Worse still, is Santa’s practice of dumping gifts on the American economy. “Dumping,” according to US law, is when a foreign producer sells goods in America below the cost of production. Previous administrations have solved this in the past through the use of antidumping duties, sometimes exceeding 200 percent of the product’s value.
But Santa does not merely sell below cost. He gives his goods away for free. This is dumping at a price of zero, which is completely indefensible under US law. Even China, often referred to as the worst trade offender in the world, has the decency to charge us something for their harmful production.
Using standard methodology to calculate the appropriate response is simple: take the value of the good, divide it by the price the importer is selling, and multiply it by 100 to arrive at the appropriate percentage penalty to apply. Since Santa charges us nothing, the appropriate response is therefore an infinite tariff rate applied to any and all goods imported from the North Pole.
…..
But if we really stop and think about it, foreign producers have a degree of “Santa” in them. While they do not sell us their wares at zero price, they still charge lower prices than our domestic counterparts can match. This means more access to goods and services that allow us to live healthily and wealthily, however we choose to define those terms. Unlike Santa, foreign producers sell their “gifts” to everyone regardless of age or religious affiliation and they do so year round.
So what we should really be after here is consistency: either condemn Santa as the job-destroying, IP-stealing, border-flouting menace he is — or thank foreign producers for enriching our lives with their gifts of specialization. You cannot have it both ways.
Economists never claimed that tariffs immediately or inevitably cause inflation (“Why Everyone Got Trump’s Tariffs Wrong,” Page One, Dec. 16). We’ve long acknowledged that their effect on prices is complicated.
The first reason for that is the substitution effect: When tariffs raise the relative price of imports, consumers often shift their spending toward other goods. Some import prices may even fall, particularly if demand dries up. The net effect, then, is ambiguous.
The second factor is the income effect. Higher import costs give consumers less bang for their buck. If iPhone prices double because of tariffs, for instance, consumers enjoy less real income. Tighter budgets mean consumers have less to spend on other goods.
Moral of the story: If you’re looking solely at the inflation rate to see the effects of tariffs, you likely won’t find it. In a vacuum, the levies cause a one-time jump in an economy’s price level but not a continuous rise in its growth rate. What happens after that depends on how policymakers respond. In any case, tariffs’ most predictable and immediate effects are sputtering growth and declining consumer welfare.
Ask yourself: Doesn’t that resonate with your experience over the past nine months?
Scott Burns
Southeastern Louisiana University
Baton Rouge, La.Caleb S. Fuller
Grove City College
Grove City, Pa.
The Editorial Board of the Washington Post writes eloquently on this:
It only took the European Union two years to start walking back its plan to ban all new gas and diesel automobiles by 2035. It’s an important reminder that government mandates are destined to disappoint in the fight against climate change.
George Will bids adieu to 2025. A slice:
In the Republicans’ hotly contested Toadyism Sweepstakes, a House member proposed legislation to mandate carving Donald Trump’s visage on Mount Rushmore. Channeling the etiquette of the Golfer-in-Chief, American spectators at the Ryder Cup shouted vulgarities at the European players. Cannot protectionism fend off the NBA’s overbearing foreigners? In the season that ended in June, the five top players, as identified by two sophisticated metrics, had passports from Canada, Serbia, Greece, France and Slovenia.
