Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs?

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   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #121  
I think the tariffs the last time around were a significant factor in the huge inflation we saw over the past several years. If you increase cost of good by 20% on the vast majority of products sold in the US, that will eventually get marked up with manufacturer's margin plus distribution and dealer margin, resulting in a 30-50% increase once it gets to retail. Even more for high margin products. As the OP said, it's economics. Now it will happen again. And bringing jobs back is never going to happen because that would increase prices even more. They all got moved off shore in the first place to satisfy consumer demand for low prices, and investor demand for ever improving corporate earnings. We all got what we wanted, except for those who lost jobs and didn't take up other, likely more lucrative employment. But hey, this is what the country said we wanted, both long term re low prices and corporate earnings, and now with respect to tariffs. Be careful what you ask for, 'cause we are going to get it....

I’ll give it a try.
After recent events, it’s like some dude said….

“What the hell do you have to lose?”
 
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   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #122  
But does it accomplish the goal? Wait, remind me what the goal is anyway?

I thought it was to partially substitute tarriffs for income taxes, but also to use it as a cudgel to punish other countries for taking a crap on us, and to encourage bringing production back onto US soil.
 
   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs?
  • Thread Starter
#123  
Hmmm.. but i cant help but wonder if what ever was said fit your narrative , would you quietly let it slide? Like what if some one said Israel is causing genocide in palestine. Would that be "ok" because 90% of mainstream media says so. Or if some one claims a man can become a women or vice versa.would these be held to the same standard?
Caleb,

I'd expect him to shut those discussions down because they have nothing to do with tractors, whereas the possible upcoming tariffs do.

He's got a tough job on this particular thread (sorry) because it would be VERY easy for this to degenerate into political flamethrowing and then he WOULD shut it down.

That would be a shame, because there has been a lot of serious thought and good information in most of the comments.

With best regards,
Mike/Florida
 
   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #124  
OK, so lets see where we can cut government spending. A big chunk of government spending is "entitlements" such as social security and Medicare. Cut social security and see how quickly that government is gone . . . cut Medicare, ditto.

Then we have defense. Do we want a strong defense? Heck yeah we do, nobody will argue that. Problem is all this stuff is expensive, really, really expensive.

Then we have debt service. People buy US debt obligations (treasuries, savings bonds, etc.) because they KNOW they are going to get paid timely. If Uncle stops paying, nobody will buy these any more (yeah, he's a deadbeat, doesn't pay his bills) and that is the END of funding the government.

The above makes up something like three quarters of the entire federal budget. We still need small details like highways, the FAA, and a blizzard of other alphabet agencies, thousands of government employees, government buildings which need to be heated, cooled, maintained ...
You're kind of right, but I recently looked at the numbers and was surprised to see how they've changed. The most recent analysis from the CBO I could find was here: The Federal Budget in Fiscal Year 2023: An Infographic | Congressional Budget Office

It's from 2023 but not much has changed since then.

The annual budget was $6.1 trillion. The biggest category was entitlements, which was $3.8 trillion or 62%. Defense was $805 billion, or 13%, interest on the debt was $659 billion or 11%. Those three things together are 86% of the budget -- quite a bit more than three quarters. The remaining 14% -- $917 billion -- is what they call "discretionary non-defense spending" and it's all the other things that people think of when they think of the government, from law enforcement and courts to highways and national parks.

I first started looking at this in the early 1980's, back then the mix was roughly 30% entitlements, 30% defense and 30% interest, with 10% going to everything else. I had stopped following it for a while and was kind of shocked to see how entitlements have grown, basically doubling their share of the budget. It's also surprising to see how much defense and debt interest have shrunk, 40 years ago the accepted wisdom was that they'd never go down.
 
   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #125  
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   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #126  
Generally speaking, inflation is caused by too many dollars chasing too few things. Example is homes. We're short something like four million single family homes right now, so homes get sold to the highest bidder. If we had a surplus of homes (rust belt Detroit, for instance) homes can be bought for a dollar. Some places in Italy offer homes for a Euro, everyone has left and the towns are dying.

Another example is the price of used cars recently. Not enough new cars (chip shortages, etc.) so money flowed towards used cars, and the prices rose because of the increased demand. This has abated somewhat, but used car prices are still historically high.

The government can be a cause of "too many dollars" by running the printing presses. (You see how well that worked out in Germany in the 1920s.)

OK, so lets see where we can cut government spending. A big chunk of government spending is "entitlements" such as social security and Medicare. Cut social security and see how quickly that government is gone . . . cut Medicare, ditto.

Then we have defense. Do we want a strong defense? Heck yeah we do, nobody will argue that. Problem is all this stuff is expensive, really, really expensive.

Then we have debt service. People buy US debt obligations (treasuries, savings bonds, etc.) because they KNOW they are going to get paid timely. If Uncle stops paying, nobody will buy these any more (yeah, he's a deadbeat, doesn't pay his bills) and that is the END of funding the government.

The above makes up something like three quarters of the entire federal budget. We still need small details like highways, the FAA, and a blizzard of other alphabet agencies, thousands of government employees, government buildings which need to be heated, cooled, maintained and and and and, so guess what, Uncle Sam is living beyond his means, and like many of the rest of us (see the definition of "peons" a page or so back), he's putting it on credit cards.

OK, how can we fix this? Cut spending significantly - where? Raise taxes - cue screaming. Tell China and Russia we'd like to take a year off on military spending - they'd just LOVE that.

What we need to do is grow our economy. We need more businesses to hire more people and increase our tax BASE, not our tax RATE. We need to operate our existing economy more efficiently, and we need to grow it significantly.

Right now, the National Association of Homebuilders says the average price of a home in America is $400,000, and one quarter of that, $100,000 is paperwork, red tape, regulatory compliance and so on. If we could cut that $100K in half, that house suddenly became more affordable.

Here's another example. I needed a topo survey on a project I'm working on. NASA and NOAA have topo surveys of the entire country, free to download (we paid for them in our taxes). Local county has them too, also free downloaded from NASA/NOAA (we paid for them in our taxes, too.)

Local government won't take them without an engineer's seal (P.E.), NASA, NOAA and the county aren't good enough. Engineer downloads them (free), takes his seal, goes crunch, that'll be $1,000 please. City looks at the seal - not at the survey, just at the seal - checks a box, and nobody will EVER see that piece of paper again even when the sun swallows the earth in four billion years or so.

Multiply that by the 4,000,000 new homes we need to build - I ought to become a P.E. and hire people just to crunch topo surveys at a grand a pop.

This isn't (entirely) the fault of the P.E., it is just a dumb, useless no-added-value requirement which is there because "we've always done it that way".

Want to balance the budget? (Or even show a SURPLUS? As the kids say, OMG!) Grow the economy, increase the tax base but not the tax rate, and get rid of a PILE of useless, outmoded rules and regulations that do nobody any good but waste everyone's time and money.

And do have a happy Thanksgiving - be thankful we are not getting all the government we are paying for ;-)

Best Regards,
Mike/Florida

If I’m not mistaken, I just heard Americans spent 500 billion on legal fees to battle the IRS.

Maybe simplify the tax code and lay off about 75% of the IRS?

Then close all the unnecessary 3 letter agencies we can live without.

There, I just saved us about a trillion a year, now add your cuts in red tape. ;)
 
   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #127  
My wife enjoys honey in her coffee and we cook with it some. When we get low I run over to a local aviary and pick up 6 5# jugs at a time. I don't see were it has much effect on allergies.
 
   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #129  
We have way…too many countries that are considered “allies” , for that to work. Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan, Poland, Slovakia…. Just scratching the surface..
What are they paying now in tariffs?
 
   / Tractors and (upcoming) tariffs? #130  
The idea of tariff's is to even the playing field for goods right? With the intent that good ole capitalism will get involved and someone will say... Hey I can make that in the US cheaper, make a profit AND help the US economy.

The reason we often buy goods made in other countries is because our country quit producing them. We as a country couldn't compete with slave/cheap labor and inferior goods. Truthfully not all imported goods are made inferior but you can hardly go a day/week without it coming up about that cheap crap from XYZ country. They make and sell it because people keep buying it.

I prefer to buy things that I believe will last hopefully generations. When I think of good quality I think of say Kitchen Aid assembled in Ohio I think, but the older ones were passed down by generation. Tractors, used to be John Deere was made completely in the US, like so many other generational companies.

Maybe once again these examples of great products will come back to be manufactured in the US and Yep... Make...
Also lighter pollution regulations.
 
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