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A friend helped the Wall Street Journal expose the damage this treaty was doing to his small business in the United States as it tried to fend off counterfeiter

• paulsutter 8y ago
  Globalization is about an even playing field, not one-sided concessions and subsidies
  • colechristensen 8y ago
    The idea of free trade/globalization is everyone benefiting from the efficiency of each place doing the work it can do most efficiently. Iowa corn and Swiss fine machinery and Arab oil and all sorts of things where one place can do something better and cheaper because of the nature of the place. Poverty (cheap labor) and treaties (cheap postage) shouldn't be the drivers of this efficiency because they aren't caused by fundamental differences, just political ones.
    • raquo 8y ago
      But the issue here is not the differential in efficiencies. It's China receiving subsidies from the US because it was considered a developing country in 1969. It's not anymore, it's a global superpower now, it can pay its own postage.
      • baldfat 8y ago
        No it has no bearing on China. It is the same policy with Switzerland. You get the international package to America we pay for the final delivery. Pay for a package to Switzerland and Switzerland pays for the final delivery. It was suppose to be a wash for both parties. China just got a much better deal. Cost me more to mail a package the next state away then for me to get a package delivered from China. Now you have to pay for Switzerland delivery and then the domestic cost. Wish and EBay from China is now bye bye.
        • nkurz 8y ago
          EBay from China is now bye bye. Why would this change the be end of direct shipping from China? Currently (rounded off numbers) the cost of shipping a 2 lb (1 kg) package within the US is about $7, and the cost of shipping such a package from China to a US address is about $2. The obvious solution would be that the Chinese shipment ends up costing $9 (current Chinese rate of $2 to the US border, plus $7 standard US shipping). The Chinese shipping would thus end up $2 more than the US. Presumably there would be lots of cases where the $2 greater shipping is offset by lower price of the item?
          • baldfat 8y ago
            I can order 8 recycling batteries for $2.99 and have them shipped to my house. That is a loss of $4. They are looking at an increase of $7 at least. BTW when I ship a small box 2 pound of cookies to my son from his mom it cost me around $10.
            • nkurz 8y ago
              Sure, certain things will no longer be feasible. My doubt was that these less-than-the-cost-of-shipping items were the bulk of the current direct-from-China Ebay orders, and even if they were, I was doubting that there was not a market for slightly more expensive items. For the US cost, a "Priority Mail Small Flat Rate Box" is $7.20 between any two US addresses, and a "Priority Mail Flat Rate Envelope" is $6.70. If you don't use one of these, the postage will likely will be slightly more.
          • kbenson 8y ago
            Where are you getting those numbers from? My understanding is that there's a nominal fee for last-mile delivery the USPS charges mail from other countries, which is all (or the vast majority) that's being charged for Chinese shipments, as the Chinese side is subsidized completely (or almost so) for outgoing mail. I think the $2 you are quoting might be the treaty fee for delivering mail from other countries, which is not the true cost of delivery, but mostly works out as long as there's a fairly even flow of mail between two countries. What we have here is that China is subsidizing their side of the outgoing mail, so all that's being paid is the treaty set delivery fee for external mail (which again, isn't the true cost of last-mile delivery).
      • datavirtue 8y ago
        Also of note, American tax payers were dropping $300MM a year to help Chinese small business.
        • toomuchtodo 8y ago
          While it's unlikely that money saved would be directed to more useful endeavors internally, as a US citizen I'd prefer that money not subsidize Chinese commerce (or rather, subsidize US consumers purchasing directly from China).
      • baybal2 8y ago
        No, every few years, there is a reevaluation. Last one was in 2016.
        • specialist 8y ago
          Huh. Very interesting. I have a notion that all decisions should auto expire and be explicitly renewed. Because it's so hard to cull outdated or revisit / repair suboptimal rules. Inspired by stuff like IP/TCP leases and cache TTL. But your example of the powers that be waving thru a bad rule refresh suggests my notion won't be sufficient. Thoughts?
          • baybal2 8y ago
            Well, the process did exactly what it was required to do, to classify countries by income levels. China is not that rich, not even passing as a newly industrialised country. Were it to pass as such, say, Kenya and many other African countries would've too.
      • morpheuskafka 8y ago
        This. I've got nothing against US aid to less privileged nations, I'm all for it. I can't stand a US adversary who is running re-education concentration camps for Uighurs and implanting remote access devices into US corporate infrastructure getting an unjust benefit form one cent of American tax money that operates the post office.
        • niij 8y ago
          The US post office is 100% self funded. They get exactly $0 from taxes.
          • morpheuskafka 8y ago
            Not so fast. You're right that the general operations of the USPS are no longer directly appropriated by Congress. However, the US government and its citizens do give the USPS significant economic benefits, including a 100% tax exemption from state and local taxes, and the ability to "pay" federal taxes back to itself[1]. USPS need not comply with local zoning, parking, toll road, etc. laws. According to a 2015 report[2] cited by Fortune, that included $2.1B in waived taxes, the benefit of a federal monopoly on deliveries worth $14.9B, and as much as $490M/yr in subsidized lower interest rates due to not having to have a credit rating and borrow on the open market, but instead getting preferential treatment from the Treasury. Not included in the report is the fact that USPS OIG and USPIS are federally funded through appropriations[3]--whereas UPS or FedEx would have to hire their own off duty police offers at significant expense to receive the same level of protection. [1] https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/taxing-postal-service https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/taxing-postal-service [2] http://www.sonecon.com/docs/studies/Study_of_USPS_Subsidies-Shapiro-Sonecon-March_25_2015.pdf http://www.sonecon.com/docs/studies/Study_of_USPS_Subsidies-... [3] https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library-files/2018/FY%202019%20Congressional%20Budget%20%20Justification%20-%20FINAL.pdf https://www.uspsoig.gov/sites/default/files/document-library...
            • niij 8y ago
              That's interesting, thanks for the detailed reply.My point was that their operating expenses are covered by fees for postage and not directly paid through taxes. But now I realize that this is more of a grey area than I had though.
    • breerly 8y ago
      Can’t have real free trade with central-banking and fiat, must have hard global money.
    • wbl 8y ago
      The biggest reduction in global poverty we've seen is due to outsourcing to China. Don't you care about starving Chinese peasants?
      • pkaye 8y ago
        I'm sure there are plenty of billionaires in China that can do more for them.
      • jarfil 8y ago
        Depends. Are they so desperate that they want to go to war, or are they rather becoming more of a middle class that wants to play the newest video games?
        • tomohawk 8y ago
          Before WW I, France and Germany were each others largest trading partners. Trade and prosperity are orthogonal to war.
          • notfromhere 8y ago
            Trade wasn't anywhere as big as it is now; most trade was within internal colonies, not externally.
        • Tsubasachan 8y ago
          How many wars has China instigated in the last 30 years though? Seems to me the region is shifting to accommodate the new power balance quite nicely.
        • oblio 8y ago
          I'm not sure about video games, but they do seem to crave mobile phones and luxury goods :D
      • baldfat 8y ago
        > due to outsourcing to China No it is the demand for better working conditions and wages. That helps the local Chinese and American workers. Oh that's right labor unions are evil????
    • dTal 8y ago
      And yet, if the profits can be prevented from all floating to the top, globalisation would appear on the surface to be an excellent way of redressing global inequality. Massive international wage gaps will be perceived by the market as an exploitable inefficiency, which over time will be ironed out. Or, to put it another way, if two people wish to trade, it must be in both of their interests. If I, as a westerner, go to a third world country and buy a bunch of stuff that from my perspective is cheap but from their perspective is expensive, we both end up happy. What's so terrible about that? (Of course where it falls down is where labor is cheaper because of poor worker protections and exploitative practices, in which case it constitutes an end-run around the labor laws of the richer party. But they are the ones that should be upset, not the poorer party, whose labor laws would be terrible regardless of exploitation)
      • anonuser123456 8y ago
        'Labor laws' is a bad argument, particularly in poor developing nations. If you enforce labor laws in developing countries, the cost of production will be high enough that industry doesn't develop. At that point, the people there have no industry and are much worse off (e.g. a sweatshop is better than subsistence farming). A better argument is 'labor choice'. Individuals need to have the ability to choose their circumstance. If they can choose, and choose freely, over time the whole society can ratchet up their standard of living by making these choices at the margin.
        • kingraoul3 8y ago
          That rosy picture is totally divorced from the actual historical course of Capitalist development.
          • icebraining 8y ago
            On the contrary, it's debunking the rosy picture that developing economies can afford developed-economy levels of worker protection.
            • 8y ago
    • Tsubasachan 8y ago
      I want to remind everyone that Chinese economy became what it is today because European, American and Japanese companies invested trillions in China. It was a Republican president who kicked it all off. A policy decision of pure capitalism.
      • boomboomsubban 8y ago
        Those areas made far more than they invested, and China needed that huge investment because those three areas had already spent a century exploiting it for profit.
        • JPKab 8y ago
          No, China needed that investment because Mao and his communist policies held China back for decades. But feel free to mouth the CCP line of China being a great victim.
          • boomboomsubban 8y ago
            For a start, things before 1950 still happened. Even during the decades you admit happened, those areas refused to acknowledge the existence of China, making trade impossible. Early Maoist policy hadn't helped matters, but it's pretty hard to argue American, Japanese, and European policy hadn't already left them in an incredibly shitty position.
          • awnfuron 8y ago
            Are you saying that China was not a victim? They literally had millions of civilian deaths in WWII. I've seen figures from 14 million to 20 million. Never mind the destructive effects of western imperialism up to that point. As for Mao holding back China, no doubt there were big problems. But the greatest increases in life expectancy at birth came under Mao [1] and his push to greatly expand access to medical care and education in rural areas. That was itself an investment which set the stage for future growth. (It's a lot easier to get things done when your people aren't dying at age 45.) [1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?locations=CN https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.LE00.IN?location...
    • jamesknelson 8y ago
      I’m not sure if Swiss fine machinery is the best example here. What is it about the nature of Switzerland that makes it a more natural place to create fine machinery then anywhere else? Similarly, using American corn as an example of how free trade should work is pretty underhanded. There’s a ridiculous amount of subsidies there, and the US doesn’t have any qualms with dumping the resulting product on international markets.
      • unfunco 8y ago
        The nature of the place in the context of Swiss watches could mean the établissage system.
        • yourapostasy 8y ago
          I had to look up that term [1], thanks for introducing me to it. I'm still not sure how Switzerland the geographic place intrinsically leads to more efficient watch-making, as Shenzen and other Chinese factory cities make copious use of établissage in many different industries. Also, Apple's offshored Chinese manufacturing demonstrates that extremely high quality hardware manufacturing is not ethno-culturally-bound, and can be successfully transmitted through a corporate culture. Ricardo's comparative economic advantage in Net age-birthed industries seems increasingly more hand-wavium the further away I get from intrinsically geographically-tied economic inputs like mineral resources, fresh water, salt water fish migration paths, or latitude-dependent agriculture, etc., and the further one transits away from historical network effects like Swiss watch-making, Silicon Valley software-writing, or Belgian diamond-polishing, etc. The mathematical and empirical analyses of comparative advantage [2] [3], as well as great explanations about it [4], don't seem to address extremely complex goods with very high cognitive input factors, like semiconductors, industrial machinery, bio-pharma products, avionics, spacecraft, high-end electronics manufacturing, fracking, cloud services, search engines, e-commerce, etc., and I suspect comparative advantage breaks down as we evolve those and similar economic areas because ceteris paribus, there is no natural, lasting advantage one nation comparatively holds over another on human cognitive power (which I celebrate). In all those areas, there are leaders, but not so much and to such a comparative degree that they decisively elbow out other nations from economically attempting to enter those industries now or in the future. The Sudan might be a cognitive desert right now compared to Palo Alto or Shenzen, but there is nothing structurally preventing them from turning into a powerhouse in the future (on a multi-generational timescale) to contend with, as say there is with them turning into the next corn-production hub like Iowa, or oil-producer like Saudi Arabia or the fracking Permian Basin. [1] https://www.watch-wiki.net/index.php?title=Etablissage https://www.watch-wiki.net/index.php?title=Etablissage [2] https://www.dartmouth.edu/~rstaiger/Bernhofen%20and%20Brown%20AER.pdf https://www.dartmouth.edu/~rstaiger/Bernhofen%20and%20Brown%... [3] https://www.nber.org/papers/w17969 https://www.nber.org/papers/w17969 [4] https://www.pauldeng.com/teaching/intecon/IE_Fall2011_Lecture%202.pdf https://www.pauldeng.com/teaching/intecon/IE_Fall2011_Lectur...
    • anonuser123456 8y ago
      Cheap labor/poverty should absolutely drive free trade, at least if you are interested in improving the human condition. People in impoverished nations choose to work in sweatshops because the alternative is so much worse; prostitution, indentured servitude, being completely destitute etc.
      • icebraining 8y ago
        Agreed; though that must be actually a choice. There have been cases where governments have made the alternatives worse to push people into "progress".
      • justinmchase 8y ago
        I disagree. This incentivizes the fostering of an environment where these are the only choices available to people. It does not help laborers anywhere in the world to exploit labor and further weaken places where labor has already organized and achieved protection. This is a fundamental failure of capitalism and a particularly harmful neo-liberal belief.
        • zanny 8y ago
          Its the only choice available because the previous means of survival was at best subsistence farming. And it isn't guaranteed to happen, but impoverished countries will never enter modern society if they are just isolated from it for labor protections sake. The trickle of money from the pockets of capitalists into the dictators of Indochina in exchange for functionally slave labor is still better than if these countries had nothing to offer the world at all. You would want the optimistic capitalist means to uplift the third world to be simple investment - you take a country with nothing to offer and no resources, invest money in it to educate its people and develop its infrastructure, and then you would have their substantially improved productivity to profit off. But that has never happened on just the backs of dollars because there is no way to risk manage that kind of arrangement. It almost always comes second to bombs or prophets as a way to provide that collateral - even if the country fails to recoup the investment, you can pillage the natural resources or convert its people into adherents of your own culture. Because those acting in self interest are approaching a scenario where the other party has nothing to offer (except idle hands) and you have everything.
    • complexmango 8y ago
      I once believed this as well, via one of my degrees (economics). It turned out to be contradicted by reality. Ricardo and Adam Smith argued that the consumer surplus gains of free trade for the higher labor market would be greater than the losses sustained in producer surplus in the same market. I.e. that American consumers reap more $$ from imported foreign cars than American workers/business lose. However, since then its become obvious that the population that loses jobs cares a LOT more than consumers do about their cars being a few $$ cheaper (e.g. Donald Trump won Michigan and Ohio). In other words - political differences DO matter. Perhaps economics should return to its previous name - Political Economy - in order to actually describe the real world again.
  • awakeasleep 8y ago
    Square that idea with the differences in national labor law for us, please?
  • adwhit 8y ago
    Globalization is a hegemonic project of the West, best understood as a means to transfer capital from the economic peripheries to the imperial core, and has tended to wreak havoc on developing countries that have exposed themselves to it. China has been very sensible to ignore the dogma about free trade and to exploit weaknesses and loopholes in trade treaties when they find them.
    • secfirstmd 8y ago
      Very true. In reality this is following the model South Korea, Japan took.
      • kingraoul3 8y ago
        And the U.S.!
    • krona 8y ago
      Hmm. It might be possible for one person to create wealth without another person losing it. Almost as though it wasn't a zero-sum game. Just a theory.
      • adwhit 8y ago
        This is true. Nothing to do with what I said, but, it is true. It isn't what happens at the moment. Every dollar of growth worldwide is subtracted many times over from our environmental commons. At the moment the global economy is a heavily negative-sum game.
      • CodeWriter23 8y ago
        Please illustrate one example of how someone (not the Fed firing up the presses) can make money without someone else giving them money.
        • krona 8y ago
          I didn't mention money. You don't need to have read The Wealth of Nations to know that it's possible to increase the GDP of a country without decreasing the overall savings. Service driven economies are the best example of this.
  • A2017U1 8y ago
    You would have to eliminate all government policy to get rid of subsidies. There a million ways around every clause in a 1000 page free trade agreement. It's just not possible. I'm a supporter of liberal trade between all countries but you've got to be honest that pure "free" trade just ain't happening while there's a few hundred individual countries on Earth
  • ryanmarsh 8y ago
    I hear you but if it costs $3 to drop ship something from China to CONUS but $4 for me to send it within CONUS I’m not sure how we can say it’s “not one-sided concessions and subsidies” I get the argument of globalization but I just don’t see it playing out how people say it’s supposed to.
  • GlobalFrog 8y ago
    That is the theory. I might be pessimistic, but it looks to me that everyone claims that one want that even playing field and at the same time, hides as much subsidies as possible to be able to protect ones own industries. Europe is heavily subsidizing its agriculture. The US are heavily subsidizing anything that has a link to anything military and oil. And others are doing the same. True, a few markets have been freed and commerce has increased, but an enormous amount of industries are helped by governments who like to criticize the subsidies of the others. By the way, there was a nice article last year about how the US are subsidizing the oil and fossil fuel industries in two ways: first by direct subsidies (about $20 billions each year and the "hidden" one about the cost of carbon emissions which can be estimated at $200 billions per year (which is real money on the carbon trading market : the government pays for the carbon emitted by its industries). (https://www.forbes.com/sites/ucenergy/2017/02/01/the-200-billion-fossil-fuel-subsidy-youve-never-heard-of/#3f18de56652b https://www.forbes.com/sites/ucenergy/2017/02/01/the-200-bil...) It is interesting to see that the "Clean Power Plan" of the previous administration was made to allow for levelling the playing field more or less by removing those hidden subsidies, and that the current administration destroys it. And that is not even including the costs of global warming that will impact the future for todays actions. So to sum up, the supposed efficiency of the markets seems to me like an illusion, or at least, an ideal that will be never reached because it allways allows for cheating. Same for the postal union of this topic : for years, the US had a net gain financially from it and it didn't seem to bother them. Now, it is China that has this net gain and they are not behaving differently than the US did for many years by trying to preserve this advantage.
    • neltnerb 8y ago
      I don't think anyone sensible would fault China for taking advantage of something that is advantageous for their businesses, nor for them to advocate for it. It would be irrational for them not to, the subsidies exist so obviously any reasonable business would use them. Nonetheless, it's clearly not in the interest of US businesses. The US is not obligated to provide subsidies that, due to the scale of trade using this tool, demonstrably favor Chinese small businesses over those in the US and distort the market. I'd much rather see the market made more balanced by charging the same prices for shipping than by tariffs. At least that's a real cost. Though I have the ulterior motive of thinking charging full price for air freight will reduce carbon emissions and inefficient supply chains.
  • justinmchase 8y ago
    I may be cynical but I don't believe this. I think its more about producing goods using more exploitable workers and resources. If all countries had the same worker and environmental protections and same degree of unionization, aka an actual level playing field, then maybe. But instead its more about exploitation and breaking organized labor unions.
  • tmaly 8y ago
    I kept hearing the claim that the US Post Office was losing money on items shipped by Amazon. So I asked the Postman delivering my Amazon package on a Sunday, and he confirmed that indeed the Post Office was being paid far less on a per package basis for Amazon deliveries than the regular rate. In the case of this Postal Treaty, it seems like the Post Office is losing money on delivering these <= 4 pound packages from China. The US Post Office is struggling enough, I think pulling out of this treaty is a good thing if it can help them.
    • CodeWriter23 8y ago
      There’s a little more nuance to it. The Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act of 2006 [1] is the major contributor to USPS’ ongoing financial issues. That act requires USPS to maintain a 75 year reserve for retirement and medical benefits. Other agencies including the Armed Forces max out at 20 years by comparison. 1. https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407 https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6407
• geezerjay 8y ago
  What about customers and companies not located within the US or China? It seems that the extra cost of doing business will force all of us to do business elsewhere.
• fzeroracer 8y ago
  What about American innovation that relies on certain parts from China, such as the entire electronic industry which we operate in?
  • nostromo 8y ago
    They should pay the cost of shipping their parts from China to the US without a subsidy from the US taxpayer.
    • keithnoizu 8y ago
      seems like this will backfire if we ever want to access the emerging Chinese consumer market.
      • gruez 8y ago
        I find it sad how the US will be "punished" for righting a wrong, because Chinese has gotten so used to the status quo of "wrong".
      • mistermann 8y ago
        This has been a big part of the motivational story all along, but what would we sell to the Chinese, and how does that compare to what they sell to us (with or without unfairly subsidized shipping)?
      • turtlecloud 8y ago
        Chinese will not want to buy foreign stuff. If looking at history, the British had to force opium down the Chinese in order to get them to trade tea. The main exception is in luxury products like Gucci bags, iPhones and LV.
    • fzeroracer 8y ago
      Of course you realize that this change will likely disproportionately affect the poor and middle-class (who will see a sharp rise in shipping costs) as well as smaller businesses who rely on thin margins to survive. The cost of $300 million per year as quoted in the article seems like peanuts compared to some of the other actions this administration has burdened tax payers with.
• Abishek_Muthian 8y ago
  Would the outcome of these negotiations at-least end up creating a path to coin a universally accepted definitions of 'Developing Country' & 'Developed Country'? Is it HDI, industry or by Military Strength Index? If MSI is taken into account, then India & China are among the most developed nations!
  • sgift 8y ago
    I wouldn't hold my breath. The discussions about developed/developing are probably as old as the distinction itself and (as evidently shown here) many people have to win or loose depending on the classification of a country.
  • matt4077 8y ago
    No, they won't. These terms just aren't used any more. That's partly because of the euphemism treadmill, and on the colonial history of these terms. More importantly: the real world does not conform to any such arbitrary differentiation into a single binary variable. There just isn't any need for such a classification anyway. If you want to index something to a country's wealth, just use any per-capita economic measure and be done with it. GNP is fine, I'm sure it wouldn't make much of a difference if you used iPhones/per million or the Big Mac Index, instead.
• jscholes 8y ago
  Does your friend get anything if I pay to read the article?
• Theodores 8y ago
  It helps to understand the history of the postal system, which was archaic and impractical until Sir Rowland Hill came along with The Penny Black: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_Hill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rowland_Hill The basic principle is a simple one, a letter could be sent to any address in the UK at the universal rate. There would be no surcharges just because you lived in a remote part of Wales. Equally there would be no discount because you lived next to the sorting office in London and wanted to send a letter to the next street. In the UK we did celebrate Rowland Hill and his work, sadly times have changed and successive Conservative governments have undermined the universal postal service by privatisation and trying to make it 'better' with 'competition'. Hence, rather than one Royal Mail van delivering letters and parcels there is now a small fleet of other delivery vans and outsourced casual labour 'gig economy' type delivery options. It is not more efficient to send six different vans out to a small village, each of them delivering one or two items when you could have just the one Royal Mail van carrying a few dozen parcels. Moving on from 1837 to today where ecommerce and email has changed things, there is the 'ePacket', not very well understood by most end consumers. Here is an article on Shopify that helps explain the fundamentals: https://www.shopify.co.uk/blog/epacket-delivery-explained-everything-you-need-to-know-about-epacket-shipping https://www.shopify.co.uk/blog/epacket-delivery-explained-ev... Now I am no fan of the 'evils of global capitalism', however, I believe that the work done by China Post and their partners in 30+ countries is very much in the spirit of 'the Penny Black'. If your business in the West does have product made in China for good reasons, e.g. that is where your supply chain is, then you want to get your products to customers in good time. Why send a crate of product to your local warehouse to then have people then resend that on to customers when you can have a pick and pack operation in China? This is particularly the case if you are wanting to offer your product to people internationally. For instance, Australia. If you have production facilities in China and then have a head office and warehouse in the UK, you can't realistically sell to the Australian market if it takes weeks for your parcels from the UK to get there, inevitably spending a week doing nothing in the Netherlands en-route. It makes customer service a non-starter. What you really want, and what your customer really wants is the China Post ePacket service and no extra trip for your products around the planet. This applies for premium products people want, not the forged knock-off product that people berate Amazon for. ePacket helps the small to medium sized business compete against the giants of industry that can afford their own planes. There is no 'win' for American innovation here, this is like a 'tariff' in that it is actually a 'tax' on American consumers. ePacket was as bit as innovative as 'the Penny Black' and it facilitates trade on a level playing field. I am sure that knee-jerk reactions will mod-down my opinions on this, however, the ePacket and how we got here is not understood that well and going Donald Trump on parcel delivery is not going to solve the problems and frictions that genuinely exist with the status quo.
• baldfat 8y ago
  > bad for globalization No it just was a bad policy. It has to be a win/win for both sides. Currently this was a bad deal for America. Prepare for things to cost much more now in regards to electronics.
• atomi 8y ago
  This is a nice anecdote. But what about the mass of consumers who will now have to pay a markup for the exact same product from an importer?
  • Loic 8y ago
    They will pay more because currently the cost is partially covered by the USPS. Such treaty makes sense in two cases: - the cost of recovery is high. 140 years ago, doing the accounting for all the parcels, letters sent from France to the US would have cost and from the US to France to then "balance" the accounts would have been way higher than the recovered money from one party. - the traffic is balanced, that is, both countries send/receive approximately the same numbers of parcels/letters each way, each year. Once these two assumptions do not hold any more, it makes sense to reconsider the situation. This is a question of balance.
  • _red 8y ago
    That cost is now just properly being paid by those wanting those goods. Previously that cost was being subsidized by all USPS users (and taxpayers via bond underwriting, tax breaks given to USPS, etc).
  • SilasX 8y ago
    It is 100% reasonable to have to pay more for shipping when a good has to travel a farther, less convenient voyage and go through customs. Anything else viciously incentivizes overuse of transportation and puts an uncompensated load on border protection.
    • SilasX 8y ago
      I would love to hear a reasonable counterpoint on this.
  • justinmchase 8y ago
    They will be incentivized to pay for similar American goods and services which will be better for the economy in general.
  • 8y ago
• api 8y ago
  The Chinese are nationalists. Xi Jinpeng is more nationalistic than Trump. They're not globalists. They've been pretending to play the globalist game to build their economy. You can't really blame them for it, but the rest of the world (not just the USA) is waking up to it. (Fairer trade is literally the one thing I agree with Trump on...)
• forapurpose 8y ago
  It will hurt everyone, as a basic fact of economics: 1. American innovators buying components from overseas, which include many on HN and in SV, will now have to pay more, reducing their ability to innovate. 2. American consumers will have to pay more. 3. American consumers will have less innovative products, as their ability to get innovative products from other countries will be reduced, and as innovators in both the U.S. (see #1 and #4) and in other countries will be hamstrung. 4. American innovators will face less competition, which is certainly not what leads to innovation; it leads to profit-taking based on market power, not meritocratic competition. 5. Reduced international cooperation and trade will reduce American innovators ability to sell abroad; the U.S. is only 5% of the world's population; the other 95% of the market is elsewhere. Cooperation and trade will not only be reduced as a direct effect, but also as a result of the U.S. appearing to be an unreliable partner, and as a result of other countries responding in kind by pulling out of treaties when they find any problems. 6. As reduced trade hurts economies here and abroad, Americans will pay more, have fewer people to sell to, resulting in lower wages and fewer jobs. Finally, the greatest American innovation is democracy, the belief that all men are created equal and that's what leads to prosperity. That innovation has resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen, and it has, as a secondary side effect, brought an explosion of prosperity unlike anything the world has ever seen. The U.S. is now purposefully killing that innovation.
  • malvosenior 8y ago
    This is the removal of market manipulation (subsidies on shipping). We should see more innovation because the market can act freely now. For instance, now that China will have to pay for their full shipping, some product may increase in cost to the point where they could be manufactured and sold in the US, spurring innovation. The fewer artificial market constraints the better. > Finally, the greatest American innovation is democracy, the belief that all men are created equal and that's what leads to prosperity. That innovation has resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen, and it has, as a secondary side effect, brought an explosion of prosperity unlike anything the world has ever seen. Yeah, I don't know about that. Maybe in the US we've had a decent run of peace (with 50 years of nuclear holocaust hanging over our heads), but we've definitely dropped a lot of bombs on people. Enough that I think we can say that US democracy has not "resulted in an explosion of peace and liberty unlikely anything the world has ever seen".