ingliz wrote:I don't think you understand how tariffs work.
An import tariff is a regressive tax on the consumer.
You pay it, not Mexico.
I have a degree in business. I understand how tariffs work. An import tariff is an excise tax on goods imported from a particular country paid by the importer. They may pass the tax on to consumers or lose profit margins by lowering prices. It makes goods from the taxed locale less attractive to consumers and thereby effects investment decisions too.
Hong Wu wrote:California's troubles are only beginning because the exodus out of the state is mostly people who are at the age where they want to start having families.
It's already worse than that. Basically, a lot of native born people don't raise their kids in California if they can't afford to send them to private school, or if they don't live in an affluent area as I do. The reason is that the schools have gone absolutely to shit as a result of illegal immigration. In poorer areas, many kids don't speak English well enough to do the school work, which in practice reduces the primary education system to a glorified babysitting service for the children of illegal immigrants rather than a learning environment. Check out graduation rates by race and income to see my point.
Hong Wu wrote:This means that the next generation in California is going to be almost entirely composed of immigrants and single mothers on welfare.
Or high tech transplants. The culture of the California I grew up in is virtually dead. It no longer exists. Native born Californians like me are either the rich white people or they are marginally surviving or homeless and addicted or mentally ill. It's a modern version of medieval caste systems.
Hong Wu wrote:It was jarring. Everyone else was old, or a parent, or a student.
I live in an exurb abutting farm land. Lots of families. Housing is more affordable and MUCH nicer. My house, if it were in San Francisco about 90 minutes away, would be about $3M. It's just as jarring socially, because today you will see white teenagers ringing the cash register at In-n-Out where I live. That was the case in the town I grew up in, Walnut Creek, CA back in the day (1980s). Today, you will see Hispanic migrants holding those jobs where I grew up, and it's only a 20 minute drive. The cashiers are bi-lingual so they can bark orders to the Spanish-speaking order fulfillment crew. Most Americans really do not understand the criticisms of immigration because they watch mainstream television. For me, I'm always tripped out when I go to other parts of the United States. For example, in Massachusetts a white person buses my table at a restaurant. You just don't see that in California. If you take mass transit and transfer to the airport shuttle, it's amazing the racial sorting that takes place--in Dubai, they have different classes for mass transit so that happens by car class. The airport shuttles in the US are almost entirely whites and Asians--that is, educated and upper income.
Having just returned from Dubai recently, I've come to realize that there are some similarities to the US, except that in Dubai the government does not pay people to sit around idle, does not subsidize recreational drugs, and does not tolerate crime at all. Yet, if you see a South Asian, you are almost certainly looking a cashier, cab driver, construction worker or security guard who probably works 7 days a week and had their passports taken on arrival. If you see a white person, you are almost certainly looking at someone "rich" by world standards--not in Dubai, of course. Liberals seem to love this, provided you do not point out the racial dynamics.
It's as if slavery came back into existence and if you acknowledge it, you are called a racist. If you oppose it, you are called a bigot. It's as ingenious as it is insidious. Hence, my disdain for the establishment.
Hong Wu wrote:This is reductive and Mexico would not have changed their policies within a week if it were true. The additional cost of the tariff can be passed onto consumers but it also makes competing products more desirable, also it can encourage the sources of production to move to other locations. It is only guaranteed to be passed onto the consumer if a product (and all of its viable competitors) can only be produced in the tariffed country.
Tariff-free trade is the one thing where the communists agreed with the late British Empire, which was only doing it to try to hang on to the Empire and prevent war (which they failed to do). That's why you see leftists here going the distance to defend policies that largely benefit multi-billionaires and huge business conglomerates and US consumers at the expense of the rest of the world. Usually, these same people rail against capitalism and are pissed off that the US middle and upper classes have a better standard of living than the rest of the world. Yet, they are instrumental in defending that system. It's quite bizarre.
Hong Wu wrote:Mexico didn't change their policies within a week. Trump moved to accept the existing agreements. Mexico and the US had agreed border policies months before the Trump tariff threat.
Countries always promise to do things they won't do unless there is a cost for not doing it. Trump's threat to raise tariffs is adding political risk to investing in Mexico for American outsourcers and others investing in Mexico with the intent of exporting to the US. The reason is that what Trump is doing is popular with people like me, because fucking with the establishment makes me happy and it will for the foreseeable future. It's also good politics for Trump.
GodStud wrote:The cost of living is high, as it usually is in good places to live.
It depends on the what drives costs. In California, food is cheap. Housing is impossibly expensive. Government is impossibly expensive. I'm a slow mover when it comes to my living situation. However, the math is already in my head that I can afford much more pricewise just by moving to Nevada with no income tax. So I'm looking at places in Incline Village and Crystal Bay. So my budget starts looking more like this:
Crystal Bay. It's about 700 sq. ft. smaller than my current house and more expensive as it is in a highly desirable neighborhood, but what I'd save in state income taxes I could just throw towards a bigger mortgage. I currently live in a house with a nearly identical floor plan,
Van Daele, except I have a deck above the California room that adds another 300 sq. ft. of living space and the "elevations" put my living space at 3150 sq. ft. One issue for me is that they've capped mortgages with the tax reform, so I'd need to throw in another $150k, and I do like having a lot of cash readily available. Real estate isn't nearly as liquid.
Godstud wrote:British Columbia, in Canada, is a great place to live, but also has a high coast of living, on the coast. It's abbreviated as BC, which we jokingly refer to as meaning Bring Cash.
That wasn't always the case either. The Vancouver area used to be much more reasonable.
BigSteve wrote:The problem is the proposal says nothing about legal residents who can't afford it having it given to them. It's only going to be provided to those who are here illegally. The State's not all to concerned with making sure hard working Americans are taken care of...
That's wrong on every conceivable level...
This is why Trump won, and why he stands a very good chance of winning again. What I find amazing about it is that people like jimjam get Trump's economics so totally wrong that they do not understand that his policies have directly helped the working and middle classes, particularly outside of blue states. I guess I could move to Florida too, but I know absolutely nobody there. I consider Reno, NV an armpit as well as Las Vegas. So I'm thinking Nevada side of Tahoe. Yet, Trump capped mortgages too so that upper class and upper middle class people won't get tax writeoffs on mortgages over $700k. I'm pretty conservative, so I'd consider a 5/1 ARM with 5% down kind of a dicey proposition. I'm a 20% down and 30-year fixed kind of guy.
BigSteve wrote:San Francisco is one of the wealthiest cities in the country, and is liberal to the extreme...
Yes, but there is also massive voter fraud, which if corrected would reveal to you why Nixon and Reagan came from California.
BigSteve wrote:California hasn't had a Republican Governor since Schwarzenegger left office in 2011.
He wasn't much of a Republican either, and couldn't do much with such a corrupt legislature.
BigSteve wrote:The current Governor is Gavin Newsome, and he's as far left as you can get...
He's pretty crazy, but to his credit he did kill off most of the high speed train project for now, which was wise. He also killed off the twin tunnels Brown wanted to build to send even more water--this time from the Sacramento River, down to Southern California. Basically, low productivity government workers here will retire in high style, and that's what taxes are going for these days, and government workers on disability of course too (for paper cuts and such).
Politics_Observer wrote:It might come as a surprise for many to learn that Vermont is a very gun friendly state.
In practice, gun laws are just away of putting the violent poor and minorities in prison. While their impetus was intended to incarcerate drunken use of guns, prevent blacks from owning guns and to impede mafias and organized crime, they generally serve to put the violent poor and minorities in prison.
"We have put together the most extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization in the history of American politics."
-- Joe Biden
- By wat0n