Official Luthiers Forum!

I was just putting an order together on the Axiom website and when I got to checkout, there was an additional charge labeled "Chinese tariff". Has this always been there?

Ed

In the context of tariffs that have been in the news for the past year, a "Chinese tariff" would be a tariff imposed by China on an item when it's imported into China. The tariff would have to be paid by the importer to get the item out of Chinese customs into China, so that doesn't seem to make much sense.

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Once in a while you get shown the light in the strangest of places if you look at it right - Robert Hunter

I don't know about the Axiom site, but I have noticed tariff costs listed for each item made in China on several websites of companies who sell Chinese machinery. I know that at least one of these sites, Little Machine Shop, states that the tariff cost has already been rolled into the price shown, so it won't be added again at checkout. At any rate, I've only seen this tariff information over the past year. They're just letting you know that the tariff cost of goods produced in China is being passed on to the consumer, at least in part.

Dave

Yes, this is the trade war, showing up on your invoice.
President Trump says he is going to impose a tariff on Chinese goods because China has been really unfair to America for years. He says it like he is being tough and imposing a fee on The Chinese Government or their greedy manufacturers. But actually he is not getting money from China. He is getting money from you - because you are comitting the sin of buying from China. Of course, you don’t necessarily even know you are buying from China. You think you are buying from an American supplier. But that American supplier shifted their production to China years ago because it is cheaper (on account of how you don’t need to pay any stupid benefits to the workers, and you can just dump the pollution straight into the river). But now, for America to be great again, you will need to pay the extra price for that, as a tariff. Not that it will bring the jobs back to America, or improve life for the Chinese workers, or stop the pollution. But I am sure Donald will put the money to good use; building walls and whatnot. It is best not to think about it too much. Just consume and pay and be happy.

I prefer not to get into the partisan politics of the current contretemps, but it seems like Mr. Ball likely has it correct - this recent increase in some tariffs on Chinese imports (I speak of Communist China as distinct from Taiwan) has begun showing up on some pricing lists or item pricing details. Nothing too unusual - there are about 12,000 items that the US collects tariffs on, according to the latest International Trade Commission report, and they are a mix of 'by nation' and general tariffs, with rates varying from a few percent to 350% on tobacco. In some cases, the US has raised tariff rates to match import tariffs levied by China on US goods, while in other cases, the US has increased some tariffs from bilateral agreement or Most Favored Nation (MFN) level to something closer to the general rates applied to non-MFN/non-WTO countries or the punitive rates established to counter perceived predatory behavior in the marketplace.

Keep in mind that up through the creation of the funding mechanism for the modern welfare state with passage of the 16th Amendment to the US Constitution, Federal expenditures were primarily funded by tariffs, with annual budgets at about 3% of Gross Domestic Product except in time of war or other national emergency (during which debt accumulated, and was later paid down). Today, budgets are closer to 20% of GDP, and trade agreements such as the WTO and NAFTA have usually reduced rates, so tariffs have become a much smaller part of the Federal funding stream, but still seen as a useful tool to manage trade or protect strategically important industries (such as the US corset industry...thus saving us from having to buy lower quality Chinese or Venezuelan bustiers for daily shop wear for want of available US-made corsetry).

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A constellation only takes shape when one maps the whole.
- Beth Brower

Just completed two major restorations of two 1937 Kalamazoo guitars made by Gibson of course. One was a KG-14 and the other was a KG-11 and they both needed what we refer to as "the whole nine yards...."

No pics to share, sorry I forgot to both take pics and ask for permission to do so from the owner who is a famous A-list actor and musician.

FYI to us the "whole nine yards" refers to a neck reset, refret, crack repair, usually a bridge plate cap, perhaps plugging and relocating the saddle with the Collin's Saddle mill to reset intonation properly, new nuts, new saddles, bridge plate caps and a plethora of other little things that we just do without even thinking about it. We also installed two pick-ups since these will be used on stage.

The instruments will be used to perform in a play that our client has written which I hope to go see and enjoy.

Again sorry no pics. This was a fun job and of course all up this client can now claim Dave and I as dependents on their annual income tax filings.

Also Netflix has released a new Documentary on Robert Johnson where we did the work on the guitars played in present time by some of the moderators. That was a fun project too.

So the tariff here would be levied on the customers receiving their restored Kalamazoos?

We have a KG-11 in for the same treatment, but currently waiting on the customer to approve the estimate and then finish his first few months in Nashville to actually afford the work.

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A constellation only takes shape when one maps the whole.
- Beth Brower

A: Hesh is getting to be more of an old dotard than we thought and is now posting answers in the wrong thread.

or B: With age comes wisdom and he's trying to derail a politically charged thread before it becomes some sort of poop storm.


I'm guessing A.

No but that's an excellent idea!!! Maybe it's time to raise prices and that's one of my favorite things to do.

The 11's are a favorite of mine, no frills L-OO and they usually are light as a feather.

Some of them are known to have had the top put on after the dovetail was set and with no cut-out for the removal of the neck. We've had some like this and some without and until you get in there we never know what we will find.

Hopefully yours will be one with the top installed before the neck set so you fine folks don't have to cut out the top over the dovetail. It's no big deal but you should have seen my face the first time I saw one of these....

LOL thanks Steve I'll admit to being an old dotard.

Regarding possibility B: Before I stopped working for General Electric we bought factories in the late 90's in China. So did many companies including Kimball the piano/organ maker and a plethora of household name American companies.

Although the jobs went overseas the disparity in costs associated with not just labor but the supply chain as well was far too attractive to not take advantage of. By some of our studies we could produce in China for less than 1/3 the total costs of producing here in the US and that included distributing the products back to North America.

Although part of what my boss Jack Welch used to describe as the "new vaporware, west coast economy with valuations 32 times earnings who will never, never ******** make it" many US companies who manufacture in China will be impacted by the tariffs. By the way Jack was not always right in so much as these vaporware companies who were never going to make it are far larger now than GE ever was when we were the largest and wealthiest company in the world with 375,000 employees.

So long story short from me and with the new found skill of a dotard at not stepping in any warm, steaming politics here... no one is going to come out of this unscathed, no one. And maybe that's not such a bad thing either in so much as there is a price for everything and some things are worth the price. If it comes to pass that there are enforceable, real changes in China's theft of our IP this trade war, now that we are in it and it can no longer be avoided.... may have some benefits.

On the other Hand trusting China or any other country to not steal our IP seems to me to be the kind of thing that someone with a much better weed dispensary than I have might dream up in an Oreo cookie and Doritos moment.

Have a great Sunday my friends.

I was on Axiom's site a few weeks ago & the tariff line item was there then too.

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I'm not a luthier.
I'm just a guy who builds guitars in his basement.
It's better than playing golf.

Towards the end of 2018 I decided to replace my 17 year old Sunhill widebelt sander with a new machine. Took me awhile to search out what I wanted. Decided on a Shopfox, which was around $6500.00 as I recall. I talked to the company several times during the last week of October and finally called on November 1st or 2nd to order one. I was told that tariffs went into effect as of November 1st and the machine cost was $700.00 more.I decided to go up the chain of command a bit and question that because I knew they had machines sitting there that should not have been affected by the tariff. They did relent, and I did not have to pay the increased cost. Just shows that some companies can use the tariffs to increase profit!

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“ The meaning of life is to find your gift and the purpose of life is to give it away” Pablo Picasso

Not to worry. Our chief has a very large brain, perhaps the largest in history. For us lesser mortals it is best to just sit back and marvel as the grand plan unfurls.

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It's not what you don't know that hurts you, it's what you do know that's wrong.

So it was interesting to note that we recently received some hardware through an Ebay purchase which perhaps had a wholesale value of about $2.50 from a US distributor, plus $6-$8 or so domestic shipping, but could not be sourced from any of our usual domestic suppliers. Cost for the items ended up to be under $3 delivered from China.

It's interesting to speculate as to how any manufacturer can send a few ounces of hardware from China to a US in two week's time for that price, let alone recoup actual costs associated with making, packaging, marketing, and absorbing listing costs, etc. without having truly massive government subsidies in play. This begs the question: why do those government subsidies exist when China already offers a low wage, minimally regulated production environment, and what sort of long-term trade strategy drives that sort of e'huge government intervention?

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A constellation only takes shape when one maps the whole.
- Beth Brower

Good points Woodie. How indeed do they manage to do it.

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Steve Smith
"Music is what feelings sound like"

They are not motivated by profit but by market domination and eliminating competition.

Explains the shipping on small parts...US taxpayers are subsidizing it. POTUS has been addressing this.

https://www.facebook.com/DailyWire/vide ... 506423840/

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Pat

Exactly. They are investing in monopoly. It is more capital efficient to maintain a monopoly than to compete and innovate. It is in the interest of large companies to create and maintain monopolies, and in the interest of the free market to prevent them from forming. We spent a big chunk of the 20th century forcing companies to compete on their products and innovation through anti-trust regulation. In turn our free market produced innovation and value.

The Chinese are not interested in the free market.

"The Chinese are not interested in the free market."

I don't think Amazon, Walmart, Home Depot, or any of the large corporations that dominate their sectors of the economy are interested in the Free Market. The only part of the market they want to be "free" is the labor market.
Corporate greed has allowed the Chinese to take over the manufacturing sector of many countries economies. If you give away the processes to make things how can you complain about them "stealing" intellectual property rights? I.P. and Patents are the true "vapor ware" - they rely on "Honor" in an increasingly dishonorable business environment. When the Chinese have the same level of technology as the "West" and feel they no longer need us you will probably see a lot of "business partners" booted from the country. From what I've read there is already a bit of backlash to foreign investment.
Complaining about the Communist Chinese is like the story of the Girl and the Snake - You knew I was a Communist!