I’m going to be scathing in my critique because these people are both dishonest and incompetent and deserve to be called out on it.
Here’s their formula:
It’s a ridiculously simplistic formula.
First, a stylistic quibble. What is up with those asterisks in the denominator? I’ll give the authors the benefit of the doubt and assume that they wanted the formula to be understandable by people who aren’t familiar with standard math notation, in which the juxtaposition of variables indicates multiplication. But to see it written that way in an official document is just… weird.
The i subscripts in the formula just indicate that the formula is to be applied to one country at a time — country i. I’ll therefore omit the ‘i’s from the rest of the discussion.
∆𝜏 is the amount by which the tariff currently being placed on that particular country should change (according to the Trump administration bozos) in order to drive the bilateral trade deficit to zero. In other words, 𝜏 (the existing rate) + ∆𝜏 (the change in rate) would be the correct final rate (according to the formula) to achieve the dubious goal of a trade balance.
The inanity of insisting on bilateral trade balances
We’re off to a bad start already, because the notion that every bilateral trade deficit should be zero is ridiculous on its face. Let’s look at a simplified example. Suppose Malawi sells us only mangoes, and the US (henceforth ‘we’, since I’m American) sells them only air conditioners. In order for the trade deficit to be zero, we need to buy the same dollar amount in mangoes that they buy in air conditioners, and we should adjust the tariffs we impose on Malawi until that happens. Why is this desirable? Why should the amount of mangoes be linked to the amount of air conditioners? Who the hell knows? It’s just Trump’s idiotic obsession, and it makes no sense.
To make the stupidity even more obvious, think of an analogous situation. Ernesto sells tacos from a taco truck, and George runs a landscaping business. George occasionally buys tacos from Ernesto, and Ernesto hires George to mow his lawn. Suppose Ernesto pays more to George each month than George spends buying tacos from Ernesto. Is Ernesto being cheated? Is he subsidizing George? No and no. George gets every taco he pays for, and Ernesto gets his lawn mown on schedule. It would be ridiculous to say that either of them is being cheated, and ridiculous to say that the goal should be to make the amounts even.
Why is Trump obsessed with trade deficits? It’s because he is confused enough to believe that the existence of a bilateral trade deficit — a trading deficit with a particular country, Malawi in my example — means that they are cheating us and that we’re subsidizing them. He actually believes that we are just handing over the money, getting nothing in return. In reality, we get every frikkin’ mango we pay for, and they get every air conditioner they pay for. No one is being cheated, and to demand that the dollar amounts should match is idiotic and pointless.
Trump actually declares in his executive order that trade deficits are a “national emergency”. He does this because he doesn’t have the authority to impose tariffs unless it’s a national emergency. Otherwise, the job falls to Congress, where it belongs. Trump is lying about the supposed national emergency.
The formula
According to the USTR statement, the x in the formula is the dollar value of what we export to a particular country, while m is the dollar value of what we import from them. The numerator, x – m, is therefore equal to the trade imbalance. If x is bigger than m, then the difference is positive, and we are running a trade surplus. If x is less than m, then x – m is negative, and we have a trade deficit. But note that they have it backwards in the formula: it should be m – x, not x – m. Why? Because the denominator is positive. If both the numerator and denominator are positive, as they would be in the case of a trade surplus, the formula would deliver a ∆𝜏 that is positive. In other words, the formula as written would actually increase the tariffs for the countries with whom we have a trade surplus, and it would decrease the tariffs for countries with whom we have a trade deficit. The formula therefore punishes the (supposedly) good guys and rewards the (supposedly) bad ones, which is opposite to the administration’s intentions. One more indication of their clown car incompetence.
They could easily have corrected the formula if they were aware of the error. Just put a negative sign in front of the formula, or swap x and m, or redefine x and m as the amounts exported and imported by the other country, instead of the amounts exported and imported by the US. Any one of those three would fix the problem, but no.
Let’s assume that we have corrected that mistake for them and that the numerator now equals the amount of the trade deficit, not the surplus. What about the denominator? Well, it just so happens that the values they chose for 𝜀 and 𝜓 are 4 and 0.25, respectively. Those multiply to 1, thus canceling each other. How convenient. These charlatans actually and blatantly chose the values so that they would cancel out, instead of using the most accurate numbers they could find in the literature. They cheated.
After that suspiciously convenient choice of parameters, the formula is now just ∆𝜏 = trade deficit divided by total imports:
Do they actually apply this formula? No. They massage its output even more. They divide ∆𝜏 by two, for no good reason. That means that for the formula to match the actual tariffs, they should multiply the denominator by 2. They fail to do that, as you’d expect. Why 2? My hypothesis is that even those dunces realized that the numbers they were getting from the formula were ridiculously large, and dividing by 2 was a way to get them down to a range that they considered reasonable. More number fudging with no theoretical justification.
Next problem: according to the corrected formula, ∆𝜏 should be negative in the case of trade surpluses. That is, we should decrease the tariffs on imports from those countries. If the existing tariff rate is small enough, it should even go negative, according to the formula, in order to balance our trade with that country. Trump doesn’t like that, so he has arbitrarily declared that everyone will pay a minimum of 10%, whether there’s a trade deficit or a trade surplus. In other words, the policy, which is already misguided, is also unfair — it says that it’s OK for the US to screw other countries by imposing high tariffs, even if they’re doing the “right” thing and allowing us to run a trade surplus with them.
The actual rates
Here are the charts spelling out the actual tariff rates.
The chart labels them “Reciprocal Tariffs”, but that is a lie, since the formula doesn’t take into account the tariff rate charged by the other countries on our exports to them. It’s completely missing from the formula. They aren’t reciprocal tariffs, they’re misguided tariffs in response to trade deficits, and they punish US importers instead of the countries selling us those goods and services.
The label on the middle column is wrong for the same reason, and it’s even further wrong because it depicts a bilateral trade deficit as a quantifier of “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, which it isn’t. We can run a bilateral trade deficit for no other reason than that Americans want more of what the other country is selling us than they want from us. That’s not “currency manipulation and trade barriers”, and the Trump administration is dishonest for trying to sell it that way.
The numbers in the middle column are apparently those that come straight out of the formula. You can tell, because the tariffs that are actually being imposed by the US are just the middle column divided by 2. That’s the arbitrary factor of 2 I mentioned above. The only exceptions are in those cases where dividing by 2 would leave a less than 10% tariff, in which case the tariff is set to 10%. Gotta make sure that everyone gets screwed at least that much.
The US Trade Representative’s explanation
Now some excerpts from the USTR statement. The very first paragraph:
Reciprocal tariffs are calculated as the tariff rate necessary to balance bilateral trade deficits between the U.S. and each of our trading partners. This calculation assumes that persistent trade deficits are due to a combination of tariff and non-tariff factors that prevent trade from balancing. Tariffs work through direct reductions of imports.
Well, duh. The phrase “tariff and non-tariff factors” covers literally every possible factor in the entire world. Yes, there are actual reasons that we buy more in mangoes from Malawi than they buy from us in air conditioners. Therefore we should conclude that we’re getting ripped off?
While individually computing the trade deficit effects of tens of thousands of tariff, regulatory, tax and other policies in each country is complex, if not impossible, their combined effects can be proxied by computing the tariff level consistent with driving bilateral trade deficits to zero.
Not by any reasonable person. You need to do the homework before making policy decisions that will affect the entire world economy. If they want less of what we’re selling than we want of what they’re selling, that can lead to a trade deficit, independent of all the factors they list above.
This doesn’t mean that trade practices can’t be unfair, but it does mean that to assume something nefarious is going on merely because we’re running a bilateral trade deficit is stupid.
If trade deficits are persistent because of tariff and non-tariff policies and fundamentals, then the tariff rate consistent with offsetting these policies and fundamentals is reciprocal and fair.
No. If we like Malawian mangoes more than the Malawians like our air conditioners, nothing is broken. Nothing is unfair. No reason to blindly punish the Malawians. It just means that American demand for Malawian mangoes is greater than Malawian demand for American air conditioners. No big deal.
A case could be made for nudging the US’s global trade deficit — which is the aggregate trade deficit we’re running with all of our trading partners put together — toward zero, but trying to eliminate every bilateral trade deficit is bonkers. These people are clueless.
Consider an environment in which the U.S. levies a tariff of rate τ_i on country i and ∆τ_i reflects the change in the tariff rate. Let ε<0 represent the elasticity of imports with respect to import prices…
Right there they say that ε < 0, but a few sentences later they assign it a value of 4. The last time I checked, 4 was greater than 0, not less. Their sloppiness is consistent, at least. What is wrong with these folks?
let φ>0 represent the passthrough from tariffs to import prices, let m_i>0 represent total imports from country i, and let x_i>0 represent total exports. Then the decrease in imports due to a change in tariffs equals ∆τ_i*ε*φ*m_i<0. Assuming that offsetting exchange rate and general equilibrium effects are small enough to be ignored, the reciprocal tariff that results in a bilateral trade balance of zero satisfies:
As noted earlier, they have the numerator backwards. It should be positive for a trade deficit, not negative, in order for ∆𝜏 to be positive, which represents an increase in tariff rates.
To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.
Which inside the Trump administration is less than 0, lol. And how convenient that εφ multiplies to 1, as noted above.
Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25.
It wasn’t to be conservative. It was to fudge the numbers so that the product εφ came out to be 1. And picking a value of 4 for elasticity isn’t “being conservative” in the sense of “this value is more likely to be correct”. It’s conservative in the sense of “we’d better make this number big because otherwise the tariffs will be so outrageously huge that everyone will see that we’re idiots.”
Think about it. They want φ to be small (whether or not the evidence supports it), because they want to maintain the fiction that other countries will mostly absorb the tariffs and that importers and retail customers will shoulder less of the burden and therefore experience less inflation. On the other hand, a small φ balloons the value of ∆𝜏 to ridiculous levels. So they set 𝜀 to 4 to bring ∆𝜏 down, even while acknowledging that the true value of 𝜀 is closer to 2.
The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).
I haven’t verified that, but either way I would sure like to see the actual number. Why didn’t they include it? Is it really 0.25? In any case, the question of pass-through to retail prices is irrelevant when you’re trying to determine which country is absorbing the cost of the tariffs. It’s the pass-through factor to importers that is relevant, and that is close to 1, even if the pass-though to retail customers is less. That means that US importers are bearing the cost of the tariffs and passing some of that cost on to consumers. It’s inflationary, and it’s a tax by the US government on US importers, not a tax on foreign countries. Which contradicts Trump’s whole rationale.
The reciprocal tariffs were left-censored at zero.
No, they were “left-censored” at 10, as you can see by looking at the charts. 10 is the minimum tariff you’ll see in the third column of the charts.
Higher minimum rates might be necessary to limit heterogeneity in rates and reduce transshipment.</p
No explanation of why “heterogeneity in rates” is to be avoided, and no comment on the fact that it isn’t avoided, given the large range of new tariff rates in the third column of the charts. That means there’s still plenty of incentive for transshipment. Take Vietnam, for instance, with a new rate of 46%. There’s a *lot* of incentive for them to transship through one of the countries with a 10% rate.
Tariff rates range from 0 to 99 percent.
There is no inherent limit. Tariffs could be 100%, 180%, or 2100%. 99% is an arbitrary limit. Tariffs could even be negative in a perverse world, in which case the government would be giving importers a bonus for importing more and nudging us toward a trade deficit. Obviously that wouldn’t happen in practice, but my point is that the 99% is arbitrary, and anyone who thinks tariffs are limited to being less than 100% doesn’t understand tariffs.
The unweighted average across deficit countries is 50 percent, and the unweighted average across the entire globe is 20 percent.
It’s pointless to state the unweighted average. An unweighted average is really just a weighted average with all of the weights set to 1. That gives Liechtenstein equal weight with China, which is stupid. Our trade volume with China is some 1,770 times as great as our trade volume with Liechtenstein, but these geniuses are weighting them evenly and presenting the average as if it had some kind of significance. Morons.
Weighted by imports, the average across deficit countries is 45 percent, and the average across the entire globe is 41 percent. Standard deviations range from 20.5 to 31.8 percentage points.
Here, they tell us that the import-weighted average of tariffs is 41 percent. Combine that with their assumed pass-through rate of 0.25. meaning that exporters in other countries will shoulder 75% of the tariff burden. That’s unrealistic and it clashes with the actual data, but even if you take the Trumpers at their word and assume that only 25% of the additional cost due to tariffs is passed to importers, that’s still over 10%, because 0.25 * 41% is greater than 10%. 10% import inflation! So much for Trump’s campaign promise: “I’ll reduce prices on day one.” Idiot.
Good job, Trump supporters. By voting for him, you put power in the hands of these dishonest and incompetent economic doofuses.
Allan Miller,
A Welsh couple (retired teachers) fairly recently bought a place in the village as a holiday home. They’re both lovely, the wife is first-language Welsh (mid-Wales farming family) and has assured me that spelling in Welsh is accurately phonetic, if you know the rules, “w” being a vowel the iconic example.
Alan:
Ah, OK. Somehow I had the impression you were born there.
I was going to post very similar. I took night classes run by Welsh-speaking students, and soon learnt correct pronunciation; it’s consistent. There’s none of the multiple anomalies of English. But, like French people with ‘th’, if you didn’t learn ‘ch’ and ‘ll’ by 5, it’s harder in later life. I can get them in isolation, but ‘Machynlleth’, I have to take a run at.
But I digress. Trump’s a twat, ain’t he?
Ah, now I see how I got that impression. Did a comment search and found this:
Alan:
Regarding Trump’s fantasy of eliminating the income tax via tariffs, I found this at CNN:
Even 100% would be insufficient, since that figure assumes that imports would remain constant. Trump’s pipe dream ain’t gonna happen.
keiths,
Hence my reference to the Cornish saying about kittens and kipper boxes. My mother had to go to hospital for my birth, she ended up with a prolapsed womb. Nearest was Loveday Street Maternity Hospital in Birmingham. Accident of birth, I could claim Brummie citizenship, but two weeks in a cot is doesn’t count to get in the Brum club.
Alan:
That’s how it works here, at least for now. If you’re born in the US, you’re a US citizen, regardless of the status of your parents. Trump is trying to end that, because he’s an asshole, but it’s in the 14th amendment:
I hereby claim the right to claim my Warwickshire immigrant status.
Thanks for that link, BTW. Only ten years ago but seems like a lifetime.
No one in the Trump administration wants to claim “credit” for the lamebrained tariff formula.
From a Rolling Stone article titled ‘Economically Indefensible’: Trump’s Bad Tariff Math Was Too Stupid To Implement:
I will go out on a limb and make some predictions.
The American economy has already corrected for the tariffs. We absorbed the effects of covid, and tariffs are a drop in the bucket in comparison. Assuming they are bad, they are just taxes. Americans absorbed a doubling of food prices in the last four years, and nothing catastrophic happened.
Populism is not going away. Immigration is going to change elections.
I expect the Ukraine war to end this year, and no one will be happy. Russia and Ukraine have been at it for centuries, and that will not stop.
Should the Russian invasion of Ukraine stop this year, I will be very happy.
Taxes do not smear the international reputation of the US, nor did COVID19.
petrushka:
Where are you getting your numbers? I looked up the Consumer Price Index for food, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics:
Mar 2021 271.8
Mar 2025 337.7
337.7/271.8 = 1.24
That’s only a 24% increase over the last four years, not a doubling (which would be 100%).
Nor do they empty shelves.
I buy groceries. Not every item doubled, but my wife keeps track of how much we spend. Doubling is a slight exaggeration, but rotisserie chickens went from $4.50 on sale to $9, and never on sale. Eggs went from $3 on sale to $12. They are back to $6, and $4 on sale.
I have to ask, why would you consult an index, when you could just look at your own purchases. I understand that anecdotes are not science, but it’s not difficult to took at your checking account.
This leads me to think about why people are upset about immigration, when statistics don’t show an increase in crime. Have you personally had a bad experience? If not, can you think of a reason why not? I know why I haven’t.
petrushka:
It’s because your statement…
…is not equivalent to
“Petrushka” isn’t a proxy for “Americans”, and “rotisserie chickens and eggs” aren’t a proxy for “food”.
I bought an expensive computer last month in anticipation of the Windows 10 end-of-support deadline, but I wouldn’t characterize that as “consumer spending on electronics surged in April.”
The CPI is the right gauge to consult when deciding whether it’s true that “Americans absorbed a doubling of food prices”. It isn’t, and they didn’t. Americans are only paying about 24% more for their food now versus four years ago.
“Seersha” apparently, though I’ve been saying “Sorcha”! Means ‘freedom’. I met a guy in (London)Derry with a dog of that name. Very friendly considering we were English. Gaelic languages are odd, because they weren’t originally written, so someone chose to make them impenetrable. eg A’Mhaidhean is pronounced “Uh-vatchen”.
Lord Cavendish made reference to the “Hooker” pronunciation of “Holker” during a talk today. An American had asked if he’d thought of changing it. He suggested they might as well change their slang.
Alan:
Allan:
The vowel is slightly different. Closer to ‘sir’ than ‘seer’. I only know this because I saw the actress Saoirse Ronan explaining it on late-night once.
That has always baffled me. A lot of weird English spellings are just fossils of past pronunciations. The ‘k’ in ‘knee’ used to be pronounced, for instance. But what is the rationale for the bizarre letter-to-phoneme mappings in the Gaelic languages?
Saoirse Ronan Explains How to Pronounce Her Name
petrushka:
It’s because they’re constantly being lied to by their xenophobic president and like-minded Republicans. Example:
The Kiffness – Eating the Cats ft. Donald Trump (Debate Remix)
Languages are fascinating this way. Early North American explorers from France ask the natives what the local region was called in their language (which perhaps had no written form). The natives said the region was called “ee-en-wah”, which the French wrote down phonetically. Thus we have Illinois.
I went to college with a girl named Siobhan (there’s an accent over the ‘a’, which I don’t know how to insert). This is pronounced “shevawn”.
But there are regional variations in the US. The city in Texas is pronounced “hyou- ston”, but the street in Greenwich Village is pronounced “How-ston”.
Many people pronounce the ‘t’ in “often”, but it’s as silent as the ‘t’ in “listen.”
I was told that Canyon de Chelly in Arizona is pronounced “canyon de shay”.
You do know what a loss leader is, right? Eggs are a very popular item, and rotisserie chickens are absolutely famous! So prices you pay for those specific items (and bread and milk) will experience large price swings driven by local shops marketing tactics — nothing to do with the economy.
This does explain your strange relationship with evidence, your obliviousness to confounding factors. Perhaps you developed a smoked salmon habit, or discovered the joys of filet mignon. And cherry on top, “it’s not difficult to look at your checking account” is an epic demonstration of Kahneman’s System One.
I suspect that you have not personally had a bad experience for the same reason I have not. Where we live. I understand why the fear of violent crime keeps climbing despite the actual rates dropping, even if my personal experience is entirely uninformative: was zero, still zero. Why do you think people are upset about immigration?
Beats me. My reading of the statistics is that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes, less likely to be unemployed, than the population as a whole. To become citizens, they must demonstrate a better understanding of the American political system than most Americans can.
But I wonder how much Trump and Fox News have to do with it. They present things like Petrushka does – they found an instance where one undocumented immigrant committed a violent crime, and have spent many months using that instance as synecdoche, as typical or inevitable.
Note that virulent anti-immigrant Stephen Miller’s ancestors came to the US in 1903 seeking asylum. There has to be some irony in there somewhere.
Flint:
Not that he would ever admit it. That guy is creepy, at a Steve Bannon level of creepiness.
I recently ran across this account from his third grade teacher:
Flint:
Not sure what platform you’re on, but here’s how I do it on my phone and PC.
On my phone (Android, Samsung keyboard), I press and hold the letter ‘a’, and a menu pops up listing all the possible variations of that letter: å æ ā ă ą ª à á â ã ä . While still holding, I slide my finger over to the desired character and release.
On my Windows 11 PC, I click on the little keyboard icon in the system tray, and a keyboard pops up on the screen. I click and hold the ‘a’, and all of the variants appear. While still holding, I move the cursor over the desired character and release.
If you don’t see the keyboard icon in the system tray, you can enable it by right-clicking the taskbar, selecting ‘Taskbar Settings’, expanding the ‘System tray icons’ dropdown, and then under ‘Touch keyboard’, select ‘Show touch keyboard icon Always’.
LA port director says it faces steep drop in shipping
ETA full video:
Port of Los Angeles bracing for 35% drop in imports next week
Now Trump wants to tariff foreign-made films at 100%. The man is mad. Quite mad.
And he wants to reopen Alcatraz. WTF? Whatever pops into his head.
From the NYT:
A national security threat? This is batshit 25th amendment behavior.
I’m currently lying in bed listening to the dawn chorus. Imagine the power if, rather than just gibbering on the Internet, I could say “I am going to tariff pigeons”.
[Send].
Then lay back while my staff scurries around trying to rationalise this thought – “you can’t ignore the President’s desires” – and MAGAs suddenly discover they’ve always been annoyed by the pigeons.
Also from the NYT:
Very simple, and very stupid. By that logic, we should just cease trade with any country we’re running a deficit with. And watch the economy implode.
Bill, I’ll bet that even you can see how pathetic it is for a grown man to take credit for the good stuff and blame others for his mistakes. It’s the opposite of leadership.
Handily é (most used) comes up as default just with a brief hold.
I’ve become adapted to French azerty layout and we no longer have any physical (UK) qwerty keyboards. My wife recently bought a cheap Windows 11 notebook with a choice of two physical keyboards, US qwerty and azerty as a plastic overlay that keeps the crumbs out, handy when cooking. Handy also when searching on the Android TV. US keyboard domination! How the World turns.
I’m hanging on to my Windows 10 laptop just to prove the World won’t end in October.
ETA Works with capitals, too. À table !
ETA2 what is the future of physical storage? I have a couple of 1 terabyte external hard discs but I’ve become very lazy about backing stuff. And DVDs? Gone the way of VHS tapes. Blu-ray next, I guess.
You’re lucky. My hearing aids have to go in first.
petrushka,
The problem is not immigration as we have a process to increase immigration yearly. The problem is when we do not secure our border and then lack a controlled process we can manage. Out of control processes are generally bad for any business you are running. One bad result of this out of control process is over crowding in emergency rooms another is child trafficking.
Trump, in his recent North Korea-style cabinet meeting:
It was Trump’s “let them eat cake moment”. Marie Antoinette didn’t actually make the cake comment, but Trump did make his callous, tone deaf doll comment. It landed with a thud, and you’d think Trump would be smart enough to back away from it, but instead he doubled down on it in his interview with Kristen Welker:
11-year-olds are “beautiful baby girls”? Beautiful spoiled baby girls with their 30 dolls each?
Good Lord.
On Air Force One yesterday:
Imagine what a slap in the face that is to a single mother struggling to put food on the table, shopping at the dollar store out of necessity, and hoping to be able to pay next month’s rent. While the guy saying it stuffs himself with cheeseburgers in his gaudy, gold-encrusted White House, where even the TV remote is gilded. The TV remote. I’m not kidding.
Some observations. Imagine how stupid you would have to be to make that doll statement at all, much less double and triple down on it. Note how Trump lamely tries to soften it by inflating the number of dolls he’s willing to grant to the “beautiful baby girls”: first it’s two, then three or four, then three or four or five. Generous, right? But then he spoils it by claiming they all have 37 dolls and 250 pencils.
From the International Emergency Economic Powers Act:
Trump is addled, but I think even he knows that foreign movies are not “an unusual and extraordinary threat” or a “national emergency”. He just needs to pretend that they are so he can usurp the power of Congress to impose tariffs. The law requires him to make a new declaration of national emergency with respect to foreign movies. The text of that declaration should be interesting.
This works fine. Thank you. The name was Siobhàn. I notice I can get the same character with alt-133
Great news from the Liar in Chief:
Let’s check Donald’s numbers:
Gasoline on January 20th: $3.22
Gasoline today: $3.26
Those aren’t “tremendous numbers”. Must be Biden’s fault. Source
Food CPI on January 20th: 335.67
Food CPI in March (the latest numbers available): 337.69
And that was before the tariffs. Source
I guess in Trumpworld, 337 is less than 335. This is the post-truth presidency.
An amusing aside. Trump, during a meeting with Giorgia Meloni, said:
“Groceries, as we call it”. The dude is still amazed at this new word he has learned.
Flint:
Yeah, and then you don’t have to grab the mouse. The tradeoff is that you have to memorize the alt codes for all the characters you use.
Ronald Reagan is revered by Republicans, so I’d love to see the rationalizalizations and cognitive dissonance induced in them by this video:
Ronald Reagan on Tariffs
Trump will be saying we should get him and John Wayne out of retirement to Make Hollywood Great Again.
Trump explains it handily: Reagan, with all due respect, was very bad on trade, whereas Trump is setting records that nobody has ever seen
(Yes, the records are in tanking the stock market as he speaks. No cognitive dissonance whatsoever.)
Haha. And that was with the Dow still above 43,000. Now it’s below 41,000.
Trump’s reply isn’t surprising, but what I’d really like to see is how other Republicans who have been longtime Reagan fans and free trade advocates are now justifying their support of Trump’s tariffs.
Allan:
My favorite Trump anachronism was when he claimed that the Continental Army “took over the airports” during the Revolutionary War:
Dumb though he is, I don’t think Trump actually believes that there were airports in colonial America. However, I do think he’s really bad at reading teleprompters and unable to detect moronic statements before the words issue from his mouth.
For an example of his true ignorance regarding the revolutionary period, we can look to the recent ABC interview:
Trump:
Terry Moran:
Trump:
The clip is definitely worth watching:
Scott Bessent is asked “Who pays the tariffs?” and is afraid to answer
keiths,
It is toe-curling watching people put themselves through this. People like Lutnick and Hegseth can sail by on overconfident bluster, but Bessent just seems all at sea. Why do they put themselves through it?
Anyway, don’t mean to sound smug, but the non-US parts of my SIPP (401k, I guess) are more than compensating for the US downturn. Countries are incentivised to accelerate trade deals which compensate for the reduction in US trade. Canada is looking outwards. ‘4d chess’ is more like Solitaire.
Some sad stories coming out of families ripped apart by deportations. “Illegals” who have been there since before they could walk. Of course there are numerous things their families or they “coulda shoulda woulda” done to stave this off, but there is still a human side. I’m seeing self-declared Christians tough-shitting and bye-Felicia-ing over it, and it’s pretty sickening. But hey, I’ve got no moral compass; what do I know?
Joan Baez was singing a tragic song about deportees in 1971. The incident inspiring the song was from 1948.
Not really. Most of the deported by ICE thus far were in the middle of the path to citizenship. None of them were undocumented. Some are arguably citizens already (arguably because USA does not know how to account for their own citizens). Also, probably none of them were gang members. For the overwhelming majority of them the thing that caused them to be deported is that due process has been cancelled.
A curious incident related to a couple of specific US residents from my own country. USA asked certain cryptoscammers to be extradited to USA. So they were given out to USA during Biden years. But just now, Trump administration sent them emails to self-deport, even though they are under court orders to stay where they are and show up for next hearing. When different authorities give contradictory orders, criminal minds take from this the cue that there is no longer any authority and they can do as they please – and they sure will…