islands as countries subject to tariffs reeks of AI and its inability to exercise subjective judgement.
  
• 

  Anony Mous

  @hoser: Canada and the EU both set price controls on medicine that is invented and often manufactured in the US. So let’s say a medicine costs $100/dose to create during its 10-15 year patent validity (invention, manufacturing, FDA approval etc), but the production cost is $10/dose the EU/Canada tell the companies, if you want to sell here you can only ask $15/dose. The manufacturers stil do it because of the $5 profit, but effectively that $85 remainder is now paid for by making that even more expensive medicine in the US. Same for hospital supplies like MRI machines etc, the ‘invention’ cost is not paid by Canada because Canada is broke when it comes to that.

  On the other hand, the invention itself is often largely funded by US taxpayers. The US spends more than the next 4 economies combined (that is China, UK, Russia and EU in order) on health research. Canada spends a fraction of a fraction compared to the US on healthcare research. And when it comes to private investment in medicine, the US drives 70% of the world in investments while only being ~30% of the market in purchasing power parity. A simple example is that of COVID vaccines - the US spent $40B on the R&D, China and EU each provided $100M in loans with the rest of their ‘investment’ going into not R&D but just a $2B pre-order (which ended up having the distribution footed by the US companies).

  Now you have a few options, you basically tell Canada and EU no more, which is what the Trump admin is doing - we cannot keep subsidizing your healthcare by making ours more expensive, which now causes even more shortages and price hikes in those socialist markets. The other thing to do would be to stop Medicaid/Medicare waste which is where most of those cost ends up hiding, as the taxpayer has endless pockets.
• 

  truthlover123

  Anonymous- US citizens have been coming to Canada in busloads to get their prescriptions filled because it was cheaper than US was charging them, putting a strain on Canadian supplies. This was going on for years. I just checked the list of tariffs items and no mention of medicines. Here is an explanation off the news--The FDA announcement underlines the appalling gulf in drug prices between the United States and other developed nations. Pharmaceutical prices in the United States overall are more than two-and-a-half times higher than those of our peers, with manufacturers charging nearly three-and-a-half times more for brand-name drugs.

  Not only are costs egregiously higher in the United States, but American patients are more exposed to those costs than their counterparts in other rich countries, as over twenty-five million people have no health insurance, and even those who do often pay steep out-of-pocket costs.

  So I guess there may be a charge but albeit a minor one compared to USA drug charges.
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  Anony Mous

  @truthlover: I explained why the US prices are higher in the above post. We are subsidizing the R&D on behalf of Canada and the EU which perform price fixing. The medicine doesn’t become ‘more expensive’ or ‘cheaper’ when it crosses the border, they are keeping the pricing artificially low.

  However US citizens cannot get medicine from Canadian public healthcare, to get access to Canadian medicine, you would need to legally immigrate or be a Canadian citizen, apply for a health card (takes ~8-12 weeks to get after application), make an appointment to the doctor (takes ~30 weeks on average) and then get the prescription filled (currently takes ~2 weeks on average). Bus loads of people coming right across the border, first of all that would be illegal for whoever organized the bus tour, second most pharmacies don’t stock that much medicine.

  So that someone from the US where all of the above can be arranged in the next 24 hours on Medicaid/Medicare with a $15 copay would go through the effort to immigrate into Canada to go queue for the next 6 months of their life before getting their prescription, I highly doubt.