Well, it is not like there are a lot environmentally friendly options anyway.

My vote would go for sudden explosions of shadow fleet ships all over the world.

Juicy! 👏🔥

Why is Bulgarian warehouse at basically the same location is punished with 20% tax while Turkish warehouse can ship the same brush to a customer in Spain (EU) with 0% tax? No convenience advantage for Bulgarians here.

Another example then. There are two identical mail order warehouses next to each other selling identical plastic Chinese toilet brush. The only difference - one is in Bulgaria (EU), another is 20 meters away across the border line in Turkey (not EU).

Nobody is asking to support some EU industry with subsidies or other aid. Is asking for identical taxing regime too much?

A simple analogy then. There are two identical shops next to your house, both selling exact same type of milk. Government says - one shop has to pay 20% tax from sale, another can pay 0%. Why should one shop owner by treated differently than another? Same case here.

Unsustainable for European budgets to keep subsidizing Chinese imports by not taxing them when at the same time they tax local retail businesses who sell those exact same imported products.

And there are more efficient ways to reduce poverty than by provision of unsustainable and unfair tax advantages for low value imports.

Retail store already has more costs than a mail order warehouse - higher rent and relative labor cost. The resulting higher pre-tax prices are that cost of “convenience”. Adding 21% VAT on top of that is just unfair competition.

Taxes, in fact, are necessary to pay for the welfare state we have here in Europe. If not via VAT, those taxes will have to come somewhere. And killing EU retail industries in no way will help to maintain the tax base.

No argument here, my point is that why should local grocery store sell the same plastic toiler brush 21% (VAT) more expensive than Temu in an untaxed package. Either make it 0% VAT in the store or put 21% VAT on the package. Even playing field.

Keep it up and soon that “consumer” will have no job and income to be a consumer.

Then ask for 0% VAT instead of supporting unfair competition. Less retail also means less economic activity in supporting industries (real estate, professional services, etc).

5bn? Immense. Assuming 20 eur value, it is VAT exempt 100bn trade. Unfair competition with EU based VAT paying businesses. EU retail industry is getting crushed, especially in low value goods segments.

Seeing numerous glowing youtube Chinese car reviews by UK car magazines and bloggers it sure looks like it. UK does seem a lot more welcoming to CN imports than EU which will devastate whatever is left of car manufacturing in UK.

Quite typical difference. My experience has had 5x price difference for functionally similar equipment from China and Italy. I have concluded that EU producers can only compete in large complex project industrial equipment segments. Anything standartized and mass produced, CN is way cheaper.

What could be comparable data for EU? Just to understand whether such subsidy levels are “typical” or not.

Norway also seems to be moving towards using its wealth fund to guarantee 9 figure loans to Ukraine. Ragozin is scraping the very bottom of his imperialist soul to come up with lame excuses.