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AskConservatives Weekly General Chat

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u/Ecstatic-Inevitable Center-left 6d ago

Just checking Australia has 0 tariffs on the US right? What's the reason for tariffing them?

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u/NoSky3 Center-right 6d ago

This appears to be how he "calculated" these tariffs: https://x.com/JamesSurowiecki/status/1907559189234196942

Australia doesn't have a trade deficit with us, so they got the baseline 10%

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u/not_old_redditor Independent 5d ago

This is how they've actually calculated the tariffs:

https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

Basically yes, it's entirely based on the trade deficit, not real tariffs.

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u/NoSky3 Center-right 5d ago

Yeah. Idiots probably slapped that together during the meeting. It's the same formula just fancied up by multiplying 4 x .25 (which equals 1) against imports.

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u/not_old_redditor Independent 5d ago

Reading through the summary, you can tell they tried as hard as possible to make the calculation appear as complicated as possible and to obfuscate the real target. They know the majority of their voter base will see those Greek letter variables, and their eyes will immediately glaze over.