While Musk is trying to get AfD elected in Germany, Trump is now threatening to put tariffs on all of Europe.
They really do not get how much hurt Europe could cause for them. Tesla, Amazon, Facebook — they are all here!
EU politicians should begin talking about the wonders of putting levies on their energy use, and how we support better working conditions and increased wages.
When Elon, Bezos, and Zuck support a fool, who wants to hurt European economy, remind them it is a two-way street!
Doc Freemo 
If we are cutting income tax and offsetting that with tarrifs I am all for it. Taxes need to be levied somewhere and any taxes we can move off income tax and apply more towards taxing expenses the better.
That said I doubt Trump will execute things well, he rarely does.
@randahl You mean a European tariff on USA goods? Yea I expect that to be the case. We tax incoming foreign goods, they tax from us. Import/export tax is pretty common to go both ways. Just another way to collect money and superior to income tax IMO.
@freemo there will be a lot of tit for tat in Q1.
Sure, thats not a bad thing. With income tax I have to pay tax for the money I make, but that money gets re-taxed on the way out too, in other words, all tax tends to work in both directions, its a feature not a flaw. The important part is that we distribute the taxes across behaviors we want to discourage. No one should be discouraged from earning a lot of money (income tax), but generally we want to discourage spending (sales tax and tarrifs), ideally in a way that puts more tax burden on luxury items.
So anything we can do to move taxes from an income tax to a tarrif/import tax/sales tax is a good thing. The fact that it works both ways is normal and expected and shouldnt discourage that.
I would imagine we would agree that one of the ultimate goals if not THE ultimate goal of human life is happiness. That generally comes from living in a society where wealth is equitably distributed not one where the gap between rich and poor is monstrous. The happiest populations in the world are normally adjuged to be in countries where tax rates are amogst the highest in the world and are slanted very much towards enforcing income equality not letting the extremely get richer! The put it bluntly we need cleaners, refuse collecters, nurses, teachers, refuse collectors and others who do relatively menial tasks very much more than we need the entirely parasitic Elon Musks and the Jeff Bezos's of this world. I would therefore tax people with such obscene wealth at 99% once they reached a level of wealth that would leave them comfortably off for the rest of their lives!
I disagree with your premise that wealth disparity is contrary to the happiness of a society.
Rule number one of economics is that wealth is not a zero sum game. Others having more does not mean you must have less. The existence of ultra rich in no way implies more poor people or that poor people suffer more, in fact quite the opposite, rich people produce the most wealth which, in a healthy economy (read a fair market) it benefits everyone.
@freemo @Paulos_the_fog @randahl No, rich people produce very little, they just skim off what others produce. If someone accumulates wealth then either the wealth is real and they indeed reduce what is available to others, or the wealth is just fictional, in which case it should not have the effect it does.
Simply saying a thing doesnt make it true. We have decades of economic theory and models that say otherwise.
@freemo equality is not about everyone having the same balance on their bank account.
It is about equal opportunity, and the US is moving away from that.
Example: Literally thousands of people owned businesses which depended on Twitter, but a person of extreme wealth bought it and destroyed it.
The extreme inequality of the US has created a society which have characteristics of The Dark Ages, where a king could decide to burn down an entire city if he felt like it.
> equality is not about everyone having the same balance on their bank account.
Exactly my point, agreed.
> It is about equal opportunity, and the US is moving away from that.
Also agreed, nor did I say anything to the contrary.
> Example: Literally thousands of people owned businesses which depended on Twitter, but a person of extreme wealth bought it and destroyed it.
Wealth can be destroyed just like it could be created. When he destroyed it he destroyed his own wealth making himself less wealthy, thus the point, wealthy people create wealth which is how they get wealthy (or inherit it in some cases), and likewise they can become poor (or at least poorer) when they make bad decisions and destroy wealth.
> The extreme inequality of the US has created a society which have characteristics of The Dark Ages, where a king could decide to burn down an entire city if he felt like it.
Nah you have it backwards. The lack of a free market (a market that can be gamed and is unfair) is what has sent us to the Dark Ages. Assuming it is due to wealth disparity as the driving cause is unfounded and just repeating the popular narrative rather than representing an understanding of the problem, which is quite nuanced.
No one claimed anything about everyone needing equal... But no demanding a share of another person's creation due to their hard work is complete nonsense. Other people generating wealth doesn't mean you deserve a cut
Paying someone a salary and providing them a risk free income while you take al the risk is not "exploiting" anyone. Lol.
If people are starving then the government failed to provide welfare. In a proper society there is welfare to ensure no one is forced to work as a slave. Then anyone who works chooses to. So If there is slave labor blame the government for failing to provide education welfare and food. It's certainly not a companies fault for paying the market wage, it's the governments fault for allowing a no free market to exist to begin with.
Paying someone what they ask for is no more exploiting someone than it is to buy an item from one store because it was cheaper than another store.
Companies arent responsible for the state of the market, that is the governments responsibility to do.
Governments in civilized countries have imposed a statutory minimum salary to avoid exploitative employers from paying starvation wages but I suppose that offends your libertarian principles!
The problem with even the most generous statutory minimum wage is that it is seldom increased to keep up with inflation. The country where live, Luxembourg, is one of the few exceptions, that still indexes the statutory minimum wage (and all pensions, benefits and salaries both public and private) to the rate of inflation. When a 2.5% increase in prices is reached, everyone gets a 2.5% increase in salaries etc.
Welfare is not and never has been what folk want; what they want is decent work with pay that enables them to pay their rent or their mortgage and raise their families if they have one. It's the billionaires who run the world's largest corporations who are amongst the worst offenders for paying starvation wages with Bezos being a fine example!
> Governments in civilized countries have imposed a statutory minimum salary to avoid exploitative employers from paying starvation wages but I suppose that offends your libertarian principles!
I am more offended by the loaded language to imply that anyone who doesnt agree with your approach to solving the problem isnt civilized.
You have only proven my point, it is /**the governments** responsibility to ensure the market is healthy, not the company. Applying a minimum wage is one way in which governments attempt to execute on their responsiblity to fix the markets, it is also a way in which they fail and make the markets worse.
Minimum wage has shown to increase the number of people who are jobless among the least skilled of the population (those without HS diplomas are most effected). Ergo minimum wage laws have caused more harm towards the groups they attempt to help, therefore, no I do not support it. Instead I support programs that are aimed at increasing the marketability of the population such as government paid education up to the PhD level and strong welfare programs.
> The problem with even the most generous statutory minimum wage is that it is seldom increased to keep up with inflation.
Thats not the problem, in fact, the more you increase it the more you harm the people most in poverty, those who are under-skilled. So no, doing that would just make it worse.
> Welfare is not and never has been what folk want;
A heroin addict wants nothing but heroin. Giving people what they want isnt what I care about. Giving people what they need is.
> What they want is decent work with pay that enables them to pay their rent or their mortgage and raise their families if they have one. It's the billionaires who run the world's largest corporations who are amongst the worst offenders for paying starvation wages with Bezos being a fine example!
Which is exactly why you need welfare and a generous paid education system up to PhD level. Welfare feeds the people and gives them a basic quality of life. That only buys them time. It is only from the education and training provided that a real solution comes, and that solution is exactly what you describe, the ability to make good money for reasonable work.
I would quote the following so as to keep it nice and simple:
"I need someone to explain to me why it’s always “if you can’t pay rent, buy fewer lattes and avocado toasts” and not “if you can’t pay your employees a living wage, buy fewer yachts and real estate”.
Explain it to me like I’m in kindergarten!
Why would I have to explain to you a quote I never made and has no relationship to this thread or anything I said?
No more so than everyone looses with taxes in general. I mean sure you hear people make the argument "everybody looses" and taxes are theft all the time. But the reality is, we need taxes to function and tariffs are a better way to get them than income tax.
Oh and by the way 28% of all goods entering the EU are taxed under a tariff... hardly the whole "only one advisory" and "its a trade war"...
@freemo we pay quite a bit more taxes than you and I'm totally ok with that. It finances things that help social equality.
Tariffs are not the same thing as taxes. They can be used to combat unfair price dumping, like with Chinese EVs.
But they can also be used to unfairly favor companies that don't want or cannot compete. The problem is they disincentivise investments into production improvements. Meaning the moment they are lifted the companies are worse off than before.
@randahl
tariffs can be used for a lot of things, unfair practices are one, just like taxes they can and should be used proportionally to discourage undesired behavior, such as buying foreign goods over local.
Since tariffs should never be lifted I dont see much relevance in discussing the effects of lifting them.
Like taxes tarrifs can of course be used to target things unfairly. The assumption with any tool is that it in order for it to benefit society it must be used properly, and that means not using it to target the wrong sorts of companies or resources.
@freemo @randahl it's not superior to income tax at all - it will create an even bigger difference in taxes paid between the poor and rich, because poor spend most if not all they earn on buying essential stuff, while the rich who can just store or invest substantial part of their income will end up paying comparatively small amounts. More people will end up poorer and the country will end up with a smaller budget, becoming weaker
@freemo I remember his last trade war. We put a considerable tariff on Harley Davidson motorbikes, etc.
I do not recall them winning anything.