[psychlops]

I could be wrong, but think the German economy just broke last week when they blew the cap off their debt ceiling and kicked current day payments to future generations. Note that Germany protects its production with tariffs and VATs, the rough average I've found is 19-21%.

I think China is the one to watch. They have double the energy output of the US and are basically the production capital of the world for the foreseeable future unless something changes.

[xyzzyz]

Germany doesn't protect its production with tariffs any more than, say, North Carolina does. There are no German tariffs, because Germany is part of European Union, which sets up common, shared tariff regime, and tariff-free goods movement within EU. Germany can lobby within EU to propose tariffs that it considers beneficial to it, just like North Carolina can in US, but if other EU members don't like it enough, it will not go through.

Second, how does VAT protect domestic production? VAT applies to both imported and domestically manufactured goods equally. VAT is really ultimately just a sales tax, just collected in a somewhat different way, and you pay the same sales tax regardless of where the good was produced.

[psychlops]

Thank you for clarifying, it did not occur to me that member states paid VATs. From outside the EU, the VAT is no different than a tariff. They are both taxes which inflate the cost to do business. From your example, I think it's fair to sum the state taxes into US tariffs for comparison.

You did send me down a research rabbit hole trying to better understand VAT. It's complex so I picked a car as a test product. As a comparison, I found that to import a car from Germany into the US it costs 2.5% of the cars value. North Carolina charges an additional 3% state tax on it for a grand total of 5.5%.

To import the same German car into France the cost is (cough) 20%.

To import an American car into France the same 20% is paid plus a 10% import fee for a total of 30%. I'm sure I'm glazing over many, many smaller charges/exemptions in these examples.

To answer your question about protection using the numbers above, companies outside the eu that want to compete at an equal price with an equivalent German car would need to do so with a product that is at least 10% cheaper.