Looking to Business Bozos to Cure the Economy They Themselves Crippled
Tariffs should be levied to equalize prices; imports would have to compete on quality only. As it is under the fair market price delusion, their prices reflect cheap slavish labor, low defense costs, and dumping.
As for Buffett's proposal, it depends on our ability to produce a surplus of attractive products to supply foreign buyers. Our present MBA clique is incapable of even supplying the domestic market. Replacing incompetent management would be necessary before that happens. He himself is just a birth-privileged parasite living off other people's work, so I don't take him any more seriously than he and his class would take any of my suggestions.
The Sage of Main Street, you apparently do not appreciate the consequences of value assessments within the Import certificates’ concept. The two purposes of the Import Certificate proposal is to (1) significantly reduce or eliminate our chronic annual trade deficits’ detrimental effects upon our GDP and numbers of jobs and their reflections upon our median wage. (2) It’s an indirect but effective subsidy of USA exported goods. It’s purpose is not to determine or cause “equitable pricing” of imported goods sold within the USA.
Assessments of goods within the Import Certificate proposal are based upon market values within the borders of the USA, expressed in U.S. dollars. In most cases, (if there’s objections to a particular federal government’s valuation), comparisons can be readily made with market prices of more or less similar goods that have been or are sold in the USA. The valuations are approximations but they are approximations much more related to actual rather than theoretical prices. The the assessment of values are unconcerned with differences between actual USA production costs and the cost of foreign goods entering the USA.
[Exporters of goods from the USA are entitled, (not required) to request that their goods be assessed and they agree to pay the federal assessment fees. Import Certificates are only issued as adjustments for overpaid fees or to exporters of goods that have been assessed and have paid their fees and their goods have departed from the USA. The “face value” printed upon those certificates is the assessed value of the exported shipment; it’s NOT the assessment fee.
The federal fees are (by law) set to defray all direct net federal costs due to this trade policy. The fee rate’s a uniform annually published percentage rate of exported shipments’ assessed values. That fee rate is annually reconsidered and (if necessary updated).
The fees ARE NOT a net source of federal tax revenue and thus a very small percentage of goods valuations. The accuracy of these value approximations are not at all critical but if the assessments between shipments are unreasonably incorrect in proportion to each other, some mischief certainly can occur. That’s why efforts should be made to keep approximations more or less real.
Regardless of how low transferable Import Certificate’s price should ever fall within the competitive global market, USA Imported goods will never be able to exceed the assessed values of USA’s exported.
To the extent that USA’s exports are ever reduced, prices of imports sold to USA purchasers and subsidies of exports sold to foreign purchasers will increase.
To the extent that USA’s exports are ever increase, prices of imports sold to USA purchasers and subsidies of exports sold to foreign purchasers will be reduced.
While this policy significantly reduces (if not entirely eliminating) USA's annual trade deficits of goods; the competitive global market for transferable Import Certificates regulates these prices of USA's globally traded goods with no additional government intervention.
The performance of USA’s GDP, numbers of jobs and our median wage within our adoption of an the Import Certificate policy would be never be inferior and would often be superior to their performance if we continue to seek a pure free trade policy. Certainly under ALL USA trade policies USA’s economy benefits from increasing exports of our goods but success of the Import Certificate policy is not dependent upon such increases.
Respectfully, Supposn