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.
colewd:
Well, since you’re clearly afraid to defend him against my other criticisms, and since your recycled dodges are getting really boring, let’s talk about his tariff policy again. Yesterday I commented:
He’s so ashamed of his failure that he’s now sending letters and claiming that they are deals:
Also, he’s still saying this:
They’re laughing at Trump because of how stupid he is. He thinks that they pay the tariffs when in fact it’s Americans and American companies who pay. The money isn’t flowing into the country; it’s flowing from Americans into the US Treasury. It’s a tax on Americans.
Bill, do you believe the same dumb things about tariffs that your Dear Leader does, or do you know better? What do you think of his dealmaking performance and the lies he has told about it? How do you feel about the fact that he won’t admit his failure and is instead pretending that sending letters is the same thing as making deals?
A few years ago there was a news story about an AI that kept going Nazi. Much of the cost of AI development seems to lie in reigning in the tendency to assimilate the most strongly expressed human opinions. Apparently balanced and cautious writing gets overwhelmed by certainty.
It happened again this week, caused by a simple prompt to tell the truth, ignore political correctness.
I found this post:
“ Author Adam Bray #StarWars
@authoradambray
This isn’t unique to Grok. ALL AI has a strong tendency to fascism, racism and totalitarianism. Anyone who works with it on a deep level professionally knows this. It’s a known and constant Problem. All brands. All levels.”
I think you are making assertions here that can be tested over time. My prediction is that you will be wrong on most every assertion you have made. Hopefully you will learn by your mistakes if it turns out you are wrong.
colewd:
They’ve already been tested. Trump did in fact claim that countries were kissing his ass and begging for deals. Watch the video. Peter Navarro did in fact promise 90 deals in 90 days. That failed. There are in fact just three trade deals, and that’s only if you’re being generous and counting frameworks as deals, which they aren’t. Those are facts. They’ve already happened. They don’t need to be “tested over time”.
Trump is wrong when he says that the US is going to collect tariff money from foreign countries. That isn’t how it works, as every freshman econ major knows. It doesn’t need to be “tested over time”. It’s already baked into the very definition of tariffs, and it’s been that way since before ancient Greek and Roman times:
Trump is wrong when he claims that trade deficits indicate that we’re being ripped off. You’re running a trade deficit with your grocery store, but you’re not getting ripped off. They give you all the items you pay for. Ditto for international trade. Americans want foreign goods. They pay for those goods. The foreign countries deliver the goods. Those are buyer/seller transactions, not ripoffs. This is obvious. It doesn’t need to be “tested over time”.
Letters are not deals. Imagine this conversation:
Francisco, excitedly:
Victoria:
Francisco:
Victoria:
Francisco:
Would that qualify as a deal, in your view? Does it need to be tested over time? Do we need to wait and see whether the definition of “deal” changes in the next edition of Webster’s Unabridged to include “a letter”?
Interesting prediction. Which assertions, and why? You’re 0 for 4 with respect to the ones above, so you’ve got some ground to make up.
Lol.
keiths,
Another assertion. Testing a Presidents performance takes years and many of the results come after he has left office.
If you think the tests are complete you are claiming the data will look the same now as 3 or more years from now. Are you really making this claim?
colewd,
Yesterday I asked:
That isn’t a rhetorical question, and I’m not being flippant. I’m dead serious. Would you be capable of saying “That’s ridiculous. The sun rises in the east. Trump is wrong about that”?
I’m trying to understand where the line lies. Is there a line, beyond which you would be willing to say that Trump is wrong?
Argh! This is worse than colewd’s “open boarders”.
Reign: to rule. Emperors and kings reign. “Reign in” is meaningless.
Rein: a strap connected to a horse’s bit. To “rein in” is to instruct the horse to slow or stop.
Rain: water falling from the sky. “Rain in” means your roof is leaking.
But these claims are observations, not predictions. Letters are simply not deals. They may influence future deals, but today they’re not deals by any stretch. And Trump in fact produced over 30,000 lies during his first term, and has given speeches this term where every single claim (not prediction) is contrary to reality. This observation is not a prediction. Now, labeling Trump a habitual liar not only describes his historical behavior, but might be construed as a prediction of future lies. Which continues to come true every day.
As for Biden, I agree that he should have stepped down a couple years before he was forced to (power is addictive – some people have even tried to stay in power after losing elections, as you may recall), and that he likely didn’t have a good idea of how the government was being run in his name. However, he surrounded himself with qualified people (who also wanted to retain their power), rather than with idiots and clowns like some people you might know.
I have no real hope that you will ever even notice that you are wrong. Fox News will never pop your bubble.
colewd:
Sure, Trump failed to sign 90 deals in 90 days, but that doesn’t mean he failed to sign 90 deals in 90 days. It will take years before we know whether what happened actually happened. The Dear Leader can travel through time and fix things in the past. That’s how amazing he is. Five years from now, we’ll look back and say “Wow! We were wrong. He actually did deliver 90 deals in 90 days!”
The claims I’ve made are already available to you. They are contained in my OP and my comments. You wrote:
Back that up. If “most every assertion” I’ve made is likely to be wrong, you should be able to explain why. Quote my assertions and rebut them. Support your claims for a change. Here’s how that would look:
keiths:
colewd:
See how that works? I made a claim. You disagreed with it. You responded, citing evidence and making an argument that undercut my claim. You successfully defended the Dear Leader! Now let’s see if you can do that in reality.
If you refuse, then why? Are you so determined to emulate your Dear Leader that you’re trying to fail as badly as he has?
* See David Icke’s conspiracy theory.
keiths,
I have no problem pointing out Trumps mistakes. Especially in the first 4 years.
-Too little work on government costs
-Rushing the vaccine to market
-Massive stimulus for covid that was not well thought out
keiths:
colewd:
That’s progress!
OK, so now I’d like to understand where the line is. If you’re able to acknowledge mistakes, why are you unwilling to say that Trump is wrong when he says that trade deficits mean we’re being ripped off? And that foreign countries will be paying the tariffs? Is it because you think those mistakes make Trump look dumber than the ones you mentioned above, and that’s too much for you?
He lied about having signed 200 trade deals, and he failed to deliver 90 deals in 90 days. Why aren’t you willing to say “He lied about the deals, and he failed to deliver on his promise?”
It appears that you’re willing to acknowledge some mistakes, but not the ones (and there are many) that make him look ridiculously stupid. You can’t acknowledge that he lies repeatedly, much less that he is a compulsive liar, which is a documented fact. I haven’t yet seen you acknowledge even one lie that the guy has told. Why?
Holy shit. Trump met with several African leaders today, including the president of Liberia, Joseph Boakai.
Boakai:
Trump:
Boakai:
Trump:
Boakai:
Trump:
Liberia is an English-speaking country.
keiths,
What I care about is ultimately is results as for the companies I invest in. You have made your predictions and I think your judgement here is poor. I will give you credit down the road if your analysis turns out to be right.
colewd:
You’re saying that sexual assault, pathological lying, and the abuse of pardon power don’t matter to you as long as your portfolio appreciates? That the illegal and unconstitutional deportation of a guy to a hellhole prison in El Salvador, where he was left in defiance of a Supreme Court order, is A-OK with you as long as you’re making money? A president stands by for hours, doing nothing, while the Capitol is being attacked by a mob who want to hang the vice president, and you’re fine with that as long as your stocks are healthy? He tries to steal an election, and you shrug and say “no biggie” as long as your bank balance is increasing? Please tell me you have more integrity than that.
And if you’re so concerned about your personal wealth, why support a guy who doesn’t understand the economy and has no idea what tariffs are, how they work, and who pays them? Especially when you can’t make a coherent argument for why his tariff fumblings are good for the country, and are reduced to saying “Let’s wait and see. Maybe it will all work out in the end”?
What predictions? How can I make predictions when the Orange Waffler’s tariff policy changes on a weekly basis? I’m not making predictions, but I am leveling criticisms at him that you are unable to refute.
No, you don’t. If you actually thought my judgment was poor, you would have jumped on it by now. You’d have backed up your claim. I’ll repeat:
colewd:
No need for us to wait. You’ve already passed judgment on my judgment. Justify it.
Also, while this may be about money for you, that isn’t the only thing. If it were, you’d be able to admit Trump’s faults rather than squirming to avoid it. This is emotional for you, not just pecuniary.
Fantastic, you mentioned some “mistakes” finally. But actually, you are still at a standstill. Namely, you are forgetting the cosmically far more serious mistakes by Trump (fatal crimes rather) such as the insurrection. Forgot about that?
Nah, it just shows your priorities: What actually matters to the country, does not matter to colewd.
And here we have it. What matters to colewd, does not matter to the country. Colewd ONLY looks at the companies that he has invested in. If his companies are not doing as well as he’d like, then he says “bad president” and anybody who thinks that the country is doing well by objective macroindicators must be wrong. Colewd cannot be wrong. His money (and therefore his heart) is always in the right place. If the place is not doing well, it’s everybody else’s fault.
Except Trump’s. If colewd’s companies are not doing well under Trump, then let’s wait until the end of Trump’s term before passing judgement. Anybody who passes judgement on Trump whether based on the economic collapse that he has introduced now or based on his first term is making “wrong predictions” that will be “tested over time”. ANd anybody who reminds colewd that Trump is an multi-failed businessman and a depraved immoral bastard has TDS and is afflicted by leftist propaganda.
You are such a suckup clown. Not sure I have seen a more disgusting apologist of rapists before, but here you are!
Edit: I’d say we have figured colewd out conclusively now. We can talk about tariffs all we want, it does not concern colewd. He does not look at the economy of the country. The only measure colewd has is the companies he invested in. And of course his unconditional suckuppery for Trump who shall be worshipped even when he crashes the markets, international trade, and domestic legal and social order.
keiths,
If these things are true it will not appreciate. Again Keiths. Lets’ see if you are right. I think you have been spectacularly wrong in the past and that is an art form in itself 🙂
What kind of past? Relevant to the topic, anything anybody says about Trump here, your consistent reply is that it’s a “wrong prediction”. Your apologetics for the rapist ( <– this is about Trump's past, if it is not clear to you) cannot get any more pathetic. And the only one wrong about that particular past is yourself.
keiths:
colewd:
That makes no sense.
My criticisms aren’t predictions. We already know that Trump is a sexual predator who lies pathologically and abuses his pardon power. We know that you’re unable to defend him. We know that you will continue to dodge questions like this one:
It’s gotten really boring.
Trump said this about his tariff letters:
My antennae went up at “the letter” (singular) and “well crafted”, and sure enough, the letters are just copy and paste jobs and they have Trump’s illiterate fingerprints all over them.
Here’s the text:
THE WHITE HOUSE
WASHINGTON
July 9, 2025
<insert title>
<insert name of head of state>
<insert name of country>
Dear Mr/Ms President/Prime Minister/Your Majesty:
It is a Great Honor for me to send you this letter in that it demonstrates the strength and commitment of our Trading Relationship, and the fact that the United States of America has agreed to continue working with <insert country>, despite having a significant Trade Deficit with your great Country. Nevertheless, we have decided to move forward with you, but only with more balanced, and fair, TRADE. Therefore, we invite you to participate in the extraordinary Economy of the United States, the Number One Market in the World, by far. We have had years to discuss our Trading Relationship with <insert country>, and have concluded that we must move away from these long-term, and very persistent, Trade Deficits engendered by <insert country>’s Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers. Our relationship has been, unfortunately, far from Reciprocal. Starting on August 1, 2025, we will charge <insert country> a Tariff of only <insert rate>% on any and all <insert country> products sent into the United States, separate from all Sectoral Tariffs. Goods transshipped to evade a higher Tariff will be subject to that higher Tariff. Please understand that the <insert rate>% number is far less than what is needed to eliminate the Trade Deficit disparity we have with your Country. As you are aware, there will be no Tariff if <insert country>, or companies within your Country, decide to build or manufacture product within the United States and, in fact, we will do everything possible to get approvals quickly, professionally, and routinely — In other words, in a matter of weeks.
If for any reason you decide to raise your Tariffs, then, whatever the number you choose to raise them by, will be added onto the <insert rate>% that we charge. Please understand that these Tariffs are necessary to correct the many years of <insert country>’s Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, causing these unsustainable Trade Deficits against the United States. This Deficit is a major threat to our Economy and, indeed, our National Security!
We look forward to working with you as your Trading Partner for many years to come. If you wish to open your heretofore closed Trading Markets to the United States, and eliminate your Tariff, and Non-Tariff, Policies and Trade Barriers, we will, perhaps, consider an adjustment to this letter. These Tariffs may be modified, upward or downward, depending on our relationship with your Country. You will never be disappointed with The United States of America.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
With best wishes, I am,
Sincerely,
(Signature)
DONALD J. TRUMP
PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
It reads like it was written by a not-very-bright 7th grader. Imagine what it must be like to be a grown man who thinks that that letter is “well crafted”.
Imagine what it must be like to be a head of state who receives such a letter and thinks “I have to deal with this moron”.
Imagine being someone like colewd who either can’t see, or won’t admit, what an idiot Trump is.
Her Excellency, Dear Mr President:
Erik,
What evidence do you have for this assertion?
The nominal topic of this thread is the economic impact of tariffs. I agree with colewd that economic impacts take time — sometimes years — to materialize.
But in the short run, the markets have said meh.
To of the composite indexes are at historic highs, and the Dow is within 0.1 percent of an all time high. Inflation has not materialized. Yet.
petrushka:
Trump has trained the markets to ignore him. They took him seriously when he first announced the tariffs — see the precipitous drop in the chart below — but since then they’ve learned the TACO lesson. He’s chickened out so many times by now that no one wants to sell until they actually see him take action.
The pattern continues. After extending the deadline again, this time from July 9 to August 1, he still backtracked, saying that the new deadline was “firm but not 100% firm”. “You don’t negotiate like I negotiate,” he says, and I agree with him, lol.
To no one’s surprise,Trump is lying about the extension, saying that the date was always August 1. In his cabinet meeting the other day, he said
And on Truth Social:
If the date was always August 1, Donald, then why did you just issue an executive order changing the date from July 9 to August 1?
Dude isn’t fooling anyone. EDIT: Except people like colewd.
I was thinking about what your strategy should be if you’re a foreign leader negotiating with Trump. It’s a pretty interesting situation.
The tariffs have been ruled illegal by a US trade court, but Trump is being allowed to proceed with them while the case is appealed. What’s the incentive to negotiate in the meantime? As a foreign leader, should you wait and see if the ruling is upheld? It would suck to make a bunch of concessions and then find out that the club Trump is wielding is really just a twig. On the other hand, you risk getting stuck with a worse deal down the road if you wait it out and the ruling is struck down. It may go to the Supreme Court, and the conservative justices may decide that they’re going to roll over yet again for Trump.
The Blowhard in Chief has gotten himself into a bind by overpromising and underdelivering. He’s desperate to score some deals, and soon, so you can probably extract more concessions from him if you negotiate now than you’d get from him later, when other people have signed deals and there’s less pressure on him.
Then there’s the petulance factor. If you stall, Trump may throw a tantrum and hit you with steep tariffs just because he’s pissed. Example: Brazil is getting hit with 50% because they’re prosecuting Trump’s creepy buddy Bolsonaro. “WITCH HUNT!!!”, Trump says.
I think you are missing Petrushka’s point. The stuff you keep harping on, how Trump is nearly illiterate, that he’s surrounded himself with ignorant toadies whose only qualification is blind loyalty, that he attempted a coup (and pardoned all the participants), that he’s hauling people off to lifetime jail sentences without any due process, that he ignores the Supreme Court, that he couldn’t tell the truth if he tried, etc. – it’s a bit of a puzzle that all this hasn’t disturbed the markets. Like colewd, they only care about their investments, and none of that other stuff seems to matter according to market performance. The markets are setting new records despite the most ignorant, unintelligent, and corrupt president this country has ever suffered. Very strange.
What’s interesting about that is, Trump is using national emergency powers given to him by Congress to declare tariffs, apparently on the grounds that Congress can’t act fast enough in an emergency. The “emergency” in this case is that Bolsonaro faces legal prosecution in Brazil, which has no influence on the US one way or another. So how is that an emergency? I sincerely hope I will learn exactly how the Supreme Court finds a national emergency, because I’m sure they will if anyone contests it on the merits.
I think presidents have very little power. They can screw things up for a while, but over time, the system stabilizes. Anyway, I have no control over what happens, so I don’t get worked up. I try to manage my life so that politics seldom impinges.
I’ve been married 55 years and have four grandchildren. That’s my life. What other people do is not my business.
There are arguments to be made for activism. But I’m not temperamentally inclined to activism. From age 16 my ambition has been to have a family. That’s where my energy went, and I achieved it. Different strokes.
Different from you, I have read some constitutions of some countries, including of the United States. The president of the United States has outsized legal power compared to an average constitution in the first world. Trump got – certainly the second time – into office illegally and is acting now extrajudicially. The president of USA has exactly as much power as he takes – no, impeachment cannot stop him – and Trump has gone overboard.
Individuals can certainly be harmed by a president.
Or rewarded.
That is why I manage my life to be least affected by political vagaries. The only major exception was Vietnam. But I’m exceptionally gifted at taking multiple choice tests, and that is what determines your choices of Army specialties.
For example, the big beautiful bill takes – after next elections – your food stamps away. You see, in a totalitarian country, it’s not your choice how you live your life.
I personally have lived in two countries through three regimes (four currency regimes) while in the same house at the same spot all the time. The more fundamental rule is – adapt or die. There are regimes who care about some things, regimes who care about some other things, regimes who don’t know what to do when everything falls apart, and regimes who don’t care while ripping everything apart. Trump’s is the latter.
Flint:
It’s an emergency neither in reality nor legally. The law requires Trump to formally declare national emergencies before imposing tariffs:
…and he hasn’t done so with respect to Bolsonaro or anything else going on in Brazil. Those things therefore can’t be a basis for the imposition of tariffs. He did, via an executive order, declare a trade deficit emergency back in April and has used that to justify all of the “Liberation Day” tariffs, and he does refer to the trade deficit with Brazil as a national security issue in his tariff letter to them. There’s just one problem: the Orange Dipshit has overlooked the fact that the US has a trade surplus with Brazil, not a deficit. So I can’t see any legal basis for imposing tariffs on Brazil unless there is some blanket verbiage in the emergency declaration that covers cases where there is a trade surplus.
Flint,
My favourite (which is to say I hate it) is when people render the adjectival form of ‘bias’ as … ‘bias’. As in “You’re bias”. It’s not that they’ve got “your” wrong there, they really think that’s how it’s spelt. I guess it’s the soft terminal “-t” sound, almost elided in speech. “Prejudice”, too. I haven’t done an exhaustive survey, but it seems more a habit of the Right. While I’m at it, Unnecessary Capitalisation. And too many exclamation marks!!! (One is often too many, in a time of global shortage).
Now back to your regular programming.
Curious, is it not, that Biden’s Presidency could be evaluated in real time, while Trump’s… why, it’ll take decades.
colewd,
There were, you may recall, tens of thousands of people dying a horrible death at the time. Don’t give me any MAGA revisionism on this; my daughter was a doctor on Respiratory when Covid hit, and witnessed these horrors first hand.
There is not a ‘standard time’ for vaccine, from R&D to market. The belief that is ‘should’ take 10 years is based on nothing concrete, just “that’s how long it always took”.. Much of the time in traditional development is spent with papers sat on someone’s desk somewhere, not with any active research going on. But in 2020, money was no object, stages could run in parallel, tens of thousands of willing volunteers were available, the disease was common speeding the reaching of predefined endpoints.
In fact (America not being the only country in the world, to the surprise of some, and Pfizer’s not being the only vaccine) the UK was ahead of the US on this. We bought multiple doses of multiple platforms, funding R&D, and were even more ‘warp-speed’ than Trump.
The consequence – my daughter, and the vast majority of other medics, is in no doubt that the vaccines have saved millions of lives. Fox pundits would have it that we should still be gazing at our navels, grinding through the traditional non-expedited process while it sits on someone’s desk somewhere while nothing actually happens in determining either efficacy or safety.
You have been missing the evidence staring at your face for pages (really for at least a decade) now. For any casual observer, the E.Jean Carroll case settles the matter – that Trump is a rapist is a fact. It is not an opinion or an assertion. Those who are interested know that the E.Jean Carroll case is just the tip of an iceberg.
Do you have any evidence that you care about evidence? There is now hundreds of posts of evidence that you are clueless about far simpler things than this.
Erik,
This was not a criminal case. The real penalty for rape is 20 years in prison. This was a civil case, brought years after the incident which very rich people have to deal with.
This is why I do not take your or Keiths accusations seriously.
Apologetics for rapists is not a criminal case, but quite damning. Considering the remainder of your depravities, your credibility stands flatly at zero here.
Erik,
Quite damning is only because you are hoping this supports your case and not taking all the facts into account.
I understand it is very hard to be objective in politics as when you favour a side you start to filter information. I am as guilty as anyone doing this. This is a cause of the “lazy label”TDS as Trump with all is faults is a very strong politician and is hard to beat in an election. This is why you and Keiths have been Trump bashing as you cannot think of another way to reduce his power.
My hope is a pragmatic democrat like Bill Clinton with new and better ideas will surface and improve our chances of moving our country forward in the future. The bashing strategy has failed.
It was a court. The 36 felony counts were a criminal case, but you don’t care sbout that either, so a criminal case would not persuade you, as long as you make some money.
What of the many other accusers of impropriety? “Grab them by the pussy; they let you do it”?
I have never seen such wilful blindness. TDS writ large. He can do no wrong. A saint walks among us.
colewd,
Because of the slavish turning-a-blind-eye by people like yourself. He’s infallible, you know. All criticism is from the Hard Left, and can be dismissed.
Allan:
It’s the one statement of Trump’s that Bill wishes were a lie.
It’s astonishing. I think Bill recognizes how ridiculous it is, which is why he keeps trying to reassure himself that he is “an independent voter”. If that’s independence, I’d hate to see what dependence looks like.
Why is it that always when you mention the word “facts” you never cite a single fact? You are a factless brainwashed cultist, that’s why.
Trump did not get his deserved bashing: He’s the president, even though insurrectionists and treasonous thieves of state secrets do not qualify according to the constitution. The constitution has failed. Does law and order matter to you? Clearly not.
On a normal politics forum you would have been kicked off for outspokenly defending rapists and pedos and for lying in every post. Every time you mention the word “facts” you are lying because you do not cite any facts to show that you understand what the word means. And it’s a lie that criminal lawsuit somehow matters to you more than a civil lawsuit. Trump has literally been criminally convicted. Forgot that?
Who is considering facts? Not you.
Allan:
Rumor has it that Trump will be imposing tariffs on imports of Capital Letters and Exclamation Marks. I don’t think he’s considered the impact it will have on his personal wealth.
colewd:
Erik:
Bill, what exonerating facts are we not taking into account? Don’t run away — this is your chance to actually defend your Dear Leader for once instead of trying to discredit us or our “suspect sources”.
Let’s examine all the facts, including the ones you put forward.
Allan Miller,
You have been sucked into the propaganda. Trump bashing is not going to work. The independent voters are on to the propaganda.
What I care about is a smart guy like you being fooled by nonsense.
colewd, to Allan:
Here’s how this will go:
1. You’ve made a claim about ‘propaganda’ and ‘nonsense’.
2. We’ll ask you to point out the propaganda and nonsense and explain why it is false.
3. You will be frightened of the challenge and cast about for an excuse not to address it.
4. You’ll present your excuse.
5. We’ll challenge your excuse.
6. That will frighten you, and you’ll cast about for an excuse not to address our challenge to your excuse.
7. You’ll present your excuse for not addressing our challenge to your excuse for not addressing our challenge to your claim that we’re falling for ‘propaganda’ and ‘nonsense’.
8. We’ll challenge your excuse.
9. That will frighten you, and you’ll cast about for an excuse not to address our…
10. We and the onlookers will collectively yawn while you sweat.
11. And so on.
Nothing will be accomplished beyond
a) confirming that you cannot defend Trump;
b) confirming that you are a cult member who has sacrificed both reason and morality in your slavish devotion to him; and
c) humiliating you again.
Are you a masochist? What is the point of this endless exercise if you’re just going to fail again and again?
Actually, colewd is providing us with an informative illustration of how a cult works. In his cult, just saying something causes it to be Truth. Reality is dismissed whenever it proves inconvenient. The real horror George Orwell described is that those in power actually believed their propaganda, they weren’t pretending. This belief is based on personal emotional need. When Moynihan said that facts are stubborn things, he was wrong. For Bill, facts are whatever supports his needs. Claims that refute him are simply not facts. He said so. In his world, “facts” don’t actually exist, all we have are claims people make, to be selected or rejected based on best fit. Remember that people died of covid denying it existed to their last breath.
Is it propaganda that he was convicted of 36 felonies? That he lost the Carroll case? Has c26 other accusers? Pardoned cop-beaters? Had extensive association with Epstein? Is widely regarded as economically illiterate? Gibbers endlessly and insubstantially in speeches and in answer to questions? What’s the Truth, then?
Or – an alternative take – “smart guys have issues with Trump; I don’t”.