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In this listener mail episode, Mike and Jay answer the following questions:
- How big of a deal is the Canadian dairy industry in the overall context of a renegotiated trade agreement, and should we be concerned about the effect of the USMCA on the Canadian dairy industry?
- Why doesn’t the show place more emphasis on the views of ‘rational alarmists’?
- Should corporate tax policy be changed to incentivize paying higher wages to workers?
- Are Libertarian ideas ‘good on paper’ but unworkable in real life?
Show Notes
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I am canadian (french canadian, so, sorry for my bad english). On the milk trade with Canada, I think you guys miss some very important points (maybe for simplification sake).
Since Canada is working with a supply management system, for Canada to open its market to the US, the first step would be to buy back the permits that dairy farmers paid for the right to produce milk. That alone would cost a fortune. Then, Canada would need to subsidies the farms as much as the United States does, so that they can be competitve. Also, very expensive.
Milk (and probably farms in general) is not like any products. Countries wants to be able to feed its people themself and not depend on other countrys. That is probably the reason why the United States subsidies their dairy farms so much.
In Canada, instead of subsidying our dairy farms, we are using permits, just like the Taxi business. Farmer paid a lot of money for the rights to produce milk and it wouldn’t be a fair playing field to make them compete with farmers who doesn’t have those fees, especially if their are heavely subsidy.
It’s like the governement helping Uber against the taxi industries and then, saying the taxi industries is not competitve. To get rid of permits for taxi is complicated enough, in the milk industry, its even more sensitive. Especially if a country does it just to please another country.
On that front, I’ve always consider the USA as the best ally a country could have and I’ve always taught that canada was lucky to have such a neighbor. That change a lot with the Nafta negociation. To me, the threat of Trump to impose special car tarifs if we didn’t agree to the new terms were less a negociation tactic then, well, threats to hurt us if we didn’t comply. Am I wrong to think that US-Canada relation is changed? Canada just lunch new initaive to help diversify trade partner, because we now know that the United States will use our relationship against us. The Iran deal is another conflict where the USA is trying to force our hands against our will (we want to respect the deal we agreed to, something that seems absolutly normal and that we usally expect from counrties like the USA).
Am I to pessimist in my view of our relationship? President Trump talked a lot about the milk tarifs, but I taught that even before the steel and aluminum tarifs, USA charged more tarifs from import goods from Canada than the other way around. So all of that is very frustrating to canadian.
Thanks,
Alex
I don’t hear much about gun safety in campaigns. Did the US just forget about Parkland? Love your podcast!!!!