It is baffling to me, as it is no different than thinking that "sugar taxes" are taxes that soda companies pay. There is even a straight forward analysis that shows it does impact the soda companies rather heavily. But it is objectively paid by the consumers. And nobody is really confused by that.
Right, and sugar taxes are an example of a tax where there's a clear objective. To avoid the tax, don't put sugar in things if you can help it. Result: Products which had sugar because it was cheaper don't any more because of the tax, it's not cheaper now.
These tariffs have a huge red flag because there's no objective. Onshoring? No, wait, we got a new deal the tariffs are removed. New trade deals? No, wait, somebody wrote a mean Tweet about Donald so the tariffs are back and the deal is off.
Tariffs to produce market effects (like onshoring) only work if those tariffs are observed to be durable (in four years all these tariffs will evaporate) and are strengthened by being paired with other encouragement (i.e. industry development subsidies).
These tariffs are arbitrary and capricious and no business would rationally respond to them with any kind of long term investment. People just want to weather the storm of the mad king and international partners are developing alternative relationships to seek more stability.
You still have to be way more strategic so the inputs of your new factories don’t get tariffed as well, otherwise your higher labor costs will kill any desire to actually do onshoring.
And if tariffs don't work, he'll just defund whatever aid you're receiving or project you're building or life saving research you're doing or critical job you're performing.
And if the cost if lives or dollars or reputation is enormous, he'll still sleep like a baby.
It's cool though, you can probably get a few billion in funding if you "lobby" a few million to the right people. The tariffs exist, imo, primarily as a threat to induce bribes for loopholes (e.g. the smartphone loophole).
There's a case in process that'll likely resolve in the next two months. Quite a few companies have filed suite banking on getting their fees reimbursed.
In the current political climate nothing is certain - but this will likely come to a resolution in the near term.
And, if Treasury must refund to the companies that "paid" the tariffs, the companies will keep the refunds despite consumers' having actually carried the burden by paying higher prices and suffering attendant inflation. A win–win for the Epstein class!
Pretty much every tax is ultimately paid by the consumer, because all the suppliers have to make a profit or they won't stay in business. The point of an import tariff isn't to make anything cheaper, it's to level the market in the presence of a foreign supplier who has much lower costs (e.g. sweatshop labor, state-supported industry, etc.) that are not available to domestic suppliers.
The problem is that the tariffs are so broad in ways that don’t help US industry; and there are few supply chains wholly within the US so you end up hurting US manufacturing as well.
It doesn’t really make sense, for example, that we slapped tariffs on Madagascar, when the primary reason we run a trade deficit with them is that they grow vanilla which cannot be grown in the US.
If the supplier is forced to leave the business, that is a form of paying. They are losing a source of income and will have to pick a different activity that they are not efficient at. In the case of tariffs on international trade, the supplier loses a chunk of market - in the case of the US, one that was wealthy - and that always means a loss for the business.
The burden of ALL taxes falls on both sides of the transaction. The proportion of the burden varies with market conditions, the most important being elasticity.
That's why studies like the OP are necessary, to determine how much the proportions are. Honestly I am not surprised with the result, tariffs are objectively bad. Curbing trade is bad by default.
I would love to see joint tarrifs, together with US allies, to fight against things like sweatshop labor, state-supported industry, etc. That would really send a signal that those things are unacceptable, and lead to change.
That's not what we have here, and that's not what the Trump tarrifs are perceived as internationally.
The trouble with sugar taxes is it does drive soda-company behaviour. A. G. Barr killed the real Irn Bru in 2018 to avoid the Scottish sugar tax.
It could've passed on the tax to the consumer, but it didn't. It has ceased making its iconic beverage and now only sells a variant that tastes crap. No amount of money can bring the good stuff back. The sugar tax killed it. The world is now a slightly worse place, thanks to government interference.
(I'm sure there's a way to extrapolate this anecdote back to tariffs)
The sibling point that talks about the goal of the tax hits the idea you are talking about, I think. And this is what I meant saying you can show they can impact the soda companies. But regardless of any downstream effects of the tax existing, the tax is paid by the consumer.
> It has ceased making its iconic beverage and now only sells a variant that tastes crap.
It looks like they reintroduced the original recipe in 2021 (and previously as a limited release in 2019), under the name Irn Bru 1901. Or does that version still differ from the version of Irn Bru the low-sugar Irn Bru replaced?
The 1901 recipe has 11g sugar per 100ml. Also it lacks caffeine.
The 2017 recipe had 35g sugar per 100ml.
The 2018 recipe has 4.5g sugar per 100ml.
The sugar tax is £0.18 per litre for 5-8g sugar per litre, and £0.24 per litre for >8g sugar per litre.
Irn-Bru has many price points depending on form factor and location, but a 2 litre bottle today typically costs £2.10. The sugar-free variant costs the same. If the full sugar tax applied, it'd cost £2.68 (22.8% higher price).
Coca-Cola is so expensive with the tax, they don't even sell it in 2 litre bottles anymore, just 1.75 litre bottles. Coca-Cola "Original Taste" is £2.55 for 1.75l (£1.46/l) while Coca-Cola Zero is £2.15 for 2l (£1.08/l), a difference of £0.38 per litre, of which £0.24 is sugar tax.
Yes, but if there's an axe murderer in my house, I don't care how much he intends to murder me. I don't want him to murder me.
The government has a variety of aims and objectives. Certainly, shooting for a more healthy population is good. Convincing those that drink a lot to drink less would be one way. Permanently making the drinks awful for the entire population, no matter how many or few they drink, and ensuring what was once good never ever comes back... is another way.
But the government didn't make the drink awful. They only set the tax. Your position is that you'd have paid more anyway but now tis not an option. That seems like a business decision. Maybe the old version has so much sugar it was untenable with the tax... how sugary was it?
The government set out to reduce consumption of high-sugar drinks. They had choices on how to do that e.g. they could've targetted demand. They chose to target supply with a "sin tax".
Private companies then, for no reason whatsoever, of their own free will, decided to eliminate high-sugar drink options. They would not have done so had the government not imposed the tax. If you then blame the government for their action, they'll want to say "oh I only set the tax", despite knowing they set the tax intentionally to engineer this outcome.
> The reduction in Irn-Bru’s sugar content from 8.5 teaspoons to four, taking a can from just under 140 calories to about 65 calories
The old (2018) Irn-Bru had about 35g of table sugar per 330ml, it now has 14.85g. Coca-Cola has 35g, Pepsi has 15g. Both those multinational companies still sell their full-sugar drinks, at a much higher price with the sugar tax applied, though they also sell sugar-free alternatives (Max, Zero), as does Irn-Bru (Xtra). Coke and Pepsi have a much larger sales volume and can afford to make less sales on their full-sugar product, and keep them in their product line-up. I don't think Irn-Bru can.
The UK government ruined Irn-Bru. I still drink as much as I normally do, which is about 12 litres a year; I am well under the intended beneficiary of this war on sugar, the sort of people who drink >100 litres a year, but when I do have it, it now tastes of sadness and lamentations for better times in the past, and I just feel anger for those who wrecked it for everybody.
> I still drink as much as I normally do, which is about 12 litres a year; I am well under the intended beneficiary of this war on sugar, the sort of people who drink >100 litres a year…
It sounds like Irn-Bru was only viable _because_ of the sort of people who drink >100 litres a year. You were benefitting from that viability thanks to the very people you admit were being targeted by the tax. If they had stopped their high consumption for some other reason, availability of the original Irn-Bru would have suffered the same result due to the same drop in demand. The tax isn’t directly to blame here. The direct cause is the original motivation itself, regardless of how it was implemented. Considering only this specific example you cannot reject the tax without also rejecting the motivation.
If rent or business taxes go up, the business may either eat the cost or eventually raise the main price, they don’t tack a “rent offset fee” on the final bill. But with tariffs, up to a point the business dgaf because they just pass it through as a separate “junk fee” line item.
> If rent or business taxes go up, the business may either eat the cost or eventually raise the main price, they don’t tack a “rent offset fee” on the final bill. But with tariffs, up to a point the business dgaf because they just pass it through as a separate “junk fee” line item.
It's always kind of enlightening to see exactly what things businesses choose to explicitly pass on to the customer, and what things they just eat as a cost of doing business. It's often very political and performative.
Some restaurants in California have taken to adding a "Living Wage Fee" to restaurant bills as a way to protest having to pay their employees proper wages. They could have just eaten the cost and raised their food prices slightly, but instead they chose the passive-aggressive route, complaining about it via the bill, which the customer sees. Presumably to try to convince the customer that "Living Wage" politics are bad and that they visibly raise the price the customer pays.
But, when the county raises their property taxes, the same restaurants just eat the cost. They don't add an "Unfair Property Taxes" line item to their diners' bills.
Yet that's not what the administration says about the subject. They're either confused or they're lying (and the people who support them and regurgitate their talking points are confused).
I don't think I can beat the drum of "they are liars" heavily enough. It remains frustrating to see so much accidental carrying of water for them as people look for a hint of legitimacy.
I don't think they're confused or lying. I think they're ideologically driven buffoons, the preferred recruits of all fascist administrations. They don't care about American manufacturing, and they don't understand economics. They want to advance their agenda.
Like, even the propaganda by fascists claiming fascism makes for good policies is bad. Germany under the Reich, completely setting aside the human atrocities, was a fucking SHIT SHOW of a nation state.
> It is baffling to me, as it is no different than thinking that "sugar taxes" are taxes that soda companies pay. There is even a straight forward analysis that shows it does impact the soda companies rather heavily. But it is objectively paid by the consumers. And nobody is really confused by that.
Businesses like to say that, to get consumers to back them politically, but it's not at all true:
When input costs increase, a seller must decide whether to take the extra expense out of their profit or to increase the price (or some mix of the two).
Taking the extra cost out of their profit obviously decreases profit.
Raising the price decreases sales (consumers won't buy as much at a higher price), which decreases profit. The change is not linear (look up demand curves). The seller, if they are smart, already found the price that maximizes revenue. Therefore changing the price will reduce revenue.
In reality, it's not such a science and there are other factors. Another fundamental factor is price elasticity of demand, which is how much a change in price affects demand. For sugary drinks, quite a bit - people can forgo them. For lifesaving healthcare, elasticity is less, for obvious reasons.
Alas, I think it is far more likely that there is no secret to any of this. Different strokes will arrive at the same place for a lot of people. All the more true for things that are even remotely creative in nature.
Not to say that routine and form can't get results. It is hilarious how much of the current fascination with LLM writing can be summarized by "actually filling out a routine template will satisfy a ton of requirements." People that are surprised with how well some output works, but would have scoffed at filling out a lot of boilerplate in previous technologies.
So, yes, try it. But do not become attached to it. If it works, rejoice in that. But do not count on it always working. If it stops for a time, feel free to leave it for a time.
I'm assuming this is talking about the revised numbers for 2025? And if that revised so heavily downward, hard to imagine the latest numbers are somehow more stable?
The same way that anyone would: they conduct a statistical sample and report unemployment numbers based on that. Source: 15 years ago I was one of the people they contacted. As I recall, a letter came to our apartment, asking for the adult (18+) who had their birthday closest to that date to contact them and provide a phone number and some basic demographic data. That was me, not my roommate, so for the next 12 months I got a call once a month asking me for my employment details about a specific week that month- had I been looking for a job, was I still employed, etc.
Kudos on you for acknowledging that your behavior changed! It is depressing how many people online are convinced that the emergency braking systems are too aggressive. The best is the cohort that insist these systems will be what causes accidents.
Ish. Polling is very YIMBY. So long as it is exactly what I want in my back yard. With a lot more leeway granted to what should be allowed in someone else's back yard.
Has been said many times, but Google+ was hoping to be as good as Google Reader and Google Buzz already were for people. Was a surprisingly good social layer on top of article aggregation that largely worked by leveraging GMail.
What they were not, of course, was a replacement for the "town hall" dream of social capture that places like Facebook are hoping for.
And, I'm a bit hazy, but didn't Youtube try and force comments to be tied to your google identity?
I wrote that PR and can guarantee you that it was not vibe coded.
the reason why I thought this PR was interesting is that, it only needed ~ 4 lines of real change, everything else was cascades due to that change. and the performance did improve with that "pointless formatting and whitespace changes"
The general fault I see here, is that we don't typically make our work tracking tools so that they look at the code for us. Instead, our ticketing systems only have what we have put in them, directly.
This is obviously obnoxious when it comes to stuff like warnings and deprecations. But is also annoying when doing migrations of any kind. Or when working to raise test coverage. Anything that can be determined by checking the source code.
This hints at a major misunderstanding that, frankly, drives me nuts. If people are getting paid in stock, they pay taxes on the value of the stock they are paid with.
Can they take a loan on existing stock? Yes. You can leverage assets and this, itself, leads to some pretty unfair things. No need to inflate it to the idea that "getting paid in stock means you don't pay taxes."
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