This very much has the feel (early, without reading a ton on it) of the (D) resistance to the tax cuts. "It'll be horrible, you're taking from the poor!" (people realize their taxes will go down) "You're going to let the rich companies get fat and buy back their own stock at the expense of the little guy!" (People start getting $1,000 bonuses left and right). "It won't make companies bring their money back to America, who are you kidding?" (Apple brings $300B back into the US and pays 22% tax on it). It smacks of "if my guy did it, I'd be cool, but since the Cheetoh Nazi is proposing it, eff you guys!" "Hey, want to not be beholden to a foreign company undercutting our American jobs out of business? Tariffs generally help with that" Dviss, interestingly enough I would've thought you'd be about tariffs, as that's one of the major pillars of Bernie Sanders' platform, and one he's agreed with Trump on since at least August 2015
No solar panels. I don't favor tariffs like this one. I also don't favor China dumping product on us so our workers can't compete, and I don't favor supporting an industry by government writing checks to the owners.
Basically (and I know it's very rudimentary of me to think this way) that giving tax breaks to businesses was a bad plan, and that businesses should be contributing more to the national spend plan. This, admittedly, targets those who import overseas panels to sell to Americans, but it seems as if it's really just making sure businesses pay more in taxes/tariffs to the gov't if they deal with companies overseas. Maybe because, as Ben Franklin said, everything in moderation?
Or, it's like deficit spending. It's terrible when democrats do it, but when Republicans increase the debt by $1.5 trillion, it's all great! Truth is, lots of hypocrisy on many sides, on many sides. Tariffs do generally help with that. There are potentially pretty severe side effects which may be much worse than the disease, however. If the doctor had actually attended med school, I'd feel more comfortable with the diagnosis. barfo
You won't find me saying that deficit spending is good, but if it's $1.5T over a decade vs. 11T over 8 years, except that this time I'm getting a cut of it? Yeah, I'm ok with it. I get the feeling that the President, for his many faults, has a decent grasp of macroeconomics and business relations. I mean, he's not a community organizer or anything, but he has some experience. But I don't know who he listens to or whether he's surrounded by yes-men that will allow him to jump off a financial cliff if he sees a snickers bar at the bottom...
If everyone buys junk whirlpool appliances we'll create way way way more jobs fixing them than we'll supposedly lose in the solar industry. It is more likely people will just pay more for Korean stuff.
That's.... interesting. Since he doesn't even seem to understand what a trade deficit is/means, I wonder where you get that feeling. barfo
Heard a news bite this morning in regard to these tariffs, about trade negotiations with China will also include North Korea. North Korea very subtly slid in there without further comment. I would almost wager, more tariffs will come as long as North Korea has Nukes.
Errm. If the tariff is on imported solar panels alone, this is fake news. As specifically Solarworld cannot compete with imported solar panels due to cost of production. Therefore Solarworld produces cheap ass shit panels that are lemons in order to stay in the market. So yeah, if it's on imports alone I can say this. Goodjob Trump. However if the tariff is on all solar panels... Well then Trump I can continue to say you're a dumbass.
Yes, new tariff backfires on US jobs. But it’s not end of world for solar power. JANUARY 23, 2018 —For all its tough trade rhetoric in the past year, especially against China, the Trump administration’s first enforcement actions of 2018 will have a measured and temporary impact. In the most closely watched case, involving solar panels, new tariffs announced Monday will slow adoption of the technology in the near term – and create a new set of winners and losers. Many fans of solar power are understandably voicing loud concerns. But industry analysts don’t expect the tariffs to cause long-term damage to the fast-growing industry of wiring up the United States with solar power. Homeowner installation costs will go up about 4 percent, says ClearView Energy Partners, a Washington-based research firm. For utility-scale installations, costs will go up about 10 percent, it says. “At the end of the day, it won’t have any major implications for the industry from a manufacturing perspective,” says Angelo Zino a senior industry analyst with CFRA Research. “Things could have been a lot worse.” In short, the tariff won’t kill solar power, but also won’t create momentum for new investment that could push the industry forward. “The tariffs are going to expire in four years. That doesn’t give somebody much incentive to build a factory” in the US, says Varun Sivaram, author of “Taming the Sun,” a soon-to-be-released book on solar power. Nor does it give companies reason to invest in the next-generation solar technologies that Mr. Sivaram sees as both economically promising and an answer to environmental concerns about global warming. What the tariff does mean is fewer jobs installing solar panels, for now. For months, America’s solar installation industry had made dire warnings about what the Trump administration might do. The International Trade Commission had called for 35 percent tariffs on imported solar panels. The two US-based manufacturers that had pushed for protection wanted even higher penalties. In the end, President Trump opted for a 30 percent penalty, not unlike what the Obama administration had imposed before. The difference is that the new tariff applies worldwide, as opposed to just specific Asian countries, so solar-panel makers in Europe as well as in China saw their share prices fall in trading Tuesday. In a separate action, Mr. Trump imposed a steeper 50 percent tariff on imported washing machines, but its effect is much more narrow, helping US-based Whirlpool Corp. fend off low-price competition from South Korean manufacturers Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics. Whirlpool chairman Jeff Fettig said Monday that the trade action "enabled new manufacturing jobs here in America and will usher in a new era of innovation for consumers everywhere.” The company said it would add 200 new full-time positions at its Clyde, Ohio, manufacturing plant, adding in a statement that "the new hires are just the beginning of increased investments in innovation, manufacturing and additional manufacturing jobs for Whirlpool and its vendors." Jobs were at the core of the solar-panel case. Thanks to low-cost panels from China, the solar industry has been soaring. Employment nearly tripled between 2010 and 2016 to 260,000 as solar installations picked up in the United States. The Solar Energy Industries Association opposed the tariff because solar-panel manufacturing is such a small part of the industry, amounting to about 2,000 jobs. With the new tariff, the SEIA estimates the industry will lose some 23,000 jobs this year as increased panel costs force utilities and other customers to scale back billions of dollars in investment. Still, the industry avoided a more severe scenario. “While we believe the decision will be significantly harmful to our industry and the economy, we appreciate that the president and the administration listened to our arguments,” Abigail Ross Hopper, SEIA’s president and chief executive, said in a statement. “Our industry will emerge from this. The case for solar energy is just too strong to be held down for long.” Even one winner in the case, while complimenting Mr. Trump, raised a note of doubt whether the tariff would be enough. “We are still reviewing these remedies, and are hopeful they will be enough to address the import surge and to rebuild solar manufacturing in the United States,” said Juergen Stein, chief executive and president of SolarWorld Americas, in a statement. The tariff may convince some overseas solar manufacturers to locate factories in the US. Already, a Chinese manufacturer may be behind a request for $54 million in state and city incentives to build a solar-panel factory in Jacksonville, Fla., according to the Jacksonville Daily Record. The other big winner is Arizona-based First Solar, which makes an advanced thin-film solar panel that isn’t subject to the tariff, says Mr. Zino of CFRA. Thin-film technology, while not yet cost-competitive with silicon-based panels, is slowly getting more attention from the industry, particularly in specialized installations. The company’s stock jumped Tuesday morning on news of the tariffs. But to grow US solar manufacturing, Trump will need far more than a tariff, say experts, who point to research and development support and an advanced manufacturing strategy as key components for a turnaround. Sivaram, a technology expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, says that despite China's rise to dominance in solar panels, other nations still have an opportunity to invest. “There are super promising technologies,” he says. Why not just let China take the lead, and continue to offer increasingly low-cost solar power to the world? “The problem is solar power currently provides about 2 percent of world electricity,” and isn’t near a glide path toward the much larger scale that’s possible, Sivaram says. That faster glide path is needed, scientists say, to reduce the human-created emissions behind climate change. Government support has a big role to play in solar technology, experts say, because for the private sector the big potential rewards are matched by big up-front risks. Yet, even as Trump imposes the solar tariff, his administration is aiming to slash R&D funding for new energy technology. That may be the bigger concern than any tariff fallout, for the future US role in solar power. Yet the tariff moves this week could have another important ripple effect, if they prompt retaliatory moves by China, as well as legal challenges to the tariffs through the World Trade Organization.
I'm not against all tariffs. But like Barfo said there are consequences. And for this one it will be jobs. Also, it's us who pay for the tariff. So let's say Drumpf uses tariffs (renegotiate NAFTA??? Yeah...) to create revenue to build the wall. But before he creates that revenue he funds it through congress. Well that means we'd (you and I) would end up paying for the wall or those products won't get sold and then... We pay for the wall... I have NO TRUST in Drumpf when it comes to his agenda.
Personally, I think the sooner we turn off Vicente Fox's narco-state the better, but that's my emotion talking, not realpolitik. And I may be misunderstanding tariffs, so if this is wrong I'll publicly retract. Here's my understanding. Solar panels in the US cost, say, $75 to make and get in front of a customer. You, dviss, buy them for $100 or so from SolarUSA. Chinese manufacturers can make them (for whatever reason) and get them in front of a customer for $40. SolarShanghai (or SolarPortland, importing from SolarShanghai) markets to me to buy them for $80. "See, Brian, you're paying 20% less than dviss!" (meanwhile, they're making more profit per panel, $40 to $25). SolarUSA had two options in the past. 1) keep price at $100 and lose market share, 2) lower price to $80 to compete with SolarPortland and make $5/panel instead of Shangai's $40. The way in the past that gov't has settled this is by letting China keep their profits (trade imbalance?) and subsidizing SolarUSA for the price drop to maintain some level of competitiveness. Now, in general I like the free market. If SolarUSA can't compete on a level playing field for whatever reason (they're charging too much, their service sucks, their product breaks, they hire bad employees, whatever) I'm ok with them going away. But it's not a level playing field. Therefore, the tariff makes it so that if SolarPortland wants to keep buying that panel from SolarShanghai instead of making their own or buying American, the $40 cost now becomes $40 to Shanghai and $12 to the government. Which means that, if they choose to sell for $80, that's fine, but their profit is not as high as it was, and there's some leveling of the playing field. I'm not sure that 30% ,or barfo's 1000%, or any number in between is the right one, though it seems like a relatively straightforward business intel and analytics problem. And I agree with your long post above that "temporary" ones don't give the impetus for long-term infrastructure investment. But if 30% tariff on solar panels goes to the government to pay for walls, or more VA doctors, or better medicare benefits, or a new submarine, I can't see how that hurts the average American. Maybe I'm missing something....I don't pretend to be an expert on this.
This tariff hurts assemblers, which makes up a huge part of the US market. Assemblers use local and foreign parts to make solar panels. Only 1 or 2 US based companies use 100% US made parts. This is extreme and hurtful to the industry. It's similar to foreign automobile manufacturers that set up plants here in the US. They are not making the car here, they are assembling them using foreign made parts. They do this to get around tariffs and the US benefits because some jobs are better than no jobs. Even US automobile manufacturers use some foreign made parts. This tariff just killed a 1,000 job module assembly plant that was going to be built in Florida.
Since we're not assuming that people are going to say "forget solar power, now", can we assume that demand will stay the same, if not go up? And that companies who don't import (or assemble) Chinese panels will now have greater market share? Those panels gotta get made somehow? Tesla just told me there's a 6 month waiting list for their panels to be put on houses, and that was already at a price I considered borderline ridiculous. If that JAX assembly plant that now is going away was an impact of the tariff, shouldn't SolarUSA (or whatever) be hiring now to keep with the demand?
Yes but that's a drastic oversimplification. The black disk is the solar panel. It is encased in american made glass, being supported by american made steel, all being assembled by american workers. The tariff is hurting businesses that use this model.
