(04-07-2025, 10:01 PM)Jag149 Wrote: Circling this date for obvious reasons ...

That aside take a look at post #81.  Actually 20% is on the low end. Most are 22-25% depending on the country.  If they will not lower best thing to do is roll up a cost of what the VAT covers and charge that. So zero to zero plus a US VAT is fair.

The funny thing is  I remember Lee Iacocca screaming about this when they formed the EU.  Also, many Dems have discussed it as unfair including  Schumer, Obama, Clinton, Pelosi. None actually did anything about it though.

Again, you're mostly right. 
Clinton for his part saw that other countries exempting exports from their VAT would be a problem, as we lowered our tariffs. 
He tried to convince Congress to implement a VAT early in his first term, but it went nowhere, and he proceeded to lower tariffs anyway.
But as I said before, if we really want to relitigate these issues from the '90s, other countries are going to want to discuss our farm subsidies, loan guarantees, public-private partnerships, targeted tax incentives and many other games we play to make our exports more competitive. I don't know what cards they will want to play, but they do have cards.
Overall, the simple fact is we have a higher standard of living and an even higher cost of living, and both of those things make our exports less competitive. Trying to tariff our way out of that problem is going to be pushing against string. We have to find ways to bring our cost of living down, while maintaining our standard of living. Mostly, this means building enough homes to transition from a housing shortage to a housing surplus, because the growth of housing prices accounts for most of the growth in cost of living, since the '90s.
Our main continuing advantage is that our country is the easiest place to introduce innovations in most sectors. However just like all other countries we have rent seekers in all corners who would love nothing more than to lock up their market and take away any incentives or opportunities for newcomers to innovate.  We have to keep a lid on that tendency.  FTC and DoL rules on overtime and anti-merger and other topics need to be aggressively updated and aggressively enforced.  That's where I think we've been falling short ever since the Reagan administration. Biden tried to make some moves in that direction, but only half-heartedly and only late in his term.  I have some hope that Trump may do some good things in this area during his second term, with the FTC type rules, but he's already let Biden's efforts to increase the number of employees who are eligible for overtime pay die on the vine.

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