Dona Ferentes
Where do you go to, my lovely
- Joined
- 11 January 2016
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An American importer of Chinese goods:
“If you’re paying 50 percent of your product costs in taxes (in the form of tariffs), you pay that the day it arrives in the country and then what if you sell a product six months later? You have to carry that as a borrowing for six months, and that can really mount.
“That’s one of the reasons why companies are feeling a strong need to raise prices now, because they pretty much have to raise the money to finance paying the taxes, because the taxes are paid first. Income taxes are paid after you make the money. But tariffs are an asset tax. And so you pay them basically to go into business.
“So we have to raise the prices sooner than later because we need to accumulate that money so we can spend it on tariffs. That completely screws up the cash flow of your business.
“This plan is a mass self-impoverishment plan. If I have to raise my prices 50 percent, 70 percent, or whatever ridiculous number it is, what I tell people is, ‘You’re going to be paying that much more to buy exactly the same thing. And this is going to happen across a wide swath of things that you want to buy: shoes, sweaters, sunglasses, power tools, you name it.’
“The one thing I can promise you will not go up is your salary. So you have the same amount of money, just everything will cost 50 percent more. What does that mean? That means that your standard of living just dropped because you can’t afford to buy what you could buy the day before. It’s an impoverishing policy and it’s so obvious."....
“If you’re paying 50 percent of your product costs in taxes (in the form of tariffs), you pay that the day it arrives in the country and then what if you sell a product six months later? You have to carry that as a borrowing for six months, and that can really mount.
“That’s one of the reasons why companies are feeling a strong need to raise prices now, because they pretty much have to raise the money to finance paying the taxes, because the taxes are paid first. Income taxes are paid after you make the money. But tariffs are an asset tax. And so you pay them basically to go into business.
“So we have to raise the prices sooner than later because we need to accumulate that money so we can spend it on tariffs. That completely screws up the cash flow of your business.
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“This plan is a mass self-impoverishment plan. If I have to raise my prices 50 percent, 70 percent, or whatever ridiculous number it is, what I tell people is, ‘You’re going to be paying that much more to buy exactly the same thing. And this is going to happen across a wide swath of things that you want to buy: shoes, sweaters, sunglasses, power tools, you name it.’
“The one thing I can promise you will not go up is your salary. So you have the same amount of money, just everything will cost 50 percent more. What does that mean? That means that your standard of living just dropped because you can’t afford to buy what you could buy the day before. It’s an impoverishing policy and it’s so obvious."....