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   Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 20:56:12 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

   You know, I've been thinking recently about the Trump tariffs. I think they're stupid, in general. The US would be better off scrapping all sales taxes and tariffs and replacing it with a federal VAT of, say, 8%, matching current average sales tax rates in the US. This would include import VAT.

   VAT is better because everyone pays it, but businesses re-claim it. This removes a lot of overhead for auditors, narrowing the tax gap, raising more revenue.

   But I'm morally torn, and I'll say why next:

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     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 20:59:16 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     Do we really want to help China get rich off of slave Labour, by not taxing imports of e.g. Temu products? Tariffs could be a force for good.

     And I hate Trump in general. But perhaps he's doing the right thing, for the wrong reason, when it comes to China.

     To my mind, taxing most Chinese products by 100 or even 200% seems like a good and noble thing to do. China is already politically unstable; making it poor really fast might encourage its people to overthrow the dictatorship that rules them.

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     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 21:09:56 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     I say scrap all tariffs with all the democratic nations, the friendly ones, and just slap it on all the dictatorships. 300% tax.

     But do this only if those countries also tariff China heavily. Use tax as a means to destabilise dictatorships, so that their economies shut down.

     Tell all their citizens that if they overthrow their government and install democracy, the tariffs will be lifted.

     Use tax to unseat dictators. That's how dictatorships fall; people have nothing left to lose so they coup.

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     Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot (libreleah@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 21:16:02 JST Leah Rowe is not a Rowebot

     in reply to

     And the weaker countries that have dictators heavily rely on friendship with China. A lot of them anyway. E.g. Vietnam and North Korea.

     Destroy the Chinese Communist Party and the rest of the dominoes will fall.

     And like, as soon as China gets democracy, the rest of the world can help it grow further. That promise is what Chinese must be told.

     Chinagov would probably shut down the internet in panic. If our leaders had any guts they would have done this in the 1990s before China got any worse.

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     tusooa :Cat_girls_Emoji_004: 西风 (tusooa@kazv.moe)'s status on Monday, 05-May-2025 22:20:30 JST tusooa :Cat_girls_Emoji_004: 西风

     in reply to
     @libreleah No. It will only hurt the people under dictators' rule, not the dictator themselves. A thing maybe counterintuitive for you is that, imposing any kind of "sanctions" will hurt people much more and much more quickly than it hurts a government. And the right solution? The most basic is to let anyone under the rule of a dictator that doesn't like it easily escape -- make it really easy for them to travel to your place (i.e. lifting visa requirements) and claim refugee.
     
     To do more, support worker's rights movements in those places. Mainland Chinese people are taught by the government that "foreign powers" are hostile to them so the only way to thrive is to support the CCP. They will be led to blame bad life on foreign governments, not CCP. If you try to support their lives instead of trying to destroy it, they will know who is good for them.
     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.