TL;DR I didn’t make it in time. Fuck you Trump!
Edit: For those asking, this was https://www.irvwpc.com/ Please support them if you can.
TL;DR I didn’t make it in time. Fuck you Trump!
Edit: For those asking, this was https://www.irvwpc.com/ Please support them if you can.
I can understand why they’d want to get rid of this… It was very generous and often meant that buying goods from an overseas supplier was cheaper than buying the exact same items from a US-based supplier. For example, I’ve bought MikroTik hardware from a Latvian supplier (Getic) because it ended up noticeably cheaper than buying from a US store.
Most countries have duty-free thresholds that are much lower, around the equivalent of $50-100 before taxes and duties are applied.
protectionism doesn’t work tho
I agree, and don’t think there should be any tariffs.
Having said that, a US store that has to pay sales tax is never going to win over a foreign store that doesn’t have to pay sales tax. Even after shipping, the exact same product will likely be cheaper to buy from the European store.
If you buy something from Europe under the de minimis exception, there’s no tax applied at all. European countries/companies usually don’t tax purchases from outside the EU, and the US doesn’t tax it either.
Applying the same tax for both US and international purchases makes sense IMO. This is what Australia does: The sales tax rate is 10% across the whole country, and foreign stores that sell to Australians have to collect 10% tax and send it to the Australian government. Collecting taxes at the point of payment, even for foreign stores, avoids customers having to pay taxes separately when the package arrives in the country.
This is probably why the EU itself recently changed the rules and VAT (the EU’s version of Sales Tax) is payable on all purchases from outside the EU, no matter how small the value, but import tax remains only payable on purchases above €150.
They also set up a system so that non-EU retail sellers can collect VAT directly on payment - just like EU ones do - so for example a buyer from the EU buying stuff via AliExpress will have the VAT added to the price during checkout.
That’s what Australia does too. Since the sellers already had their systems set up to handle it for Australia, it was probably easy for them to extend it to be used for the EU too.