10 ms·

The Largest US Trading Partners All Put Higher Tariffs on the US Than Vice Versa

78 points by Four_Star 8y ago

megaman22 8y ago
No shit. Protectionism is only bad when we do it, for some reason.
CompelTechnic 8y ago
The headline's use of the word "put" has an oddly vague interpretation. The first time I read the headline, I imagined "put" was in the past tense, which implied the recent past, i.e. the last 6 months, due to the recent political action. Which would give the impression that Trump was foolish and got backlash worse than the benefit he gained. Then I read the article and i realized "put" is in the present tense, which implies this is the way it has been for the long time, which gives the impression that Trump is smart for just trying to catch up and make things fair.
- Four_Star 8y ago
  Agreed. The character limit prevented 'impose' from fitting.
  - moate 8y ago
    "Had" would have worked and provided better sense of tense. "Put" is a pain in the ass when it comes to setting tense by itself.
- tehlike 8y ago
  A better one would be "the largest ys trading partners all had higher tariffs on the US goods than vice versa"
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - itsmenotyou 8y ago
    also ambiguous as had in this case suggests that might no longer be the case
- nod 8y ago
  "make things fair" is a strange way to put "other countries hurt their consumers more, so we should too"
  - jerf 8y ago
    If tariffs were simply a matter of "whether or not we hurt our own consumers", there would be no debate about them anywhere; nobody would have any particular motivation to impose them, whereas in the real world it's clear there's some motivation that causes at least some imposition of tariffs to be nearly universal. Without implying any particular position is right, that's beyond an oversimplification that leaves you completely unable to look out into the world and even propose a theory that explains the current behavior of all the players, let alone validate one as correct.
- jerf 8y ago
  The current narrative is that Trump is starting a trade war. But I have a hard time working out a way to define "trade war" in a way that does not have "trade war" occurring since long before Trump even began his campaign, unless your definition of "trade war" has a special pleading clause that just excludes the US for some reason and imposes a special, non-symmetric obligation on it for some reason that presumably contradicts the idea that the US isn't that special. People just didn't know about the tariffs that already existed because the media didn't report on them, so politically, they didn't exist. (The idea that the media has this power but that it has not corrupted them is one I have a hard time understanding.)
cletus 8y ago
Ok, so this is complicated. Tariffs are only part of the story. First I agree that some countries will protect industries they consider to be of national interest or are just politically important, like the Canadian dairy industry. I actually think this is OK. Second I think it is true that there is some hypocrisy here on both sides. It's fair to say US trading partners impose tariffs on US goods and ask why the US shouldn't do the same. But the US doesn't play fair here either. Take wheat. Or agricultural products in general. In the US (and the EU) these are massively subsidized. If you're talking about tariffs, you should also include subsidies. But it gets worse: as an example the the US has historically blocked Australian agricultural products (including wheat) on quarantine grounds. While protecting local ecosystems is valid (eg Australia has, I believe, the only disease-free farmed salmon in the world) it's also used as a barrier to trade. It's clear the US here has historically used quarantine as an excuse to protect US farmers (ironically when Australian farmers aren't subsidized and US farmers are). Fun fact: this little trade spat led to a deal in ~2006 that resulted in the Australian-only E3 US work visa. The problem here is we have a complete buffoon in the White House who is the poster-child for anti-intellectualism. So, why put tariffs on Chinese tech goods? Those are primarily just assembled in China these days. China imports most of the parts from Korea, Japan and other places. It's also clear that China plays favourites with local tech companies. It's a fair question to ask why the US should open up to Chinese tech companies when China won't reciprocate?
- tehlike 8y ago
  You have a fair point, but you can say that most of agriculture is _probably_ subsidized in a good part of the world, because governments have to feed their people. Also for china, they have subsidies or support from government over foreign companies (which you also mentioned) which is also unfair. Trumps tariff is not about price of goods. It is more of a forcing hand to ease trade and american corporations to enter these markets easily.
- Retric 8y ago
  Buying subsidized products from another country means you benefit from the subsidy. Having native producers to cover basic food needs via plants is reasonable, but importing subsidized beef is a net economic benefit.
brookhaven_dude 8y ago
It's their loss and US consumers' gain. Why is everyone so quick to assume that anything that benefits exporters is the what we must pursue?
- aceon48 8y ago
  Thats your theory at least. At some point, you don't need any more cheap shit from Amazon, but you need a decent job. As a top 5%er or whatever, surely cheaper is better for you... But prob not your lower middle class neighbor who has to compete more globally in the low skill labor market, where other countries are protecting their people in that regard
  - wpietri 8y ago
    In which case, I'd much rather we increased taxes on income and/or wealth to a) help workers move up the value chain, and b) provide a safety net for people who lose out on trade. A tariff on "cheap shit from Amazon" is a heavily regressive tax, and acts to reduce total delivered value. Whereas taxing the well-off to pay for education and encourage investment increases total delivered value.
    - zip1234 8y ago
      How does taxing the well-off to pay for education encourage investment?
      - mrguyorama 8y ago
        Publicly paying for education is one of the most fundamental kinds of investment in society
      - s73v3r_ 8y ago
        An increased supply of high skill workers? An increased supply of people who are economically secure, and thus not interested in "eating the rich"?
      - 8y ago
coliveira 8y ago
The US is not a serious country. During decades they spent millions trying to convince smaller countries to open up their economies, because this was supposedly good. Now that they're starting to slip back in the competition against other countries (particularly China), they do a sudden 180 degree change and introduce tariffs. Only the uninformed can take this seriously.
- seanmcdirmid 8y ago
  The USA is a democracy, and therefore can have a president like Obama sometimes or one like Trump sometimes. Even then, the USA is hardly homogenous, many people in the country take many sides of different positions. I suppose many other countries are like that as well. Fickle because you know...people.
DenisM 8y ago
Tariffs are backdoor wealth redistributon in some sense. Hear me out. US export industries are more high tech with higher wages, imports are comparatively low tech. When US imposes tariffs it creates low-tech jobs in the US. When the trade partners impose tariffs they destroy high tech jobs in the US. The net result is high tech jobs lost, low tech jobs gained. Overall economic efficiency goes down due to loss of high tech jobs and benefits of specialization.
- HillaryBriss 8y ago
  > When US imposes tariffs it creates low-tech jobs in the US. I can kind of follow your argument. I can see how it might be true for, say, the recent US steel tariffs (although I don't know enough to say that steel production is 'low tech' these days). But, in general, doesn't your argument depend upon which mix of goods the US includes in the tariff? I mean, I wouldn't call car engines, cell phones, memory chips, television sets, game consoles, etc 'low tech' but the US imports a good deal of them. I also wonder how countries like Germany and Japan manage the blend of tariffs. They certainly produce a lot of high tech goods.
  - jethro_tell 8y ago
    >I wouldn't call car engines, cell phones, memory chips, television sets, game consoles, etc 'low tech' but the US imports a good deal of them. Making them is pretty low tech, there's a team of people that design machines, robots, and human processes to manufacture the parts. That would be high tech but it's not that many jobs, and many of those jobs were already here. Then, there's a few people to get the stuff the robots can't do, and a couple guys to grease the robots, and a couple guys to maintain the conveyors and such. None of those are really high tech jobs. The senior machinery tech and the senior robotics guy and a sysadmin may be 'high tech' but most of the work, even working with the robots, is swaping parts, lubing and calibrating. And that, while it pays more than the floor workers, is still far below what we would think of as a high tech salary.
  - DenisM 8y ago
    Good point. So much for my theory then.
Nokinside 8y ago
This is overly simplistic. You should look at the trade from in value added basis and how the trade benefits different couturiers differently. Take for example US vs China. US products exported to China have value added close to 80-90%. Chinese products exported to US have value added around 40%. If Chinese import stuff, join them together into a thing that has export value $100, only $40% of the value stays in China. When the US does the same $80-$90 of the value stays in the US. Trade agreements are negotiated over long time to be beneficial for everyone involved and nobody can claim that US is easy negotiation partner that has been taken an advantage. US allows higher taxation from other countries in exchange of some other things (lobbied by the the financial sector inside the US). In general the whole "imports bad, exports good" outdated folk mercantilism is just silly. It's unfortunate that the political discussion anywhere can't raise above that.
- bkor 8y ago
  It's also telling that the chart shows tariffs in %, not in absolute numbers. From what I saw in other articles it mostly balances out. This aside from the bit which you mentioned that it's a bit more detailed than import/export.
resters 8y ago
For the benefit of HN readers, no serious economist supports tariffs in any form. Tariffs appeal to the naive idea that trade imbalances between two nations are a bad thing. They simply are not a bad thing. But due to the political history of tariffs it becomes possible for politicians to claim (falsely) that tariffs will benefit the economy, when in fact they are (at best) a handout to specific industries. What really boggles my mind about the groundswell of support for tariffs is that much of it is coming from people who would traditionally have frowned upon receiving welfare. Yet they are happy to receive it when it's called tariffs and also happy to receive bailout money when their industry is harmed by the tariffs. Put another way, tariffs are simply a way of introducing the government into economic transactions. If a foreign government foolishly decides to tax its citizens via a tariff on US goods, this harms the foreign citizens. When the US then plays tit-for-tat and adds its own tariff, this punishes American consumers in an attempt to harm foreign exporters. But I repeat, no serious economist (someone who studies the economy scientifically) supports tariffs. They are a political phenomenon and the rhetoric used to support them has no basis in reality. There have been countless blog posts and articles from economists since the president began talking about tariffs that have pointed out the many ways in which the president confuses the meaning of some of the big numbers he presents as justification, etc. The understanding that tariffs are foolish is a universal among economists and is not remotely a partisan issue. It's one thing to want to grant welfare to a specific industry for some political reason, but completely another to introduce a distorting factor like a tariff. I have a trade deficit with my grocer, for example. Why? Because I chose to exchange money for groceries. How is this bad? The same applies to nations.
- Nokinside 8y ago
  The real weakness of democratic societies is that the general understanding of the world don't transfer into politics. Mercantilism as a zero sum game where you export more than you import and then you get rich reasonable first theory if you start to think trade from the scratch, but it's wrong. It was already debunked by Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" 1776. Then came Ricard's comparative advantage (1817), the emergence of Classical Theory Of International Trade, then New Trade theory then New New trade theory. Every area of politics that touches issues like medicine, chemistry, genetics, climate science, macro economics, trade economics, urban economics, etc. is always facing arguments that were outdated hundreds or thousands of years ago.
dang 8y ago
> I don't know if you're being intellectually dishonest on purpose That crosses into personal attack. Please edit such bits out of your comments here, and follow the rest of the guidelines as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17718957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17718957 and marked it off-topic.
- simonsarris 8y ago
  Edited
  - dang 8y ago
    Appreciated!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

78 points by Four_Star 8y ago

No shit. Protectionism is only bad when we do it, for some reason.

The headline's use of the word "put" has an oddly vague interpretation. The first time I read the headline, I imagined "put" was in the past tense, which implied the recent past, i.e. the last 6 months, due to the recent political action. Which would give the impression that Trump was foolish and got backlash worse than the benefit he gained. Then I read the article and i realized "put" is in the present tense, which implies this is the way it has been for the long time, which gives the impression that Trump is smart for just trying to catch up and make things fair.

Four_Star 8y ago
Agreed. The character limit prevented 'impose' from fitting.
- moate 8y ago
  "Had" would have worked and provided better sense of tense. "Put" is a pain in the ass when it comes to setting tense by itself.
tehlike 8y ago
A better one would be "the largest ys trading partners all had higher tariffs on the US goods than vice versa"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- itsmenotyou 8y ago
  also ambiguous as had in this case suggests that might no longer be the case
nod 8y ago
"make things fair" is a strange way to put "other countries hurt their consumers more, so we should too"
- jerf 8y ago
  If tariffs were simply a matter of "whether or not we hurt our own consumers", there would be no debate about them anywhere; nobody would have any particular motivation to impose them, whereas in the real world it's clear there's some motivation that causes at least some imposition of tariffs to be nearly universal. Without implying any particular position is right, that's beyond an oversimplification that leaves you completely unable to look out into the world and even propose a theory that explains the current behavior of all the players, let alone validate one as correct.
jerf 8y ago
The current narrative is that Trump is starting a trade war. But I have a hard time working out a way to define "trade war" in a way that does not have "trade war" occurring since long before Trump even began his campaign, unless your definition of "trade war" has a special pleading clause that just excludes the US for some reason and imposes a special, non-symmetric obligation on it for some reason that presumably contradicts the idea that the US isn't that special. People just didn't know about the tariffs that already existed because the media didn't report on them, so politically, they didn't exist. (The idea that the media has this power but that it has not corrupted them is one I have a hard time understanding.)

cletus 8y ago

Ok, so this is complicated. Tariffs are only part of the story. First I agree that some countries will protect industries they consider to be of national interest or are just politically important, like the Canadian dairy industry. I actually think this is OK. Second I think it is true that there is some hypocrisy here on both sides. It's fair to say US trading partners impose tariffs on US goods and ask why the US shouldn't do the same. But the US doesn't play fair here either. Take wheat. Or agricultural products in general. In the US (and the EU) these are massively subsidized. If you're talking about tariffs, you should also include subsidies. But it gets worse: as an example the the US has historically blocked Australian agricultural products (including wheat) on quarantine grounds. While protecting local ecosystems is valid (eg Australia has, I believe, the only disease-free farmed salmon in the world) it's also used as a barrier to trade. It's clear the US here has historically used quarantine as an excuse to protect US farmers (ironically when Australian farmers aren't subsidized and US farmers are). Fun fact: this little trade spat led to a deal in ~2006 that resulted in the Australian-only E3 US work visa. The problem here is we have a complete buffoon in the White House who is the poster-child for anti-intellectualism. So, why put tariffs on Chinese tech goods? Those are primarily just assembled in China these days. China imports most of the parts from Korea, Japan and other places. It's also clear that China plays favourites with local tech companies. It's a fair question to ask why the US should open up to Chinese tech companies when China won't reciprocate?

tehlike 8y ago
You have a fair point, but you can say that most of agriculture is _probably_ subsidized in a good part of the world, because governments have to feed their people. Also for china, they have subsidies or support from government over foreign companies (which you also mentioned) which is also unfair. Trumps tariff is not about price of goods. It is more of a forcing hand to ease trade and american corporations to enter these markets easily.
Retric 8y ago
Buying subsidized products from another country means you benefit from the subsidy. Having native producers to cover basic food needs via plants is reasonable, but importing subsidized beef is a net economic benefit.

brookhaven_dude 8y ago

It's their loss and US consumers' gain. Why is everyone so quick to assume that anything that benefits exporters is the what we must pursue?

aceon48 8y ago
Thats your theory at least. At some point, you don't need any more cheap shit from Amazon, but you need a decent job. As a top 5%er or whatever, surely cheaper is better for you... But prob not your lower middle class neighbor who has to compete more globally in the low skill labor market, where other countries are protecting their people in that regard
- wpietri 8y ago
  In which case, I'd much rather we increased taxes on income and/or wealth to a) help workers move up the value chain, and b) provide a safety net for people who lose out on trade. A tariff on "cheap shit from Amazon" is a heavily regressive tax, and acts to reduce total delivered value. Whereas taxing the well-off to pay for education and encourage investment increases total delivered value.
  - zip1234 8y ago
    How does taxing the well-off to pay for education encourage investment?
    - mrguyorama 8y ago
      Publicly paying for education is one of the most fundamental kinds of investment in society
    - s73v3r_ 8y ago
      An increased supply of high skill workers? An increased supply of people who are economically secure, and thus not interested in "eating the rich"?
    - 8y ago

coliveira 8y ago

The US is not a serious country. During decades they spent millions trying to convince smaller countries to open up their economies, because this was supposedly good. Now that they're starting to slip back in the competition against other countries (particularly China), they do a sudden 180 degree change and introduce tariffs. Only the uninformed can take this seriously.

seanmcdirmid 8y ago
The USA is a democracy, and therefore can have a president like Obama sometimes or one like Trump sometimes. Even then, the USA is hardly homogenous, many people in the country take many sides of different positions. I suppose many other countries are like that as well. Fickle because you know...people.

DenisM 8y ago

Tariffs are backdoor wealth redistributon in some sense. Hear me out. US export industries are more high tech with higher wages, imports are comparatively low tech. When US imposes tariffs it creates low-tech jobs in the US. When the trade partners impose tariffs they destroy high tech jobs in the US. The net result is high tech jobs lost, low tech jobs gained. Overall economic efficiency goes down due to loss of high tech jobs and benefits of specialization.

HillaryBriss 8y ago
> When US imposes tariffs it creates low-tech jobs in the US. I can kind of follow your argument. I can see how it might be true for, say, the recent US steel tariffs (although I don't know enough to say that steel production is 'low tech' these days). But, in general, doesn't your argument depend upon which mix of goods the US includes in the tariff? I mean, I wouldn't call car engines, cell phones, memory chips, television sets, game consoles, etc 'low tech' but the US imports a good deal of them. I also wonder how countries like Germany and Japan manage the blend of tariffs. They certainly produce a lot of high tech goods.
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  >I wouldn't call car engines, cell phones, memory chips, television sets, game consoles, etc 'low tech' but the US imports a good deal of them. Making them is pretty low tech, there's a team of people that design machines, robots, and human processes to manufacture the parts. That would be high tech but it's not that many jobs, and many of those jobs were already here. Then, there's a few people to get the stuff the robots can't do, and a couple guys to grease the robots, and a couple guys to maintain the conveyors and such. None of those are really high tech jobs. The senior machinery tech and the senior robotics guy and a sysadmin may be 'high tech' but most of the work, even working with the robots, is swaping parts, lubing and calibrating. And that, while it pays more than the floor workers, is still far below what we would think of as a high tech salary.
- DenisM 8y ago
  Good point. So much for my theory then.

Nokinside 8y ago

This is overly simplistic. You should look at the trade from in value added basis and how the trade benefits different couturiers differently. Take for example US vs China. US products exported to China have value added close to 80-90%. Chinese products exported to US have value added around 40%. If Chinese import stuff, join them together into a thing that has export value $100, only $40% of the value stays in China. When the US does the same $80-$90 of the value stays in the US. Trade agreements are negotiated over long time to be beneficial for everyone involved and nobody can claim that US is easy negotiation partner that has been taken an advantage. US allows higher taxation from other countries in exchange of some other things (lobbied by the the financial sector inside the US). In general the whole "imports bad, exports good" outdated folk mercantilism is just silly. It's unfortunate that the political discussion anywhere can't raise above that.

bkor 8y ago
It's also telling that the chart shows tariffs in %, not in absolute numbers. From what I saw in other articles it mostly balances out. This aside from the bit which you mentioned that it's a bit more detailed than import/export.

resters 8y ago

For the benefit of HN readers, no serious economist supports tariffs in any form. Tariffs appeal to the naive idea that trade imbalances between two nations are a bad thing. They simply are not a bad thing. But due to the political history of tariffs it becomes possible for politicians to claim (falsely) that tariffs will benefit the economy, when in fact they are (at best) a handout to specific industries. What really boggles my mind about the groundswell of support for tariffs is that much of it is coming from people who would traditionally have frowned upon receiving welfare. Yet they are happy to receive it when it's called tariffs and also happy to receive bailout money when their industry is harmed by the tariffs. Put another way, tariffs are simply a way of introducing the government into economic transactions. If a foreign government foolishly decides to tax its citizens via a tariff on US goods, this harms the foreign citizens. When the US then plays tit-for-tat and adds its own tariff, this punishes American consumers in an attempt to harm foreign exporters. But I repeat, no serious economist (someone who studies the economy scientifically) supports tariffs. They are a political phenomenon and the rhetoric used to support them has no basis in reality. There have been countless blog posts and articles from economists since the president began talking about tariffs that have pointed out the many ways in which the president confuses the meaning of some of the big numbers he presents as justification, etc. The understanding that tariffs are foolish is a universal among economists and is not remotely a partisan issue. It's one thing to want to grant welfare to a specific industry for some political reason, but completely another to introduce a distorting factor like a tariff. I have a trade deficit with my grocer, for example. Why? Because I chose to exchange money for groceries. How is this bad? The same applies to nations.

Nokinside 8y ago
The real weakness of democratic societies is that the general understanding of the world don't transfer into politics. Mercantilism as a zero sum game where you export more than you import and then you get rich reasonable first theory if you start to think trade from the scratch, but it's wrong. It was already debunked by Adam Smith in "The Wealth of Nations" 1776. Then came Ricard's comparative advantage (1817), the emergence of Classical Theory Of International Trade, then New Trade theory then New New trade theory. Every area of politics that touches issues like medicine, chemistry, genetics, climate science, macro economics, trade economics, urban economics, etc. is always facing arguments that were outdated hundreds or thousands of years ago.

dang 8y ago

> I don't know if you're being intellectually dishonest on purpose That crosses into personal attack. Please edit such bits out of your comments here, and follow the rest of the guidelines as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Edit: We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17718957 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17718957 and marked it off-topic.

simonsarris 8y ago
Edited
- dang 8y ago
  Appreciated!
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]