Wednesday, October 17, 2018

Trump Goes Postal, Abandons 144-Year-Old Unfair Shipping Treaty With China

It's stuff like this that keeps Trump popular.  It's what we hired him to do.

Trump plans to withdraw from a 144-year-old postal treaty that has allowed Chinese companies to ship small packages to the United States at a steeply discounted rate, undercutting American competitors and flooding the market with cheap consumer goods.

Peter Navarro, Mr. Trump’s hard-line trade adviser, wrote in a Financial Times op-ed last month.
These disparities have introduced a massive distortion in the eCommerce market.
It is often possible for a Chinese company to sell ‘knockoff’ products through online vendors, such as Amazon or Alibaba, to U.S. consumers for less than it costs for American mailers to ship authentic goods. Moreover, while USPS loses an estimated $1 on every small package that arrives from China, outbound mail of American exporters is charged at well above cost.”
As The New York Times details, a 2015 report from the Inspector General of the United States Postal Service found that the treaty, which was created to ease the flow of mail and small parcels between 192 countries, had not been overhauled to reflect the new realities of eCommerce and China’s aggressive undercutting of international competitors.
The price of shipping a 4.4 pound package, the largest parcel covered by the treaty, from China to the United States is about $5, according to United States estimates, according to post office estimates culled by Mr. Navarro’s staff.
American companies can pay two to four times that amount to ship a similar package from Los Angeles to New York, and much more for packages sent to China.
The “system creates winners and losers,” the report’s author’s concluded, especially China’s national postal service and "Chinese online retailers in the lightweight, low-value package segment at the expense of the U.S. PostalService and American retailers.”
It is not clear how much the disparity costs American taxpayers and retailers, in part because the Postal Service does not release detailed country-by-country shipping breakdowns. A 2014 study, cited in a Postal Service analysis of the issue, estimated that discounted shipping cost industrialized nations as much as $2.1 billion a year in aggregate.
The losses to retailers and manufacturers could be much more, as online commerce expands further.
Typically, Obama ignored this problem, choosing to favor foreign nations, even hostile ones, over our own workers and companies.  

10 comments:

  1. Barack had no love for the United States or its people.

    President Trump has a different take on things. It makes a lot of people in the Beltway who were raping the nation uncomfortable. It makes many foreign nations and the potentates who lead them uncomfortable. If it wasn't for President Trump and his efforts to drain the swamp we'd have been sunk.

    Hillary and the flying monkeys who attend her would have been so much worse.

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  2. I'm glad to see this, though I've been a "beneficiary" of some cheap goods from China. The scare quotes are because often the Chinese stuff disintegrated almost as quickly as I got it, or had defects which made it useless.

    Long ago I was short of money & bought a Chinese hand drill at a thieve's market instead of the Stanley which cost twice as much. On the first use of that drill the chuck broke.

    I went back to the vendor, who laughed & told me that of course there were no replacement chucks for the Chinese drills- but that he still had the Stanley, and you could get replacement chucks for them!

    My son's still using that Stanley drill, and the original chuck still works great. Cheap tools aren't even worth what they cost!

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    1. Yep. The rule of thumb is "Don't buy cheap tools, tires, shoes or firearms."

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  3. I bet that is going to piss of the China men even more, I am sure they are as mystified by President Trump as we are enthralled with him! Maybe a right path for mom and pop stores to be again?

    Eskyman, cheap and/or free is a very high cost...

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  4. So, does this mean Harbor Freight and WalMart are headed down the crapper ?

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  5. My suspicion is that the Chicoms are NOT AT ALL mystified by Trump. One thing Chinese DO understand is looking out for your own people. They've just been laughing their asses off over our weak, globalist, and in many cases America-hating, Ruler/Parasite class and its agenda of globohomoislamonegrolatry. The only thing the Chicoms might be wondering is why it took so long for someone such as Trump to emerge.

    LL almost certainly* knows more about China than I do, but you'll never go wrong to keep this as a bedrock principle: To a Chinese (and that means Han**), EVERYONE ELSE is some sort of barbarian, savage, idiot, or all three. To the Chinese mind, Whites are reasonably-clever, dangerous barbarians; South Asians [Indians and Pakistanis] are all two-faced ass kissers who suck up and shit down and thus totally untrustworthy; blacks [of any sort, American or African] are houzi and thus impulsive, unreliable and untrainable [note the word "educate" was not used -- that was no accident]; South-east Asians [for all that the Chicoms are importing them as brides] are considered slow and lazy. As to the other East Asians? Japanese are "the dwarf rapists" and the hate of the Irish for Cromwell is but a pale flame compared to the burning hatred the Chinese*** have for the Japs. And the Koreans are kao-li bon-ze ("people who deserve to be beaten with sticks"). Apart from another high IQ group, there is hardly anyone more chauvinistic than the Chinese. THAT'S the Chinese mindset. Trust me on this.

    * the percentage chance that I know more about China than LL is about equivalent to Liz Warren's percentage of Cherokee-ness;
    ** Manchus, Tibetans, Miao, Hui, Uighurs, other non-Han groups living within the geographic borders of China? NOT real Chinese, to the average Han Chinese. Only Han, thanks very much. (And don't get me started on the Teochow FFS. Derbyshire had some choice words about them....);
    *** Chinese hate the Japanese, apart from some soi disant "Taiwanese" (really descendants of mainland Fukienese invaders, ironically enough) who learned to like kissing Jap ass after having been colonized by them on Formosa.

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    1. The HN Chinese today look down upon mixed-hn Chinese as half-breeds. Note that this is HB Chinese/non-Han Chinese mixes. They really don't like mongrels and mixed breeds from non-non-Han Chinese? Pond Scum have higher value.

      And they (Mandarin ChiComs) still think that ChiCom is the 'Middle Kingdom' and everyone else on earth is just a lower life form.

      But they aren't racist or anything. It's their 'Culture.'

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  6. Mike, how long did you live in China or study it?

    CW this is an interesting post as there are all sorts of Chinese sellers on ebay in addition to the larger companies using Alibaba

    Dave

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    1. Dave,
      I've never formally studied China (as in getting a degree) if that's what you're wondering. However, I happen to be Chinese (genetically), and speak Mandarin, FWIW. (Apparently this might make what I wrote above part of an "autoethnography" these days according to some of the soft-headed social sciences, but for the record, I don't particularly agree with the above, so it's not very "auto".)

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