1. Bring back manufacturing jobs 2. Remove trade barriers 3. Make US rich by collecting huge amount of tariffs
If 1 is true then there is no benefit for countries to remove trade barriers or pay tariffs because now there is no leverage (manufacturing jobs to protect).
If 2 is true then there is no leverage for other things to happen - countries aren't going to voluntary remove trade barriers without keeping the jobs or paying tariffs.
So and so forth.
are the trade barriers in the room with us?
Not only USA products. Most countries with low safety standards and known for dangerous products are barred from trading with the EU, or at least many of their products. Recently, even big Chinese on-line shops are being targeted for selling dangerous products and lying on the description on that products.
I understand that quality and safety is a diminishing goal for the USA. But I hope that other countries keep the care for their citizens as a achievable goal.
> is not entirely incorrect
With enough re-interpretation nothing is not entirely incorrect. Agree on the part that it is misleading.
This is the difficulty with discussing "trade barriers": things that are simply handled differently in different countries can be (arguably) economic factors that discriminate against one side or the other, hence they're trade barriers. Complicating it further, one can create barriers that have plausible deniability, or point to unrelated factors and scream "TRADE BARRIER".
I know someone who was involved for a while in the softwood lumber discussions. Just an absolute snake pit trying to suss out what are real barriers, intended barriers, relevant inputs... and all of this in the context of negotiations over the same, so everything is also "does he mean this or is he distracting us from something else or just building up a talking point to surrender later?"
the logs in canada are just worth less than the ones in the US. Differential advantage is a real thing that exists.
If the US government really beleives it to be a canadian government subsidy to loggers, it should be more than happy to give the tariff money to the canadian government, making canada's taxes and fees exactly what the US thinks they should be.
BTW, I'm Canadian. IIRC, the trade courts didn't find that the complaint about fees wasn't legitimate, it was that American logging companies had other, offsetting economic benefits, so the bottom line was that they weren't disadvantaged. So the U.S. simply refused to abide by the ruling and didn't pay the fine it was supposed to, so that receiving the fine or some portion thereof, became another thing to negotiate in the next round. Unbelievably hairy stuff.
Isn't that kind of America's thing?
"No, not like that!"
All the rest of this is designed to distract from the real issue: Americans love Capitalism, except in the rare cases where they don't come out on top. Then everyone else is being mean and unfair.
It's funny. When European governments charge high fees, Americans deride them as socialist and anti-capitalist. When the American government does it (as it does here)? Why, it's the natural order of things! Our fees are the "correct" fees. It's everyone else that's wrong!
Please.
Yes. And I'm saying this in the EU.
e.g. Ein Beispiel ist die verschiedene Sprache.
Although perhaps German is one of the stranger cases, given that I've seen the English phrase "Made in Germany" on some political posters around here: https://www.cdu.de/aktuelles/cdu-deutschlands/mainzer-erklae...
This is also a problem for trade between EU member states.
There's other examples of course, e.g. the Cybertruck is not road legal in the EU. Though I can hardly say that's "in the room" given how unpopular the vehicle is even in the USA.
Honestly if that is the best you can come up with, please try a lot harder.
that is a subsidy to american businesses and a barrier against german ones, when germany trains its Citizens in both german and english
it silly, but it is a barrier with a measurable dollar spend related to it
The local jobs market is currently demanding a lot of C1 German. This does not seem unfair to me. Does make it challenging to sell services to Germany if you can't provide it at that level.
Or, to put it another way, imagine my response had been:
Hör mal, Kumpel, wenn du glaubst, du kannst deine Dienstleistungen in einem Land verkaufen, dessen Landessprache du nicht sprichst, dann glaub mir als jemandem, der es gerade versucht: Das ist verdammt schwer.
One example: In Canada, there's a vibrant french language film industry, meaning films in french that originate and are made in Canada and then marketed abroad. The english language equivalent is anemic because decades ago, as part of trade negotiations, the Canadian gov't gutted subsidies for english language film production as a trade barrier against Hollywood.