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To: DannyTN
It can be viewed as a tax on anyone not buying Made in America. It can more correctly be viewed as a tax on the foreign firm for selling their product in America. After all, who eats the tax?

It seemed easiest to wrap up all my comments to my comment all at once (not singling you out, DannyTN!).

To answer your question: the consumers always pay all taxes. Period. Oh, you can try to play with the system through subsidies (and we all know how well that works) but all costs, including taxes, get passed on to the people consuming the goods. This works out to a big increase in costs to those who can least afford it and a huge inflationary bump as prices are jacked up.

The hard truth is that when we 'export' jobs (I hate that phrase but we are stuck with it), we create something like 1.2 jobs IN the country due to increased trade and worldwide efficiencies. Protectionism as a whole means we HAVE to do the tasks that have a low value added (e.g. making socks), instead of spending our efforts elsewhere.

Whether we care about our trading partners or not (and I do only in a very vague and diffuse sense), we are connected in a global economy. High tariffs make things more expensive, drives inflation, is a tool for politicians to pick winners and losers, kills our exports through retaliatory tariffs and decreases worker efficiency.

Someone pointed out that we had relatively high tariffs up until about the eighties... what else happened then? The longest peacetime expansion of our economy we have ever known. This was partly through reduced regulation, taxation and tariffs to allow the efficiencies of the market truly shine.

As I said, the answer is not more government interference but less. Get off the backs of the producers, cut up the Bank of China credit card, stop the 'quantitative easings' and let the natural urge of our workers (and entrepreneurs) create and invent a better future.

21 posted on 09/20/2012 7:03:08 AM PDT by WileyC
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To: WileyC
"The hard truth is that when we 'export' jobs (I hate that phrase but we are stuck with it), we create something like 1.2 jobs IN the country due to increased trade and worldwide efficiencies."

I don't believe that. I don't believe you can prove that number, and it doesn't make common sense. When you export jobs to overseas, you lose jobs period. If you created and paid for more American jobs than you lost, it wouldn't make sense to do in the first place. And if other Americans are paying for those jobs, it still doesn't make sense to do.

"Protectionism as a whole means we HAVE to do the tasks that have a low value added (e.g. making socks), instead of spending our efforts elsewhere."

Spending our efforts elsewhere? You mean like the unemployment line. Once Again

25% UNEMPLOYMENT

. You're still spouting the general case for trade and ignoring the special situations where trade doesn't make sense. What part of 25% UNEMPLOYMENT do you not understand?
22 posted on 09/20/2012 11:14:01 AM PDT by DannyTN
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