cazalea
[Seiko Moderator]
20933
But Wait, There’s More! because states, like California, impose a USE TAX if you buy the watch out of country or state (separate from Tariffs)
If you get your watch via a dealer outside your own state (or county) you may not have to pay any sales tax (let’s take Oregon for example) at the point of sale. But California expects you to pay the tax you would owe if you bought it at home.
If your California dealer in LA or SFO is cooperative, you might pay the tax in your home county as opposed to the tax in a big city where many of the large retailers are located. With cars that are registered to a physical address, dealers are required to do that, but with other purchases it seems some discretion is permitted.
Sales tax rates in California vary from 7.75% to 10.75% SALES & USE TAX TABLES
Now if you import a watch from Europe by flying home with it on your wrist, let’s say, you may have to declare it at Customs and pay duty yourself, and later the Use Tax is additive to that.
How would the state know?
Customs may inform them, or you might talk about it on the web (there are watch lovers in the tax office too), or there might be a guy from the State on your tour group to Switzerland.
If your overseas purchase is shipped in, Fedex or other carriers may inform your state of the value the seller declares, or that you declare.
So in these cases, even if there is NO duty due at customs (as on food, some antiques, etc.) you may still be liable for some “transit tariffs”.
Before roughly 100 years ago, ALMOST ALL the government revenue in the US came from tariffs. See excerpt below or read this whole article by John Steel Gordon
Tariffs are among the oldest of taxes for the simple reason that they are easy to collect. Just send in the tax collectors and don’t let the goods being transported move until the duty has been paid. Being one of the earliest forms of taxation, it is not surprising that tariffs produced one of the earliest forms of tax evasion: smuggling.
In America’s colonial period, the east coast of the United States, with its many rivers and inlets that the small ships of those days could utilize, lent itself to smuggling… Rhode Island, with its long coastline and its many small harbors, was the epicenter of colonial smuggling, and opposed any attempts to suppress it. Rhode Island was the first colony to foreswear allegiance to Great Britain, two months before the Declaration of Independence. It was the only state not to send delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, fearing that a strong federal government, empowered to tax, would suppress smuggling. And it was the last state to ratify the Constitution, and did so only under the threat of having its exports taxed as if from a foreign nation.
When the Constitution took effect in 1789, the first order of business was to straighten out the nation’s disastrous financial situation. The State Department started out with only five employees while the Treasury Department had 40. Alexander Hamilton became the first Secretary of the Treasury, and immediately began to prepare a schedule of tariffs, along with excise taxes on such commodities as alcohol and tobacco.
NOTE: The Constitution forbids taxing the exports of any state, and so American tariffs have always been laid only on imports.
Hamilton’s tariffs transformed the American financial situation… By 1800, federal revenues, a mere $3.7 million in 1792, had nearly tripled to $10.8 million. About 90 percent of that revenue came from tariffs—a ratio that wouldn’t change much, except during the Civil War, for more than a century.
Depressing, isn't it? I think Tariffs are the reason the French invented wine…
Pfalzgrafenstein Castle — Tariff Collecting Waypoint in the middle of the Rhine
Quick Education: USA Tariff 2025 on Swiss Watches Introductory Course 101
Many of our members have formulated some incorrect assumptions about tariffs. This short article is designed to help clear up some of the misconceptions and incorrect assumptions. Many people assume that a 39% tariff that the USA is leveraging on all Swis...
I think you're missing half the story
Duties are assessed at a category (e g. Watches) and a country level. The part you listed is at the category level, any watch. On top of that there as a country level tariff on the declared value (cost, wholesale or retail) so the effective rate is actual...
Correct, there is no such decomposition for the new tarrifs which are additive.
If I buy a watch from overseas with Swiss movement it is considered a Swiss product and I have to pay 39% of the declared value in addition to the existing charges. Retailers, distributors etc have to do the same. The value of the import would be of cours...
So the part I missed is on top.
So if we use the 5 k watch declared import value $2500 put the country level 39% we get an additional $975. As I noted I still have not seen the actual numbers. Your statement makes sense.
Unfortunately this wholesale price effect is irrelevant to individual collectors.
If I buy from an independent watchmaker, at auction or pre owned outside of the US I have to pay the additional 39% on the full price. Which pretty much kills all such transactions on the spot.
But Wait, There’s More! because states, like California, impose a USE TAX if you buy the watch out of country or state (separate from Tariffs)
If you get your watch via a dealer outside your own state (or county) you may not have to pay any sales tax (let’s take Oregon for example) at the point of sale. But California expects you to pay the tax you would owe if you bought it at home. If your Cal...
more wine please 😂
and yet every Rolex AD in CA I go to has no watches to sell to me. Shows how many rich people we have here 🤣🤣🤣
Hold up your glass please
Bonus points if you can identify the wine Mike Forget it, I can’t spell or pronounce it (but it was good) Spanish rose wine ...
I did all my European watch transactions last year.
Strong Dollar plus you knew this was going to happen. He’s been blathering on about this for years
This is truly insane (worse than insane). Two weeks ago I ordered a hand made puukoo (hunting knife from Finland) from a knife maker in a small town in Finland. Shipping to the US was €50 by UPS.
A couple of days later I received a notification from UPS that I need to pay $635 in taxes and fees for the knife to be delivered in the US. I told them to return the package to the sender. I wrote the knife maker, he told me he had learned that declaring...
This too shall pass
It used to be we could visit almost any country, now we can’t. Things were looser, now they are tighter. Europe was a crazy mess of customs and border checkpoints. Now it’s not so much. We used to go to Mexico at the drop of a hat, now it’s too dangerous....
Perhaps not. For the better part of a century America has been . . .
. . . the market of choice for global producers, partly because it was once wealthy and prosperous, but also due to favorable levy treatment for imported goods. That's changing with the new administration. The current policy of reversing trade trends back...
As others have said…
This analysis is correct as to the product-specific tariff. Fortunately, watches under the harmonized tariff regime have experienced relatively low tariffs (try, in contrast, importing fabric!). Now, however, we have a country specific tariff that will be...
Quick tutorial on “Trade Imbalance”
The gal that cuts my hair and I have a 100% trade imbalance. She buys steaks from a guy in Kansas City -they have a 100% trade imbalance. That’s how the system works!
But then we lose real meaning.
One cannot treat isolated purchases as equivalent to the systematic exchange of goods and services between nations without affecting, and losing, meaning. There seems to be a conflation here of unidirectional transactions as presented in these examples, w...
Really? How about another example, more realistic.
Guatemala is friendly to the US. It exports coffee. US does not produce coffee. It is too poor to buy American goods. There is large trade imbalance, let's slap on huge tarrifs. Which reminds me of another example ... Switzerland!!! Buys tons of American ...
Just purchased a watch from overseas
I just imported a watch from Germany, and yes, I ended up paying tariffs about (25%) or so. So you will pay tariffs, be ware.