I think it may have been something along the lines of this:
He heard the 270% number, but the context of it never really sank in … so he was able to make up a new context for it which gave him the excuse to do what he wanted to do anyway – complain about how Canada (and everybody else) done 'Merica wrong.
It’s much the same with his ‘Reciprocal’ tariffs – the tariffs he’s ‘reciprocating’ are largely made up – he (or his staff) just took whatever he wanted tariff he wanted to impose on them, doubled it and claimed that this is the tariff he’s responding to.
I know that my native New Zealand doesn’t have anything close to the 20% average tariff on American goods that his chart claims:
That very much fits my impression of that chart. I even wondered if he took the very highest tariff for some countries and then pretended that that tariff applied to ALL goods imported from the USA.
I’ve been amazed that no media that I’ve checked so far has said, “All the numbers in that chart are bogus.” (Perhaps the fact checks will come out later today.)
True, those tariff rates are never collected. Canada practices supply management for dairy. The merit of this for Canadian consumers is debatable, the price of cheese can be hard to digest.
For anyone interested, Andrew Chang of CBC does a good job discussing the differing perspectives in regards to the dairy tariff.
So we return to an old question: Is Trump simply a pathological liar—AND/OR is he woefully incompetent at reading comprehension and processing information?
Indeed not. The chart’s tariff claims are entirely false. The numbers do not come from tariff schedules but from this insane formula:
I am currently dealing with the fact that I’ve got to order about $45K of goods from Taiwan – order already set up and just awaiting my signature – and there’s now a 32% “reciprocal” tariff that will apply. I looked up Taiwan’s tariffs on US goods in the same goods classification, and there are three rates for three different groups of those: duty-free, 3% and 5%. Not 32. Not even close. But The Orange Peril claims their rate is 64% .
That’s an interesting one. In civil litigation, for a certain period of time, a plaintiff can just take a dismissal without prejudice of his claims; after a while, however, it becomes impossible without court approval, and the question for that approval is primarily whether there is unfair prejudice to the defendant. I imagine that in criminal cases it is somewhat the same; and if the object of a without-prejudice dismissal is to let the state hold the threat of resumed prosecution over the defendant, the argument for unfair prejudice is very strong.
There was a Frontline documentary (I think?) that picked out the White House Correspondents dinner where Obama razzed Trump from the podium as the moment that Trump decided to run himself.
Forcing schools to “withdraw” the degrees of graduates who participate in protests is a deliberate threat aimed at discouraging student protests. Also the “No Masks.”
Back in my twenties, I worked at some soul destroying manufacturing jobs where time stood still.
I must be missing something for what is motivating these tariffs on goods, especially given an unemployment rate around 4%. Like I could have a high paying and interesting service job in engineering or finance, but forget that - what I really aspire to is a career laboring to sew pajamas for twenty bucks a day? Maybe five years in and I could work my way up to quality control. Solid.
US stock markets tumbled on Thursday as investors parsed the sweeping change in global trading following Donald Trump’s announcement of a barrage of tariffs on the country’s trading partners.
Related to this thread’s topic by Republicans’ denial of Climate Change:
The world is fast approaching temperature levels where insurers will no longer be able to offer cover for many climate risks, said Günther Thallinger, on the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies. He said that without insurance, which is already being pulled in some places, many other financial services become unviable, from mortgages to investments.
The formula would produce negative tariffs for those places where the US exports more than it imports, and zero tariffs for places where there either isn’t a trade imbalance or where, like Heard Island, there isn’t any trade at all.
I believe there’s a baseline 10% that applies even if the US has a surplus with you.
It also seems that some very junky numbers were the basis of these calculations – hence Norfolk Island (which had a phantom trade surplus with the US due to some non-existent leather footwear exports).
This system also makes for the counter-productive effects – e.g. Madagasscar – which exports things like cloves and vanilla pods – which, due to climate etc, the US is unlikely to ever produce itself, gets hit by massive tariffs – just increasing further the cost of food in the US, without much in the way of even potential benefit.
I just watched this video, which suggested that the aim of all this tariff chaos is to force other countries to peg their currencies to the US$ at a high enough rate that trade imbalances even-out, even with the US$ remaining the main reserve currency:
I’m not really buying it however.
Addendum: I did however find the video’s point, that the global trade system Trump is complaining about being so unfair to the US, is in fact the system that it itself (under Reagan) created, to be interesting.
What if instead of creating jobs in the USA these measures create significant inflation, as is quite likely? Will his fan base forgive him when so many things they are used to buying will suddenly become much more expensive? Or will they find others to blame again?
Do they understand that the American public will be the ones paying for “being very wealthy again”?
I think they will in the short-term, as long as he can keep the pipe-dream of the benefits of this strategy alive. How much pain, for how long, is needed to disabuse them, I don’t know – it seems nobody wins by underestimating America’s collective gullibility.
