Not only that, but it creates an anti competitive environment where someone like me, who sells to US customers, subsidizes those shipments from other countries.

That's the real kicker in this whole thing.

I guess the taxpayers are also the people who buy stuff from China so by and large they're just subsidizing themselves?

Given how ubiquitous ordering stuff from China is these days I'm not really sure the first impression of this being some good deal is accurate.

In fact subsidizing transport to a degree might probably have a progressive effect because low wage earners are more likely to order cheaper foreign goods.

It's basically a reverse tarriff, placing a market barrier on your own industries for no good reason.

Both the seller and the buyer benefits from the subsidy, while only the taxpayer pays for it. So the net benefit is to the chinese seller and net loss is to the taxpayers, which only partly mitigated if they are buyers too.

FYI, the US Post Office is an independent agency with its own budget. It does not receive taxpayer money.

So really what was happening is that other people or companies sending mail or packages were subsidizing overseas mail and packages.

I would make the case that they do receive taxpayer money. They have a legal right and monopoly to show ads in your mailbox. Without that, they would not exist. Imagine if Facebook were legally allowed to drive by your house and play recordings of ads over a loudspeaker every morning. Facebook would pay the government for that privilege. The government is selling your attention daily (worth billions, if anyone company were to have the ability to charge for it the same way), and giving it to the post office for free.

The environment suffers though. Shipping it in bulk to the US and from there to the customer is more efficient and allows for returns to be reused, creating less waste.

I don't think individual Chinese are rafting your goods individually over the pond.

If people had to make an explicit choice between ($1 shipping cost and $2 taxes) vs ($2 shipping cost and $0 taxes) they'd choose the unsubsidised option.

"they're just subsidizing themselves" -> they are spending money that they wouldn't choose to spend if they had fine grained control over the taxes they paid.

For lots of things, though, that really isn't the clear cut choice.

You pay health insurance so you don't have to pay the full cost later on. And it could easily be that the shipping cost + taxes generally means that the system stays afloat. And besides, if you tax correctly, it wouldn't be the same rate for everyone (income taxes should be higher for those making more, for example) nor would it be more than the flat shipping costs so long as the tax money actually went to the postal service.

In both cases, are the employees getting paid fair wages?

Does the tax mean I'm not getting charged for receiving packages? Are there hidden costs to the lower amount?

> You pay health insurance so you don't have to pay the full cost later on.

When you buy health insurance you pay more than the expected value of the full cost, both as a result of the cost of providing the insurance and the over-consumption as a result of insurance making patients price insensitive.

The reason you buy insurance is in case your medical bills are more than average and you can't afford them. For the average person the insurance is a net loss but the cost savings of not having it aren't worth the risk.

> And it could easily be that the shipping cost + taxes generally means that the system stays afloat.

If the system is worth more than it costs then it will be able to charge prices that allow it to stay afloat. We generally don't need systems that cost more than they're worth.

> And besides, if you tax correctly, it wouldn't be the same rate for everyone (income taxes should be higher for those making more, for example) nor would it be more than the flat shipping costs so long as the tax money actually went to the postal service.

Everybody always wants somebody else to pay for it. But it's the people in the middle and not at the top who actually pay for stuff, because they're the only ones numerous enough to do it.

> In both cases, are the employees getting paid fair wages?

That sounds like a question for the employees and not the customers. Naturally if they're getting paid below market rates they should consider seeking other employment.

> Does the tax mean I'm not getting charged for receiving packages?

You can already get charged for receiving packages. It's called COD. Nobody really uses it because it's much more convenient to charge up front than have the carrier try to collect payment from the recipient.

I see your pount about insurance but would love if health insurance and medical costs were more transparent.

In some countries without mandatory health insurance, medical cost is a lot lower and simpler. If major medical emergency happens, then families usually need to take out a loan. But for regular medical issues, you save for it. This includes issues like childbirth which in America very few people can afford without insurance.

I imagine, having health or car insurances gives some sense of false security, which leads to poor lifestyle choices or driving fast, which in turn causes one to experience bad health or accidents, thus using their insurance. Which causes insurance rates to rise. And one is not directly negotiating with hospital or bodyshop, those prices rises too.

It isn't mandatory health insurance that makes it more expensive: I have taxpayer funded insurance, which basically makes it mandatory for most (some folks don't qualify if you are a certain category of immigrant, but you still have to have it). There is a private option if you want to pay extra.

... And the system is more efficient because of standardization and pooling money together.

The US system doesn't have much of any standardization, and in general has a lot more facilities than it might otherwise need - plus things like some of the government provided insurance not paying enough and not having the ability to act like public insurances. These all make it more expensive. Heck, even standardizing insurance coding would help.

It is cruel to expect folks to take out a loan for medical emergencies. In some places, you die if you can't pay. It isn't like health is completely under your control: Type I diabetics couldn't prevent it (for example). Many cancers can't be avoided. And so on.

Negotiating with medical facilities is a pipe dream. There are many cases where you simply don't have the choice (emergency) nor the mental space to do it (for example, do you know how to judge what facilities are better for a gall bladdar removal surgery? How about where to get cancer treatment? How does one judge any of that?)

Does care insurance cause you to drive fast? Seriously? Isn't that more cultural than whether or not you have insurance?

I think the point is that part of the reason the goods are cheaper foreign is because they can't be made here at all, when shipping is 5x more expensive than importing from China.

according to statista[1], the average weight of cross-border packages is about 1 lbs or so, so according to that table shipping from China would be about 1$ cheaper. As the article itself states

"You can see from the above anything under 4 ounces is actually cheaper to ship from China. From 4 ounces to 8 ounces the rates are pretty comparable. Once you start hitting about 2 lbs, the prices from shipping within the U.S. start to get comparatively cheaper and cheaper than shipping from within China."

I seriously doubt this was ever an existential in the sense of the shipping cost itself destroying a business. China is simply able to produce cheaper things because they have lower labour cost and so on, and that is actually good for American consumers. It's simply free trade.

If anything I see a much bigger threat in the ability of the US to raise the prices, because given the current administration it may be used as a protectionist tool.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/974065/cross-border-deli...

> It's simply free trade.

How can it possibly be free trade if one side is subsidized and one side is not.

This is a good thing, I hope same thing will happen in Europe, if it haven't already. The law/agreement in europe is to help people send hand written letters across the globe, and to help people from poor regions send letters ro the more developed regions on earth.

This was the case back then, now, the same agreement is used so that you can send stuff worldwide without any fee. That is NOT free trade.

https://www.svenskhandel.se/contentassets/5db334c2740b4b7ebe...

If you are concerned about maintaining access to the international post system for poor people, how is this change going to help?

Surely it does the opposite - someone living in the poorest country in world would have to pay rich-European country rates to access their postage system.

Btw. I strongly suspect that the international rules on charging for postage were chosen for simplicity of implementation and not out of a sense of altruism for people in poor countries.

How usual is it sending hand written letters in 2020? Even in poor countries, I believe people sending hand written letters across the world is very uncommon.

If you believe it's still neccessary to keep sending letters across the world a neccessity, well, then we could only allow thin letters that can not hold anything else than a written letter - no items, what so ever.

I didn't mention hand-written letters at all so I've no idea why you're asking that question.

Your original message seemed to express concern that the original purpose of the rules for international shipping was to support people in poorer countries?

If this cross-subsidisation is removed, then people in poorer countries will pay more and people in richer countries will pay less to send stuff to each other. That's simple arithmetic.

And I was wondering how someone could simultaneously support such a policy while expressing concern about access to international post in poorer countries.

Sure, you didn't mention hand-written letters, but hand-written letters is exactly what the agreement/law (in europe) was designed to take care of.[0] So I think you are missing my point.

It was definetly not designed to be abused by the world's biggest companies to be able to ship stuff for near zero cost world-wide. If you can't see how it's clearly being abused, I don't know what to say.

A trade union created in the late 1800's that made sense then, may need a change now. Although alot of damage is already made.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Postal_Union

It is not about being handwritten or not, in many situations physical letters have a different legal weight than other mediums.

I agree, I meant to write physical letters. And if it's of legal weight, they should be able to afford shipping.

The problem is not physical letters, it's the postage of goods across the world, being cheaper because of subsizidies.

> I seriously doubt this was ever an existential in the sense of the shipping cost itself destroying a business.

I've read many e-commerce blogs with US sellers lamenting that they can't compete with China on $5 items because shipping costs are 5X as much within US. Maybe not killing businesses, but definitely keeping many out of the market.

> China is simply able to produce cheaper things because they have lower labour cost and so on, and that is actually good for American consumers

Lower, but not nearly as low as it used to be. Minimum wage in China is almost 1/2 of US now.

There's real instances of shipping cost offsetting lower labor. Manhole covers are a somewhat famous example. They're still made in USA because shipping offsets increased labor and materials. Would it be the same for ecommerce? I'm not aware of any studies but to me, the increased cost and shipping time make it plausible

If you want cheaper products with lower shipment costs, why not subsidise them locally? Why pay to make buying abroad cheaper while making your local products more expensive?

If you're creative, you can have free local shipping too, or just pay $2-4 to get shipped pretty much anything. It's just sligtly more expensive than standard aliexpress shipping, which is $1.5 or so.

The major thing compared to local stuff is lack of VAT on cheap foregin goods. Noone locally can compete with that.

Also most of the stuff I buy on Aliexpress (electronic components, SBCs, ...) simply isn't available locally, or is simply bought there and resold locally (because the manufacturer's main shop is Aliexpress).

There were a truckload of articles on this published over the last several years, even during the Obama administration, on how this "international China shipping" being cheaper than "domestic shipping" destroyed small businesses and was also responsible for hundreds (likely thousands) of American deaths thanks to cheap fentayl shipments.

This was the most nonsensical self-destructive American policy that strangely never caught much mainstream media attention.

With the potency to weight ratio Fentanyl has, do you really think the shipping being slightly more expensive will make it cost prohibitive? "A kilogram of heroin is purchased for approximately $6,000 and sold for appropriately $80,000." [1] Paying a few more dollars for shipping, which would be the case, doesn't make a dent in profitability.

1. https://www.affirmhealth.com/blog/word-on-the-street-fentany...

I'm not sure if you read the article you linked. It clearly refers to easier smuggling. If it was possible to just "ship" heroin then those profit margins wouldn't exist. The heroin would be bought for $6k and sold for say $6.5k. The reason why it sells for that much is because a substantial portion of the margin is spent on smuggling.

I am truly disappointed at the downvotes and the complete lack of research done by down-voters. The answer to your question is "Yes" not because of cost prohibition - but because most fentayl imports are less than 700 grams - which get lost in the massive flood of UPS e-Packet shipments and thus near impossible to inspect. I beg you to carry out your own research before expressing such disbelief.

Please read this briefing by the US trade commission https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/e...

"The illicit trade follows the standard e-commerce model of small-scale shipments and B2C and B2B distribution channels. The trade is SME-focused, with small-scale Chinese suppliers primarily exporting to individuals and small independent U.S. criminal networks.China was the source of 97 percent of inbound shipments of high-purity fentanyl during 2016 and 2017"

"Given the high purity of Chinese fentanyl, most illicit imports are less than 700 grams (1.5 lbs.) per shipment. "

> I am truly disappointed at at the downvotes and the complete lack of research done by down-voters. The answer to your question is "Yes" not because of cost prohibition - but because most fentayl imports are less than 700 grams - which get lost in the massive flood of UPS e-Packet shipments and thus near impossible to inspect.

So what? 100 grams would be bought, by the numbers above, for $600 and sold for $8,000. If shipping cost $200, no one would care. That would add $2,000 in shipping costs to the full kilogram, but, again, no one would care. It's just not significant.

Do you have an argument to advance that isn't ludicrous on its face?

I guess that if shipping cost $200, only very lucrative goods like fentanyl would be shipped. That would reduce that the total shipping volume to something that was possible for the border guards to inspect in order to find drugs.

It is not a matter of the shipping cost. Can you please state which statement do you find ludicrous ?

1. Chinese fentayl shipments do not need to have high weight due to purity. Mentioned explicitly in the trade commission report linked above.

2. Due to 1), it is convenient to leverage e-packet shipment as inspection of massive volume of e-packet shipments is near impossible.

3. Small-scale US businesses were adversely affected by e-packet rates https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/trump...

>> There were a truckload of articles [...] on how this "international China shipping" being cheaper than "domestic shipping" destroyed small businesses

> It is not a matter of the shipping cost.

Seems like your original point was centered on shipping costs destroying domestic businesses. In light of the downvotes it became mostly a matter of drug imports in small, cheap packages:

> most fentayl imports are less than 700 grams - which get lost in the massive flood of UPS e-Packet shipments and thus near impossible to inspect

Which is irrelevant, shipping costs (within reason) won't change this.

"Seems like your original point was centered on shipping costs"

I made both points right at the beginning, though the thread got focused around one of them.

1. e-packet shipping cost adversely affecting US businesses

2. e-packet being used to hide fentayl shipments thanks to massive volume and delivery convenience. (cheap and fast)

"Which is irrelevant, this will be the case regardless of the shipping costs, within reason."

I fail to understand this statement. How will reduction of e-packets - one of the major causes of the bloat of international packages not help in inspection ?

If you reduce the total number of e-packets by removing the subsidy, then it becomes far easier to inspect which packages have fentayl and which do not. EMS shipments apparently quadrupled after the e-packet scheme was introduced which adversely affected all inspection procedures as agencies could not cope with the volume.

Reduce the volume by removing the subsidy - the inspection agencies can then manage their job.

So we can agree the shipping isn't make it cost prohibitive. Your point about there being less hay making finding needles easier might be possible (although I don't think it matters, as with our southern border, a higher detection rate just means you need more chance to get the desired total smuggled). I would imagine there would just be more product shipped to Central and South America and then imported like everything else south of the border, cars, trucks, boats planes. "The flow of fentanyl to the United States in the near future will probably continue to be diversified" [1] Production in those places might also increase. Moral of my story is this change in shipping prices will have no long term effect on amount of fentanyl brought into the US; though, it might very well increase the involvement of SotB cartels. If there are buyers, these will be sellers.

[1] https://www.dea.gov/sites/default/files/2020-03/DEA_GOV_DIR-...

Perhaps, but until those supply chains are established and proven to be effective, one should address the way 97% of all fentayl enters the US today - e-packet from China.

Just because opponents will likely evolve their tactics in the future should not prevent one from mitigating their extraordinarily successful tactic that is running in the present.

In FY 2012, USPS handled about 27 million ePackets from China. This increased to nearly 500 million ePackets by 2017. (Thanks to that disastrous subsidy agreement in 2011)

None of our inspection agencies could cope with this volume. Remove the discount-from-China subsidy, this will automatically reduce the volume of all e-packets and thus will ameliorate the load on inspection agencies.

The supply chains from Central and South America are already established and proven to be effective. What you seem to be ignoring is the demand part of supply and demand. If there is demand, there will be people importing drugs, increasing USPS pricing won't stop anything that from happening.

I think even if you reduced volume to 2012 levels its not going to make any practical difference. Like, 1 gram of pure fentanyl is on the order of 1000+ doses... You can profitably smurf it in anything.

If you achieved the same level of bulk processing it may not be $0.50, but it wouldn't be $5 either.

The Post Office works off Postage, not Tax dollars.

Congress is responsible for the rates. Politics and likely donor interests are why the rates are this way.

The rates are set because Republicans want to have the postal service die and be fully privatized, and thus make regulstions to sabatoge it on a regular basis.

> It’s sickening when I have to pay $5 to send something within the US, yet the same item would cost $.50 from China.

What's sickening about this? It's different quality of service. Your $5 package will be received in a few days. With $.50 shipping, your Chinese trinket will be delivered in a couple of months.

> So while I agree with you that we don’t necessarily need a profit motive at the usps, at the same time the taxpayers don’t need to subsidize cheap crap from China.

Too late for that. China is world's manufactory. Your stuff will be shipped from China one way or another.

Given that, subsidising direct shipping from China is the reasonable thing to do. Otherwise you will be paying a 5-10x markup to middlemen for the exact same item.

All the slow Chinese mail gets put on a boat, and taken to say a port in LA where it is offloaded and then inserted into the US mail system. If I bring a package to that same spot in LA where the packages enter the system, why can't I choose a shipping option that costs something less than 50 cents to anywhere in the US?

The system was illogical. Whether you want to say that US shipping is too expensive, or Chinese shipping to the US too inexpensive is unimportant.

> All the slow Chinese mail gets put on a boat, and taken to say a port in LA where it is offloaded and then inserted into the US mail system.

It's shipped by air. It is so slow because of sorting, customs, paperwork. The last mile postal shipment is actually quite fast in USA.

> why can't I choose a shipping option that costs something less than 50 cents to anywhere in the US?

Not an American, but I believe there's a 2006 bill that prevents USPS from selling services below the cost. Learned about it in a John Oliver's video [1], mentioned somewhere else in this thread. I'd guess that Chinese epackets are part of an international agreement, so they are exempt.

> The system was illogical.

It would be illogical if USPS had flexible costs.

But the USPS costs are more or less fixed. The mailman will go his round every day and will get his salary, even if he has little to deliver. So, you may as well have him deliver Chinese epackets, for whatever price the Chinese are willing to pay. And that's a good deal for the public. Otherwise the $1 trinket for China would be $6 (if Chinese had to pay full shipping), or $10 (if bought through a US-based reseller).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoL8g0W9gAQ

> It's different quality of service.

I think that’s only true until it arrives in the US though and USPS delivers the package to your door. Sure, total time is long, but the cost to USPS seems similar?

I'd bet this has to do with capacity, similar with network equipment. If you operate below capacity, it's hard to tell apart a high priority packet from a low priority one. You will start noticing delays in low priority packets only when you start saturating your network capacity.

Actually it has to do with how international shipping rates are arbitrarily set by committee every 4 years.

Here’s a planet money episode on the topic.

https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/08/01/634737852/epis...

But it's the mail. It simply arrives. If I am in some other country, I pay postage in that country, then that country gives it to USPS and says "your turn now". Are they going to send it back? Surely there can be negotiations between the two countries about how to split that cost paid overseas, but at the end of the day the mail comes in, what are we going to do, not deliver?

If domestic mail is too expensive maybe let's address that.

Accept it in harbor, send a new notification that it can be fetched after paying a processing fee (which includes the price of three previous notification).

It's not like that isn't already done all over the place.

It's not like that would happen often. They'd quickly adapt and start charging more for sending, making it a non-issue most of the time

>The trouble is that we are subsidizing the shipment of items from China.

I don't see any problem if taxpayer is the one is paying cheaper price as the end result. It's not like Chinese are charging full rate and sending for dirt cheap and booking mega profits like that.

And if a student can order cheaper pen and paper from china or a mechanic can order cheaper nut bolts and screwdriver from china, what's the harm?

There is definitely a problem with subsidising the destruction of US small-scale businesses while favouring Chinese businesses and subsidising death of American citizens via fentayl.

https://www.quora.com/Does-China-ePacket-hurt-American-busin...

"COMBATTING THE OPIOID CRISIS: EXPLOITING VULNERABILITIES IN INTERNATIONAL MAIL" https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Combatting%20the%...

US Senate Staff Report: "Fentanyl Flows from China" https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Fentanyl%2...

>There is definitely a problem with subsidising the destruction of US small-scale businesses while favouring Chinese businesses and subsidising death of American citizens via fentayl.

You can find extreme examples in anything.

But let me tell you, sometime back I was unemployed. I bought machining tools from china and setup a good business, I could have never been able to afford local manufactured tools without accuring debt.

I paid a lot of money in taxes as my business grew, I bought better quality machines which were locally available from local suppliers because local suppliers ensures a maintenance package.

> subsidising death of American citizens via fentayl.

LOL, do you really think people buy chinese fentanyl 'cos the shipping per gram is a few cents cheaper than it would be if they had to pay higher shipping rents?

No, the problem is that the drugs disappear in the flood of cheap legal packages sent because it's so cheap to send small items.

It also contributes to the dismounting of American industry. When the poor people can't make any money to buy things made in USA because their jobs got exported to China, the next level of workers in USA will also lose their jobs and this will just continue for the next level and sooner or later hit the software world too.

I made a terrible mistake by my short, snarky answers without citations because I mistakenly assumed that most people were already aware of this. But it seems that I was utterly wrong. (also I did not downvote you)

Please read this report by the US trade commission. I can quote further citations if needed, but this one is a succinct briefing. https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/executive_briefings/e...

Please also read the United States Senate Sub-committee on Investigations Staff Report.

https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Combatting%20the%...

"The preferred method of the international online (fentayl) sellers is Express Mail Service (“EMS”), a global delivery service for documents and merchandise contained in letters and package."

Further reading in that report will show you how difficult it was to scan/inspect e-packet shipments due to immense volume.