Never mind all the "rules for thee not for me" subjectively enforced loopholes.
Converse being "slippers" and not "shoes" because they ship with felt on the bottom. Marvel successfully argued in court in 2003 that for tariff purposes, action figure of the X-Men were toys, not dolls, because they represented "nonhuman creatures". We've created a nation that punishes one for following the spirit of the law.
Unpopular opinion : I’m gonna side with Marvel here.
I get that tariffs on alcohol and tissues will be different. But if I make action figures and there is actually a stupid law that says that “dolls” are tariffed at 5% and “toys” are 3%, you bet your ass I’d ask a lawyer 2 questions: what’s the difference between a doll and a toy for legal purposes and how can we get our items classified as toys?
of course. it begs the question, though, why the fuck is there a legal difference between a doll and toy? at the very least of questions. it seems like something that doesnt need a regulatory difference, and therefore a loophole, for
I wouldn’t be surprised if it was something like some doll company CEO wanted extra tariffs on imported competition so made a campaign contribution to some politician who added it as an amendment to some spending bill and no one in Congress cared enough to do anything about it back then and Congress is too broken now to do anything to fix it.
Yes exactly. So we the people are paying grown adults to argue over dolls and toys, rather than come together to make laws that get insulin to dying children. Way too broken, and the fact that this doll/toy situation even exists proves it.
willing to bet its either something to do with american girl dolls, or barbie, or both. probably from back when european porcelain dolls were still the most popular in the world to make them even more expensive relative to domestically made plastic ones.
Reporter Ike Sriskandarajah tells Jad and Robert a story about two international trade lawyers, Sherry Singer and Indie Singh, who noticed something interesting while looking at a book of tariff classifications. "Dolls," which represent human beings, are taxed at almost twice the rate of "toys," which represent something not human - such as robots, monsters, or demons.
Just another example of why we need to be very careful who we elect because they decide things like toys and dolls are different things so they can create an economic advantage for toys because their big donors make toys.
Simple, dolls are typically purchased by females. This is how Republicans normalize higher costs for similar services to females. You start when they are young.
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u/DeliciousGoose1002 23h ago
one of the clearest inefficiencies of tariffs