August 29, 2018
YEAH, BUT NOW IT'S THE TRUMP LEMONADE STAND:
Trump's Mexico Trade Deal Looks Like a Lemon: Peer under the hood, and these auto rules pack less punch. (David Fickling and Anjani Trivedi, August 28, 2018, Bloomberg)
[T]he small list of affected vehicles chimes with the equanimity with which the agreement is being greeted in Mexico.About 70 percent of the country's light-vehicle exports to the U.S. would be compliant under the new rules, with the remaining 30 percent getting a five-year phase-in period running through 2024, Economy Minister Ildefonso Guajardo told a press conference Monday. Even those that fall short would only receive the usual tariff of 2.5 percent for cars and 25 percent for trucks -- levels that Volkswagen AG, Hyundai Motor Co., Kia Motors Corp. and others consider worth paying on swathes of models in return for Mexico's drastically cheaper labor costs.It's likely to be a similar story with Canada, which shouldn't be affected at all by the wage rules. "Canada should find it relatively simple to join the U.S.-Mexico consensus" and the agreement is a "fundamentally positive development" that should reduce perceptions of risks around Nafta, Brett House, deputy chief economist at Bank of Nova Scotia, wrote in a note after the announcement.
When we were growing up in the 'hood, we used to play kick-the-can for hours. For whatever reason, we decided that instead of a can the game had to be played with a Red-eye. But the kid who owned it was rather petulant about being "it" and would storm off with his Red-eye all the time. (Happily, two of his older brothers played and would beat him up and steal it back.)
Donald Trump is pretty much that kid. As long as you pretend that he's winning he doesn't care about any actual achievement.
Fortunately, his sycophants are only too eager to trumpet stuff like this and North Korea's elimination of nuclear weapons as world historical wins, so we get to avoid having him do much damage.
Posted by Orrin Judd at August 29, 2018 11:07 AM