3mo ago

The simple math behind Trump’s tariffs: How the White House calculated the new rates and why it’s not reciprocal at all

The simple math behind Trump’s tariffs

Financial journalist James Surowiecki noted the tariff rate for other nations Trump showed off is not related to a tariff American manufactures pay, but a calculation using the trade deficit.

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Just more proof that Trump is the dumbest of fox, except for all of those who voted for him. They are definitely much much much more stupid.
Is there any actual rationale for this calculation, even a bad one?
- Trump sees trade through a mercantilism lens. Any trade deficit we have is bad by default and the deficit is how bad we are "ripped off" by importing that countries goods. The only way to "fix" the imbalance is for them to import more of our goods.
  Its rooted in the 16th-18th century so its totally the best system
  
  Yeah this. The only way to counter these tariffs is to buy as much from the US as you sell to it.
- His logic is: I walk into a store and buy a hat for 10$ and sell them a shoe for 7$. This means the store ripped me off by 3$. To counter this, I will add a tarriff of (3/10)/2 = 15% to all business I do with this store so they dont dare sell me anything in the future.
  
  Ah, so not only does he not understand what a tariff is, he doesn't even really understand the concept of money, or math, or know the difference between a hat and a shoe.
- Trump was mad
  
  Was?
- They just typed "give me a reciprocal tariff for every country the US trades with" into ChatGPT
The two big charts with the countries and "discounted" figures.....all the countries discount tariffs are simply halved with a minimum of 10%. Except a couple of countries are a couple percentage points off from that and instead of it being for some purposeful reason, I'm pretty sure whoever made the chart just failed at dividing by two.

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