Trade wars and deals

The interesting question for me is, what will be Harper's agenda? I suspect he is going to coordinate with the Republicans on ways to defeat the Libs and elect the Cons in 2019.

Who cares? I am broke now, and I will be broke in a trade war. Why should I give a fuck? There is just no incentive to do anything any more. I can bust my ass and get insomnia for peanuts in a high stress job with idiot supervisors 1/3 my age, or I can sit at home and do nothing and get my sleep.

Why would I start up a business? Municipal taxes on a storefront in Montreal are $8000 a month. Every time I would invest in something, I only get 85.01 cents on the dollar of value because of GST/TVQ. Yeah, I might be able to get it back 4 months later, but that is not when I need it.

I think there may be a good cultural IDGAF Canada movement to do. And IDGAF Quebec, especially. Just a general strike on everything. Buy as little as possible. Move to a smaller place. Give up driving and flying. I stopped eating meat a while back. I am feeling great, and my food bill has gone down.

If I buy less, other people will have less work to do, and then they can join IDGAF Canada as well. IDGAF about corporate profits. They can rip someone else off. IDGAF about paying for 200 bureaucrats who will decide where one tree will be planted. Or $9,000 bicycles where $300 would do. If you get municipal taxes on 20 new condos, that is $8,000 a month, which will pay for one new bureaucrat who can decide where 0.5% of a tree should be planted. Or of course you can always hire more police and security guards. I noticed at the Montreal Jazz festival they had 4 people at each hotdog stand, where in Toronto one will do. Still no reason to move to IDGAF Toronto. And 4 security guards on each entrance telling people what to do. If they had no fences, and let people walk where they wanted to without official harassment, they would not have to hire any security guards. IDGAF about police, who use people like me as target practice, as we 'fit the description'.

IDGAF about business. IDGAF about government. IDGAF about work.

Maybe I can shake some people up a bit, and make them face reality. Bust through that fatcat Canadian complacency which always takes the moral high ground, when they are wearing no clothes. Fuck bourgeois civility! It is designed to paralyze us.

Canada must always shoot itself in the foot in the interests of national pride. The only ones who will pay for the Canadian tariffs will be Canadians. 

Sometimes sullen passive resistance is more effective than a high horse which is trying to compete with mini-guns mounted on Apache helicopters.

Canadians are very good at passive aggression. It is what we do to a T.

Not understanding economics at all will make people respond in certain ways. If Canada just said IDGAF about tariffs, the Canadian market would flood with goods, making the prices go down. Then, all of these foreign suppliers would be cursed with Canadian currency, which they would have to spend in Canada. Having lower producer prices in turn, Canadian producers could profitably sell at low prices.

However any idea which might give Canada an advantage over the US is completely unacceptable, right, josh?

progressive17 wrote:

You didn't even bother to read my post, josh. You would rather make a knee-jerk reaction. This is why the left is losing all of the political arguments and all of the elections. They don't listen, and they don't read, and they don't comprehend. 

I stated quite clearly higher income taxes for rich people can go with low corporate taxes. But you would not read that. You would only read what you want to read, and label it what you want to label it. A system which works well in Scandinavia would work well for Canada. 

You can label me Conservative 17. How about I label you Someone Who Cannot Read 17?

It is also obvious that you cannot pull back on taxing corporations and tax rich only because tax is by geographical jurisdiction. Corporation do not only sell in the same jurisdiction in which their shareholders are taxed. The rich people behind many corporations in Canada are not subject to Canadian tax laws. Slashing corporate taxes allows for huge amounts of money to be made in Canada and taxed elsewhere -- if at all. It is a ridiculous and regressive idea that has been proven not to work.

But you are the one arguing about comprehension in one thread and against facts and logic in another and trolling different directions in a few more threads.

Sean in Ottawa wrote:

But you are the one arguing about comprehension in one thread and against facts and logic in another and trolling different directions in a few more threads.

Yeah that. 

P17, he's just letting you know he sees through you. So do others they just don't all post. Some of your posts are reasonable so I have responded to those. Many are mocking and suggest you think you are clever. If "winning" to you is getting people to call you names that is pretty much the definition of a troll. 

Pondering wrote:

P17, he's just letting you know he sees through you. So do others they just don't all post. Some of your posts are reasonable so I have responded to those. Many are mocking and suggest you think you are clever. If "winning" to you is getting people to call you names that is pretty much the definition of a troll. 

If they did not call me names, they would not lose. That is their choice, and not mine. Because of complacency, the left is going to lose everything. So I want to shove some red hot pokers up that, Russian-style. So, they can continue to be complacent. Show the left is just empty words and no action. Show the left is less than useless for anything. 

When the Conservatives win everything, it will not be my fault. But it will be yours. Because you were complacent, and I was not. As I said, it is going to be ugly and disorienting at first, kind of like a vaccination, if you still think those kinds of things are good. If you can't stand my gentle prodding now, you are going to be literally atomized in the election.

It is only for the greater good. You must understand that.

You can do better than that, Pondering! Pathetic.

Sweden's Corporate Tax Rate

https://tradingeconomics.com/sweden/corporate-tax-rate

Their corporate tax rate is 22%. They dropped it down to that level from 28% percent about 5 years ago.

personal income tax is 61%

sales tax is 25%

Don Orchard is a Liberal now.

Governments generally do not tariff necessary foodstuffs, even in a trade war (or a military war). However on the non-necessary things you could have inflation on one hand, or you could have a depressed market for those items on another.

The history of trade wars tends to run in a "beggar-thy-neighbor" competition. This means that demand falls off because of restriction of export markets, and incomes fall as a result. There is less corresponding money in the internal economy, which can cause internal prices to fall. This in turn means that internal wages have to go down, or jobs have to be lost. Another thing that can occur is rationing, as whole markets are destroyed. This of course causes a black market to form, as governments are not good at determining future supply and demand.

It is a wretched cycle. The last time we were in one of those, we needed a World War where 65 million had to die. I hope it is not so bad this time. It is sort of like a slo-mo-Zomby version. The 2008 stock market crash was bailed out when Gordon Brown decided the buck was going to stop at his desk, and all the governments and central bankers fell into line behind him. They had to dump in trillions. Canada got off easy, because only one bank had bought the bad paper, and the others were able to bail it out for "only" $60 billion.

As I recall the trade wars were started after the stock market crash in the 1929 as a 'solution' to the credit contraction, and the Fed's failure to act as they would have today.

In my opinion Canada's best solution, when the rest of the world is in a trade war, is unilateral free trade. This of course will not be accepted in Canada.

Unilateral free trade will tend to keep tariffs against us low, and prices low at home. It will also keep producer prices low to enable our industry to compete as well as it can given bad trading conditions out there. Added to this you could have a number of economic policies you would normally find on the Left which would keep up demand, such as housing construction, highways, transit, etc.

We can take a "What me worry?" stance, and perhaps avoid the worst of the global trade war. Having our own dollar should work out quite well for us at this juncture.

There is absolutely no negative and aggressive stance that Canada can pose against the EU, the US, and China, which would do Canada any good at all. Any one of those three entities could squash Canada like a bug.

Unilateral free trade (plus the government spending) is the perfect passive-aggressive stance we should be taking.

The other issue is taxes. Trump is paying for the increased tariffs by cutting taxes. Canada, China, and the EU are not going to be willing to do that. However, we do not know when that strategy is going to run out. For now, he can say he is winning because he is getting the tariffs and 4% growth at the same time. You can bet that the big money is gaming Trump for every cent he has got.

Even a communist country like china uses capitalist pricing signals and investment policies to manage its import and export markets.

A communist economic system would have difficulty in knowing where to allocate resources to stage any kind of competition in import and export markets. 

Unilateral free trade would need some kind of capitalist pricing system in order to function the most efficiently.

Our foreign competitors would care not what our internal economic system was. It would make no practical sense to make ideological decisions for their benefit.

Competition is the only name of the game in import and export markets. By definition, only capitalism is based on competition. How we spend the profits is a matter of public policy.

Social democracies can use a mixed economy. No need to go to extremes. It is obvious someone working for 15$ an hour can't compete with someone making 5$ an hour. 

We don't need 10$ t-shirts in Canada. That does not help the poor. What helps the poor is making t-shirts in Canada or some other form of semi-skilled work even if that means we pay more for some products. 

If they have a captive market, as in supply management, they invest. But I'm not anti-trade. I just think they should include more to protect workers and consumers and to limit the power of multi-national corporations. 

SeekingAPoliticalHome wrote:

progressive17 wrote:

If the person on $15 an hour has better machinery and can output more than 3 times the amount as someone on $5 an hour, the unit labour cost is still the same. This requires investment per worker. Investment per worker happens when the suppliers of the investment capital deduce that it is more profitable to hire the worker than collect 4% in a stock portfolio. Somebody has to invest in the worker's wages and equipment. For a while, Canada had an investment advantage over the United States. Now it has lost that.

Interesting your statement hints at a understanding of the orthodox marxist thought as to reason the capitilaist  invests into capex and therefore drive empolyment.  Marx is clear the capitalist will invest only if profit can be made.  Different from Kenysian which customer demand is the dirver of investment.  Marx orthodox thinkers share the idea that capitalist  crisis begins with a drop of profit.  Unless the profit rises than the capitalist goes on strike and stops investing.  General crisis starts soon after, no profit>>>no investment>>>no new job.

This is a very good point. As well as being the Marxist viewpoint, it is also somewhat the pensioner's viewpoint. What am I going to invest in? What is the risk and what is the dividend return? Small oil companies can pay over 10% but they often go out of business. Banks pay less than 4%. If the company goes out of business, I lose my income, which is like an employee there losing their job.

What many models do not include is the inevitable catastrophe which follows exponential growth. Exponential growth always leads to catastrophe. If you put bacteria in a petri dish, they will thrive until they get to the perimeter of the dish. Then they die.

The biggest companies now will probably not be in 50 years, and definitely not in 100 years. The world is always generating net profit, some $8-$9 billion a day. That will grow with the population. So the money cycles around. Companies die, and new ones form. Money seeks the highest return, like water is affected by gravity.

So I don't see the decline in profits. In all the time since Marx came up with that theory, profits have been fine. If you had put $40 into TD bank shares in 1970, you would have $1,000 now. The Royal Bank of Canada has been going since before Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto. There have been countless wars and depressions and catastrophes since then, but the bank dividends have never gone down.

If you are going to end capitalism, you are going to have to do much better than the Communist Manifesto.