P-Necromancer
No bio...
User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
11hr ago
Actually, I’d say there’s a better case for itemizing tariffs than sales tax, since the latter doesn’t actually give you any choice. The state of Texas is going to get its cut no matter which goods Amazon sells to Texans.
I suppose that's true: the seller's costs don't matter to you, but it could at least signal to you that you might be able to find cheaper options elsewhere, at least in the small niches where there is a vaguely competitive American-made option that isn't itself dragged down by tariffs on part imports.
They don’t think that. They think having to pay a tax is a bad thing. What happens after that is handwaved.
Nor do they really go anywhere. If a traditional tax hike was on the table, they’d flip out about it, too. But Trump is a populist, and has demonstrated less than zero interest in the normal legislative process, so that’s a non-starter.
Would they? I've heard a decent amount of flipping out about Trump's proposed 'tax cuts'-- scare quotes because they're almost all extensions of 2017 cuts. (He is, bizarrely, considering removing the cap on SALT again, though? I'd always considered that his single best policy move; why should the Federal government subsidize rich states' high spending?) In other words, they're complaining about the absence of a hike. Granted, most of them seem to think these cuts just benefit the wealthy (fairly ridiculous; doubling the standard deduction and the child credit disproportionately benefit the middle class) so I suppose they're at least not knowingly advocating for raising their own taxes.
P-Necromancer
22hr ago
Ah, that point was not directly relevant to Amazon's decision here. At least, there's a legible business motive in addition to the presumed political one. Nonetheless, it's a common complaint that misses the mark. Apologies if it wasn't clear that was a digression.
I'm no Republican; at most I'd say they are, perhaps, slightly better on taxation than Democrats on average. Even these tariffs aren't as bad as a tax on unrealized gains would have been, for instance, though I've got no idea how serious that proposal really was; not very, I thought, but I also thought Trump was too market-focused to really move forward with extreme tariffs either. Well, I suspect it would have been harder to pull off via executive fiat, at least. But you're certainly right they're doing their very best to tear up that lead right now.
More generally, it's hardly surprising that both sides are hypocritical on this issue: polarization means they both prioritize opposing the other over any particular principle. This is the default scenario.
P-Necromancer
23hr ago
Agreed. That's deceptive in just the same way. I don't think there's any particular movement to get sales tax repealed, though, so I suspect the motive is slightly different: advertising a slightly lower price in the hopes that marginal customers will be too lazy/ignorant to calculate the true price before getting far enough into the sale for the sunk cost fallacy to set in.
Looks like Amazon has given up on this idea; were they planning on hiding the tariff charge until checkout? At least on Chinese goods, I suspect it's high enough to overcome sunk cost reasoning anyway, though I suppose there's always some marginal consumer on whom it'd have worked.
P-Necromancer
1d ago
I mean, it's a lie. Highly misleading, at least. It's clearly intended to communicate to the consumer that they're assuming the whole burden of the tax. This simply isn't how taxes work. The burden is split between buyers and sellers according to the relative elasticity of supply and demand. This is hard to measure in practice but you should never expect to see it go 100% one way or the other. They can list the tax as a line item if they like, it doesn't change the reality of the situation for them: if they want to maximize their profits, they'll have to reduce their margins. Of course, the maximum possible profit may in fact be negative now...
As @anti_dan says, so far as the consumer is concerned, it's no different from any other government-imposed cost, including both non-tax impositions like costly regulatory requirements and each direct and indirect tax on a business's operations: sales tax, which is often reported, but also corporate income tax, capital gains paid on their stock (which reduces share price, which reduces the amount of liquidity they can raise through sales, which can be compared to the cost of loaning that capital to get an equivalent rate), their employees' income tax (of which, again, they bear some of the incidence). Sellers love to complain about their costs, but at the end of the day all that matters to the consumer is the product they offer and the cost they offer it at.
(Though, as others have intimated, perhaps the real goal is to propagandize against the tax in the hopes they will later be able to offer the same product at a lower price. That does raise the question why they weren't already doing this for all those other taxes, however.)
For that matter, where do all these people who think taxes being paid is a bad thing go when the discussion turns to income tax, or payroll tax, or social security? I'm not convinced the marginal government dollar isn't net-negative, but Democrats don't generally hold that position. The money actually paid into the tariffs is no better or worse than any other source of tax dollars: the downside is all the transactions that don't occur because of the tariffs. I suppose that's harder to communicate, though.
Tariffs are generally bad. They can play a part in a net-positive strategy, but these obviously don't: the tariffs are the whole strategy. Are they bad enough to justify lying to make them look worse than they are, or bad in different ways? I'm not sure.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Google lets pages from sites with millions of words blatantly copied off of chatgpt take the first result
Wait, really? I don't think I've ever seen this; certainly not in the first result. Do you possibly mean in the ads? If not, do you have an example search term?
Maybe I'm just easy to fool, but I honestly don't think I've been impacted by (text) AI slop at all. I imagine it fills out the bodies of those recipe blogs no one reads, but I've been skipping over those since they were all artisanally crafted slop. I'm reasonably confident almost all the fiction I read was written by a real person -- as far as I know, SOTA text gen still isn't able to maintain continuity over tens of thousands of words. Maybe as an assistant for editing or filling out short exchanges, but at that point I wouldn't really call it slop. (And, if it is good enough that I really can't tell, why should I care?) I'm certainly not buying bottom-of-the-barrel self help ebooks off Amazon, or whatever trendy topic people are generating books for.
P-Necromancer
1mo ago
Apologies for the digression, but I feel compelled to point out there are legitimate economic reasons why certain jobs are valued over others that are in their totality more important to the maintenance of civilization. It is, at least, not purely aesthetic and cultural.
Imagine a society with two professions: farming and weaving. Of the two, farming is obviously the more important -- it doesn't matter how nice your clothes are if you starve to death. And, for the sake of argument, let's say that weaving is the harder of the two, requiring far more education/training/practice.
Farming is both more useful and easier. So everyone should be a farmer, right? Clearly not. If you have no farmers, adding one is massively valuable: he directly saves many lives. But if you already have many farmers, adding another one just increases variety slightly, or reduces produce prices. If you have no weavers, adding a weaver is pretty valuable. Less so than the first farmer, certainly, but the most important uses for cloth -- bandages, maybe, or protection from the elements in harsher climates -- are important, and obviously that's where the products of your only weaver will go.
So you want some of each. How many? Not an easy question, but here's an algorithm that should work: given X farmers and Y weavers, would X-1 farmers and Y+1 weavers be more valuable? Or the reverse? Swap one worker in the indicated direction and then repeat until neither change improves total utility. The average value of a profession decreases monotonically with worker count (if you cut one farmer, the rest will adjust such that only the least valuable farming work goes undone), so this simple algorithm should always find the optimal arrangement.
This is all just a long winded way to say that jobs (and all other goods) are valued at the marginal return rather than the average, and that's a good thing. The point of a wage is to incentivize workers to adopt a certain profession, and you want to allocate workers to where they can produce the most value given the current state of the market. If nail factory workers aren't paid well, that's because we already have enough nail factory workers. You don't compare the total value of nails to the total value of [some other better paid profession], you compare the marginal value produced by an additional worker in each field, because that's the number that indicates where the marginal worker should go.
If that poor wage results in a large exodus from the profession, fewer nails will get made and more and more important uses for nails will go unfulfilled... such that it becomes worthwhile to pay nail factory workers more. Everyone -- factory owners, consumers, and workers -- just need to follow their individual incentives and the result naturally maximizes total utility.
As for prestige: to some extent I think you're right that it's about self-actualization. Teachers and musicians and journalists are much higher status than their wage predicts, and petroleum engineers much lower. But these cases are interesting because they diverge from the baseline; wage is the baseline. After you've stripped away all the cultural/philosophical cruft, you'd still expect to see the observed phenomenon.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Ah, I can see how that's unclear. Here's what I meant:
Suppose that the bankruptcy process were repealed. Debtors can still run out of money, obviously, but there's no established legal process to discharge insolvent debts. Further, suppose that both creditors and debtors are unhappy with this change, as your prior comment did. My point was that in this scenario, there's no reason they couldn't just add a bankruptcy clause to their loan contracts. The actual process is identical, it's just that instead of it being codified by law, it's codified by contract, which the courts enforce just as they would have a standard bankruptcy.
(In practice this is somewhat complicated, as bankruptcy proceedings generally involve more than two parties, not all of whom necessarily have agreements with each other. This isn't an insurmountable issue if everyone really does like the process as it stands; every creditor could agree to abide by the decisions of a bankruptcy court.)
When I said it's implicit, what I meant was that contracts are currently written with the understanding that bankruptcy is possible. That is, it's implicit in the lending contract. There's no need to write such a provision because the courts will enforce it regardless. It's not that both parties want their contract overridden by the state. It's that, given they know the state will override their contract in this way, there's no need to make it explicit in the text. If all parties really do want the possibility of bankruptcy to exist, where the process is defined is just bookkeeping.
This isn't intended as a gotcha; in principle it should be very surprising to find a case where the practice of consensual contracts excludes a Pareto improvement, so it's important to determine whether this is such a case. I don't think it is, but it was worth exploring.
As an aside, I'm not a particularly committed libertarian either. Even were the theory air-tight for rational, aligned agents (which it may or may not be), ignorance, foolishness, and principal-agent problems often lead to entities making bad contracts and I think we're better off for the ability to nullify them under some circumstances, even given the costs associated with people anticipating that possibility.
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
If, as you say, all parties want it, then, were it not the law, it could simply be written into the contract. Contracts often have exit clauses or explicitly defined penalties for noncompliance. Loans generally don't because they're written in the context of a legal environment that guarantees exit via bankruptcy; it's implicit.
I'm not sure all parties do actually want bankruptcy protections, but either way I don't see how it threatens the theoretical basis for preserving the sanctity of contract.
P-Necromancer
5mo ago
There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.
Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.
(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)
P-Necromancer
6mo ago
Really? No one's made the standard case against unions?
(I've been too lazy to actually make an account here for three years, though I participated occasionally in the old place. This, finally, has pushed me over the edge.)
Say you're an autoworker in a nation that doesn't participate in trade (or that the labor lobby has persuaded to engage in sufficient protectionism the rest of the world can't possibly compete). Would you rather the auto industry be unionized? In principle, yes. (In practice, unions are so dysfunctional the answer might well be no, but let's put that aside and assume for the moment the union will genuinely work towards your interests.)
It'll make the industry objectively less efficient:
- The union will torpedo labor-saving innovations
- Collective bargaining makes it much harder for employers to remove poor performers or reward high performers. At best they'll be permitted to act on irrelevant or gameable metrics, like seniority or overtime hours
- As a result, there's very little incentive for any employee to do more than the minimum
- Strikes obviously reduce productivity, and negotiations waste everyone's time and attention
- Someone's gotta pay the union organizers their six or seven figure salaries. Stapling a whole second bureaucracy onto a company isn't exactly cheap
These factors aren't transfers from the greedy capitalists to the deserving workers, they're just lighting money on fire to bully the capitalists into making those transfers. But so what? It's not coming out of your pocket. You'll make higher wages with much better job security. You can just slack off and collect a better wage than when you were working your ass off! Sure, cars are a lot more expensive, but you're only going to spend a small portion of your salary on cars, so you still come out ahead.
So far so good, right? In fact, it's so good that the factory workers want in on the action, and they unionize. Then the farmhands, and the janitors, and the retail workers, and the accountants, and... Soon enough every industry in your nation has unionized. And the funny thing about workers and consumers is they're actually the same people, depending on the good or service in question. It's easy to see that you're in fact worse off now than you were when there were no unions: all that money you lit on fire has to come from somewhere, and the only people putting money into this whole arrangement are the customers.
But at least the capitalists are mad too?
Unions are government-backed cartels. That's not, like, an insult, it's just factually what they are. (It's also an insult.) I'm baffled how people who are eager to point out the problems corporate monopolies pose (most often with a very generous definition of monopoly) don't see that unions are bad in exactly the same ways and much worse in others. (Monopolies actually don't have to burn that much money to maximize their profits.)
Uncharitably, it's tempting to say they just care more about hurting the capitalists than helping the workers, or that they're happy to defect in full knowledge they're taking advantage of our insane laws on the subject to rent seek. Charitably... I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable explanation than ignorance, which isn't very charitable. I suppose Democrats cynically supporting them as a source of partisan advantage might be more charitable, provided you allow they think their partisan advantage will be good for the country?
(As far as 'fairness' is concerned: things are worth what you can sell them for. This isn't some special standard invented to screw over workers, it's how literally everything else is valued. And note: that's the marginal value, not the average value of the whole class of the product. You can see this easily by observing that food is pretty cheap despite the value of food as a class being effectively infinite for everyone. Collective bargaining is no more 'fair' than Nestle buying up all the water rights and charging you every cent you have for privilege of not dying of dehydration.)
Now, I'm not saying unions should be banned. There are... vaguely union-shaped things that actually work pretty well in some circumstances, like worker co-ops or law firm partnerships. (After all, these are examples of workers organizing and bargaining as a collective, right?) Trying to draw up definitions that capture the necessary subtleties wouldn't be easy, and I have no faith in the legislature's ability to do so. They're currently protecting them, so I think that's plenty fair.
Fortunately, I don't think that's necessary. Just strip their ridiculous legal protections and businesses will make their own judgments, hiring law firms that provide genuine value while firing rent seekers. In this particular case more work might be necessary, but organized crime is a solved problem.
Broadly agreed. I suspect many products are no longer profitable to sell in America at all and many others have a vastly reduced customer base. And, like I said, that's the actual deadweight loss here: preventing transactions that would otherwise have happened. When the tariff is paid there's no actual loss, the government just takes some of the value for itself. But a prevented transaction doesn't merely extract value, it destroys it.
My point was just the technical truth. Pedantic, maybe, but this isn't the sort of information environment where you can't afford nuance and must prioritize being merely directionally correct. I'm certainly not claiming cheap consumer imports secretly have enormous margins -- I don't know if Trump really believes that, but I don't.
More options
Context Copy link