Yeah, well I'm glad I bought my 15-inch MacBook Pro last year. A 10~15% price increase on a $1800 product would have sucked.
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Apple Raises iPad and iPod Prices in Japan
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What country in Europe are you talking about?
VAT has absolutely nothing to do with health care. VAT is just a sales tax, nothing more.
Thank God. Hopefully the demand doesn't drop for these products and domestic manufacturers (and some large retailers) see the Japanese consumer is still willing to spend money on price inflated goods, thereby raising their own prices and possibly getting that economy out of a tailspin.
Got a few American colleagues. So true. So true. some brought their family over just for the sake of treatment.
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What pays for health care, VAT or PAYE or what doesn't matter. That we have a lot of freeloader doesn't change though. Although hospitals now starting to check if visitors got insurance. Currently our UK NHS pays £70M per annum on freeloaders.
No, it's a TAX on the added value at each stage of manufacture/distribution:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_added_tax
Perhaps. However I doubt they will correct this if the rate changes in the other direction.
Maybe they should have removed the rear camera to "keep the price point" [ipod-style].
...So your solution for a country that has over $80,000 in debt per citizen, is to go out and... go further into debt to buy things they don't need? Hmm.
Question. What's wrong with saving money (after you've paid off all the debt of course) again? Where would the money come to finance investment without savings? Print it out of thin air, and take value from the existing currency? Why can't they just make more things in their country, sell those things overseas, consume less of it themselves, thus bringing more capital into the economy, paying down their debt, and stimulating the economy and the job creation you mentioned previously?
Just wondering.
"While there" - do you mean while on holiday or working in Europe? Because you do need a carte medicale to be reimbursed by the system. At least this was the case when I was living in France. Are other countries different?
What you wrote makes sense, unfortunately that's something in short supply. There's nothing wrong with saving money, of course, provided we have a sane monetary policy that doesn't eat away at the value of your savings (as we have now with artificially low interest rates and QE + infinity).
The answer to your sensible question is that our monetary system is based upon fractional reserve banking, whereby banks are allowed to "create" money by lending it - it literally doesn't exist before the loan is made, and the principal will never actually be paid back, because the quantity of money doesn't exist to pay back all existing debts - thus we have exponential debt growth, with relatively linear real economic growth.
Banks are only interested in the interest generated by these loans, and to continue to service this debt, the money supply must constantly be increased. Eventually the debt levels go parabolic (the hockey stick) and large amounts of derivatives (risk based instruments) and bad loans start to default and collapse.
This represents a reduction in the monetary base (unlike people calling for hyperinflation, this is actually deflationary). To counter this, the FED fires up the printing presses and pumps funny money into the system.
It's a lot less simple than just money printing = inflation. Remember there are 2 sides, destruction of bad debt and a huge derivatives market, and on the other side reckless money printing to counterbalance this. This is why we haven't experienced hyperinflation despite many calling for it (look what happened to gold recdently). The FED may be run by sociopaths, but they're not stupid.
Either way, the savers and sensible people get shafted.
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Please tell me you did not just use hash tags on a forum. Not everything is Twitter, dammit.
Sorry, but I don't believe it. I know many Brits really want to believe that NHS is the world's envy or whatever, but it doesn't make sense to pack up a family and move across an ocean for "cheaper," lower-quality health care, unless someone is extremely sick and the UK system is absurdly accommodating to freeloaders. Moving a family is not a cheap proposition either in money or other costs.
To the government of course stupid! VAT is a wonderful idea where companies get to be unpaid tax collectors for the government and unlike corporation or company taxes pretty, much unavoidable and complete with draconian penalties for not paying them (at least in the UK that is!)
Seriously though value added tax is a system where every entity in the supply chain charges VAT (20% in the UK) which is collected on behalf of the government and defrayed by the amount of VAT charged on purchases by that company, only joe public pays that 20% in full. Another thing is that consumer prices must legally include VAT so for instance the prices on Apple's UK website are the same as in the retail stores unlike the US where prices will be higher due to state taxes.
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How is Apple supposed to make any profit if people in Japan pay 20% less in dollars for products that still cost the same to produce?
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Has happened all the time. Australian dollar has doubled in value, and prices there have gone down. (However, Australians somehow don't see this because they translate all prices into US$ and forget their VAT).
Your assumptions how a weak currency would affect prices are absolutely uninformed. When Apple products are imported into Japan, they need to be paid for. The Japanese branch of Apple is paying in Yen, which are worth 20% less than they used to be. What happens to customers inside Japan is the same that happens if they travel to the USA as tourists and buy an iPad there: They have to exchange more Yen into dollars to buy the same product.
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I'm afraid it's true, whilst moving an entire family may be extreme, it's certainly the case that in some parts of the world, (the middle east is a problem) if you get diagnosed with say appendicitis, you're next move is to go to the airport, not the hospital, fly into Heathrow, get a cab to the hospital and get treated courtesy of the UK taxpayer.
The theory behind 'outsiders' paying to use the NHS is fine, in practice, a hospital will always treat someone based on need and not consider their ability to pay. All that can be sorted out later. Unfortunately later never comes for most of these cases.
No, but people do move tend to visit just before needing expensive healthcare.
Why is the NHS being discussed here? Only on the internet could a price rise in Japan result in a discussion about the NHS and immigration!
Just wanted to add....
I was in Japan early may and picked up an iPad Mini.
We live in China, so an ipad mini 16gb costs ￥2500 RMB, with the exchange rate, the 5% I got back from Japanese tax refund, my ipad costed somehting like ￥1750 RMB.
So that translates to a savings of 30%. Good deal for me. But it seems this price increase hurts the locals, and only prevents 'travelers' from capitalizing on the savings like I did.
I was in Japan early may and picked up an iPad Mini.
We live in China, so an ipad mini 16gb costs ￥2500 RMB, with the exchange rate, the 5% I got back from Japanese tax refund, my ipad costed somehting like ￥1750 RMB.
So that translates to a savings of 30%. Good deal for me. But it seems this price increase hurts the locals, and only prevents 'travelers' from capitalizing on the savings like I did.
Uh well. The Japanese were weakening the own currency to push exports (a weaker Yen means that Japanese products will be cheaper abroad), to avoid bankruptcies and unemployment. It was not done to stimulate anything.
While this makes imported products more expensive, it has no effect on local goods.
Exactly! Being from the U.K., it amazes me the ignorance on socialized democracy systems and the amount of fear mongering that the general U.S. population feeds into.
What I find most amusing is that the US spends more public money per person on health care than the UK.
The keyword here is "productivity". Car makers iike VW, BMW and Audi have, on average, increased the output (cars assembled) per employee between 5 and 10% every year for more than a decade. And as somebody who has visited both, US and German, car factories, this is visible to the naked eye.
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It is not really amusing (IMO, of course). It is sad. It is a free market gone haywire. There is absolutely no reason why a doctor in the US has to make 5-7 times more money than a doctor in France (while France has the best health care in the world and the US is not even in the top ten), why a simple dental procedure in the US is up to 8 times more expensive in the US, why identical medical drugs cost up to 400% of the European price in the US...
I am not a fan of any regulation per se, but doctors and clinics in the US would need some.
Yes, because god forbid Apple make less margin on their already high margin products!!!!!