Comment by evanpw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by evanpw | Hacker News Reader

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> Meanwhile the wealth gap is at historic highs. Increasing demand when supply is already low should bring up wages.

Tariffs are an extremely inefficient form of redistribution. If you want to fix the wealth gap, just make the pie as large as possible and redistribute directly.

> Tariffs will not generally improve the welfare of Americans, removing the tariffs after our global competitors have ceased their own unfair trade practices, improved worker conditions, stop polluting so much, etc. may improve the welfare of everyone.

I'm not sure what to make of this. It sounds like the plan is to make ourselves worse off in the hope that it also damages China? Most of the difference in labor practices comes from the fact that the US is much richer than China. It's unlikely that we can convince China to stop being poor by taxing ourselves.

>Tariffs are an extremely inefficient form of redistribution. If you want to fix the wealth gap, just make the pie as large as possible and redistribute directly.

It's hard to make the pie as large as possible when your second largest trade partner isn't playing fair.

>I'm not sure what to make of this. It sounds like the plan is to make ourselves worse off in the hope that it also damages China? Most of the difference in labor practices comes from the fact that the US is much richer than China. It's unlikely that we can convince China to stop being poor by taxing ourselves.

China has weird rules that restrict foreign companies from doing business there, which is a defacto tariff on all US corporations who want to sell to China. There's a lot of other industry-specific ways in which China is not playing fair. Of course American corporations want to manufacture in China to avoid paying for an American standard of living. And I get that poor countries are going to have lower wages. But these people are working in factories where suicide nets are necessary. We can pressure them to do better. Then of course there's environmental concerns which we're increasingly aware are an international problem, not an localized one.

We can't enact law in China, but we can pressure them to make changes which are more fair to American competitors and healthier for the entire planet.

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