• procrastitron@lemmy.world
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    17 hours ago

    Demonstrating once again that he has no idea how tariffs work.

    Tariffs are taxes on the importation of physical goods and they’re charged at the port of entry.

    Movies aren’t physical goods and they don’t go through a port of entry.

    There’s literally no way to put tariffs on foreign movies but Trump is too stupid to understand that.

    The closest thing they could do is charge tariffs on DVDs, and that would have zero impact on anything.

    • zurohki@aussie.zone
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      15 hours ago

      Sounds like it’s even stupider than that - he wants to tariff movies sold in the US by US companies which were filmed overseas. So it not only doesn’t go through a port, the finished movie doesn’t cross borders at all.

      Hollywood accounting is very experienced at making money disappear when taxes are due, I can’t imagine tariffs would pose any problem at all. Anything that crosses the border will be worth $0 and make a loss, they’ll have the paperwork to prove it.

      I might be completely wrong about what Trump meant here. Which is fair, really - he likely doesn’t know what he meant either.

    • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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      16 hours ago

      Donald Trump on Sunday announced on his Truth Social platform a 100% tariff on all movies “produced in Foreign Lands”, saying the US film industry was dying a “very fast death” due to the incentives that other countries were offering to draw American film-makers.

      I do not know how it works, but he wants American movies that filmed outside US to get tariffs.

      • MudMan@fedia.io
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        16 hours ago

        Hey, that makes two of you. He clearly doesn’t know how any of this works, either.

        But yeah, it also drives me nuts that people can have entire threads of posts without having clicked through to the thing they are reacting to once.

        You may even draw some connections between that and Trump getting elected in the first place, if you wanted to put yourself in a very deep pit of despair. I mean, this whole thing is in reaction to a dumb tweet. Even Trump doesn’t seem to know what he’s talking about or how any of this would work.

        But he said it, and now we’re talking about it without any understanding on what it is, because it’s just some crap he posted in the crapper. And tomorrow he will see what people are tweeting back and double down on whatever gets him the most attention.

        I am SO tired of this century.

        If you want to do something useful go get Romanians on the platforms to get their friends off their asses and not electing a Trumpian president. That may at least still do something.

        • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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          15 hours ago

          The only way i see it applied, is only to US companies that they film outside US. So the state comes and asks how much did you spend filming there? $5 million, well here is a $5 million bill to pay us.

          • MudMan@fedia.io
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            15 hours ago

            Yeah, but now you’re implementing it for him.

            Filming on location is a bit of an afterthought, and typically local film comissions will spend money creating incentives for it when they have the right conditions for it. You know, weather, facilities, locations, some beaches or mountains you can pretend are a fantasy thing with dragons…

            But the movie is not necessarily produced there, and there is no real process for the government of the place where the production firm originates to go add a tax disincentive on their end. I mean, at what stage? Using what instrument? Production companies for movies are often made ad-hoc for an individual project anyway.

            He’s just taking out of his ass, as always, and we’re giving him too much attention, as always. If he gets to doubling down on this he may try to do something, and he probably should figure out himself what that is. I’m not gonna do his homework for him.

            • nuko147@lemm.eeOP
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              15 hours ago

              He’s just taking out of his ass, yes, but he has others to figure the how and the terms for him. Or he can do the method he used, putting tariffs all over the world. Asking chatGPT lmao

              • MudMan@fedia.io
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                15 hours ago

                For sure, but at least on that they were just being dumb about figuring out an amount to slot into a tax process that was already in place.

                I don’t know that they have a mechanism or instrument to tax any of this at any point. And I’d love to see them have Grok or ChatGPT or whatever design a loophole-free tax that targets some company of unknown origin shooting some footage in some location through some service provider or subsidiary and then post-producing that footage somewhere else and then showing that footage in cinemas, TV and streaming in some other location.