This man just added 10% extra tariffs on everyone just out of spite and to show he can.
He could put them at a flat 19% globally and he's still be undercutting most of Europe.
I don't know if it's universal, but in the UK when a good is imported abroad and valued over £135, you have to pay a VAT to bring it in (20%) and then VAT when selling the good itself (20%).
$181 + 20% = 36.20 + 181 = enters the country at $217.2
217.2 + 20% = $260.64 to be sold at to make up the cost of double VAT charge.
If you're from the UK or a loicenced VAT business, you can reclaim the VAT costs of importing to sell at $217, but if you're wishing to sell in the UK from outside of it, then you effectively have to pay 40% VAT on the good/product you're selling. This more or less inhibits any smaller businesses from selling abroad because to become a loicensed VAT business in the UK, you must first be earning a taxable turnover of around
$121,000 a year from the business in the UK, it doesn't count if that's profit from business in the USA.
If this is applicable to the rest of Europe, then yeah, Americans are getting shafted hard and so it's only fair these tariffs are put in place. The charge is
just on admittance, so non-Americans are still doing better off. Not evening out to the rest of the world is basically self-harming altruism. A lot of Libertarian-types need to recognise that the free market includes the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is playing by a different ruleset which screwing over everyone else for their nation's own self-interest (
not a bad thing) but pretending they aren't, and then bitching when someone stops pretending.
I feel like most average Americans haven't been hit by them in any substantial way despite the big deal made over them, but I could be wrong, and someone here could set me straight on that. The tariffs seem only to affect people selling cheap tat into the US, such as this Canadian lady.
"Why is there VAT in Europe?"
To help put it in perspective, you know all those welfare states? When VAT started to roll out, VAT alone covered 80-100% of the cost of welfare in conjunction with low income tax. In the UK, as late as 1991, VAT by itself covered 55-60% (37 billion VAT to 58 billion welfare.) — today it's £180 billion to £334 billion. It's still technically the same percentage, but a far wider gap which has to be covered by other, bullshit taxes and decreased spending in other "less important" areas such as military.
I blame immigrants.
