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The simple math behind Trump’s tariffs: How the White House calculated the new rates and why it’s not reciprocal at all
(www.the-independent.com)
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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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.
Does he think people will just start buying things they don't need to make the tariff go away?
He's a complete moron who believes he's an absolute genius who thought of something new that nobody EVER considered before, and convinced himself that its the solution to everything, based on no evidence at all, other than his massive intellect.
Or he's just a craven traitor doing Putin's bidding, and deliberately destroying our economy.
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.
Sounds about right
They just typed "give me a reciprocal tariff for every country the US trades with" into ChatGPT
Trump was mad
Was?
Correct.
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.