LOL. Does New Zealand have some mightily industrial output to protect? Of course free trade make sense for them but it doesn’t mean it makes sense for everyone else.
There were more people in my high school then there are in New Zealand.
That must mean Trump's tariffs have to be good for America.
let’s take a look at NZ. facts:
NZ keeps a very tight control on immigrant labor.
NZ top exports (71%) are according to IMF.
At the more granular four-digit Harmonized Tariff System code level, New Zealand’s number 1 export product is cow’s milk followed by sheep or goat milk.
Dairy, eggs, honey: US$10.2 billion (27.6% of total exports)
Meat: $4.7 billion (12.7%)
Wood: $3.3 billion (9%)
Fruits, nuts: $1.9 billion (5.1%)
Beverages, spirits, vinegar: $1.4 billion (3.7%)
Fish: $1.1 billion (3.1%)
Cereal/milk preparations: $1.1 billion (2.9%)
Machinery including computers: $978.6 million (2.6%)
Modified starches, glues, enzymes: $884.6 million (2.4%)
NZ top trade partners are 1 china and 2 australia. then UK/EU.
NZ imports mostly cars and various machinery. Their imports recently spiked in 2016/2017 according to source.
so if they had tariffs, they must have been protecting farms and farm goods which compete directly with ours (can’t blame them for that)? unlikely. or their own machinery (china, computers?) maybe.
or more likely they were trying to keep importers of finished goods out and hurting their own retail industry and consumer market employment in the process? (the article cites improved employment. that could come from more imports.
anyway, it’s immediately clear that any parallel of this economy to the US is pretty bogus.
in short, this is an agrarian/socialist economy which is relatively small. it looks like it hasn’t got any real manufacturing base to protect anyway which is the reason for American tariffs.
the local farmers are protected from immigrant labor (a kind of labor tariff) probably because they don’t want to end up like us.
they trade mostly with china and australia so that is probably where the farm goods go and probably have always gone. no trade war there i think.
verdict: could investigate further but not convinced by NZ that so called “free trade” is good for us.
First it was Switzerland, now it is New Zealand. When will the One World Idiots learn that you can’t compare apples and watermelons! NZ is about the size of California. Texas is three times as big and has four times the population. NZ has a population of 4,749,598 as of 2018. It is not even in the running as far as an industrial economy is concerned. Compare its population with over 300 million Americans. This article is ridiculous!
When I think of economic powerhouse, I always think of New Zealand.......
“[I]n general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”They knew what they were aiming for, back then. And the politicians of today are also aiming for “the social revolution”.
— Karl Marx, 01/09/1848
Hey, I know, ask China, Japan, Germany etc. how their protectionist policies hurt them.
ok, I found out why we heard from New Zealand out of the blue. Zero’s there, collecting $300K in between meddling:
The argument that the laws of economics mysteriously change because the country is bigger is bogus. Water still boils at 212 even with a bigger pot and, once again, tariffs are still taxes , even if the country applying them is bigger.
And what is the size of New Zealand’s economy? The same as the size of Delaware’s maybe.
Interesting. So when did we ever have free trade with China?
New Zealand’s trade deficit widened to NZD 566 million in January of 2018 compared to a NZD 227 million gap in the same month of the previous year and expectations of a NZD 2710 million gap. It was the largest deficit for a January month since 2007, with both exports (+9.5 percent year-on-year vs +24.3 percent in December) and imports (+17.1 percent vs +10.8 percent) reaching new highs for January months. Balance of Trade in New Zealand averaged -52.19 NZD Million from 1951 until 2018, reaching an all time high of 1157.64 NZD Million in April of 2011 and a record low of -1387.99 NZD Million in September of 2016.
Small island nation vs a continental power like the USA. No comparison. What a bunch of BS.
If “Free Trade” is such a good idea why does China, EU, Japan and S. Korea all practice protectionism and threaten protectionist tariffs in retaliation all the time?
