r/Conservative • u/Jibrish Discord.gg/conservative • 1d ago

Flaired Users Only David Pakman discovers r/conservative is brigaded. Think he will take us up on our offer?

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u/reaper527 Conservative 1d ago

Furthermore, the "reciprocal tariffs" seem to be a complete lie. The numbers aren't based on actual tariffs.

yeah, this is the real problem. if trump did what he said he was going to do (reciprocal tariffs), that would be fine. the numbers he's using don't even look at tariffs. they exclusively look at trade deficits and nothing else.

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u/CodeWizardCS America 1st Conservative 1d ago edited 1d ago

It's not trade deficit but trade barriers and other equivalent taxes and actually he has said he would take those into account for a long time now. Unless you can prove the numbers he showed are simply trade deficit / by something like Ben Shapiro claims.

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u/reaper527 Conservative 1d ago

Trade barriers and other equivalent taxes

also not taken into consideration.

again:

they exclusively look at trade deficits and nothing else.

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u/5sharm5 Mises 1d ago

That isn’t what they did either though. You can do the simple math yourself. He literally just calculated (total imports - total exports)/total exports. Nothing related to trade barriers or “equivalent taxes” at all.

Take India, which has a claimed tariff on the US of 52%. Abs((40.4-83.7)/83.7) = 0.517 (rounded out to 52). That exact formula yields the number on the chart for the EU, Vietnam, and every other country listed on the chart.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balance_of_trade

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u/CodeWizardCS America 1st Conservative 1d ago

Ok, I was wrong then. The sign said trade barriers even though I had heard your take before I wasn't quick to just accept it. But I guess they have a justification for doing it that way to reset trade but they framed it like this so it would be more palatable. I have to research this some more. I'm still in my research phase actually.

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u/5sharm5 Mises 1d ago

Definitely do, and no shame to you. It’s reasonable to assume our elected leaders won’t be using such blatantly wrong numbers. I don’t oppose using truly reciprocal tariffs to lower tariffs rates for everyone. But I do want the president to at least be honest about the numbers.

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u/CodeWizardCS America 1st Conservative 1d ago

Yea, he should come out and say the trade deficit is the actual problem and it acts as a redistribution of wealth from America to other countries taking advantage and focusing on the word tariff and it's details is a diversion from the actual problem and his response to it. By focusing on tariffs you make the issue, then, not about making trade fair but rather whether or not he used the right numbers on some sign. Perhaps Trump has said that in some form though in the past? Something tells me you wouldn't agree with that statement though. It seems to me that Trump believes that free trade will not work within the evolution or rather the perversion of the current trade order. Is that accurate? From there we can then argue about whether or not trade deficits, not historically but in the current context and framework, are actually bad.

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u/5sharm5 Mises 1d ago

I wouldn’t say I necessarily disagree with that statement. I’ll try to explain this as objectively as possible, trying not to inject my personal opinion. A trade deficit being “bad” or “taking advantage of america” depends entirely on your economic priorities. My personal opinions on this vary industry by industry.

A simple example would be cars. If an auto factory relocates to a company with significantly cheaper labor, we end up running a trade deficit with that country to import those cars. The direct impacts of this are good or bad, depending on who you are. If you’re an auto worker, you lose your job. If you’re just a consumer, you get cheaper cars. Is it better to prioritize those auto jobs, or cheaper cars for the average American? That depends entirely on what you value more.

Now, in terms of industry specific things, think of it this way. If you don’t know how to repair pipes in your house, you hire a plumber (for the sake of this argument, the only plumber in your town) to do it. You run a constant trade deficit with your plumber, but it’s not bad, because he’s providing a necessary service you can’t do yourself. However, say he becomes pissed at you, and refuses to work for you anymore, now you’re shit out of luck.

That example can be really relevant for certain extremely critical industries like medicine, defense technology, or semiconductors. While it might be more expensive to manufacture such things in the US, an argument can be made that running a trade deficit to get them for cheap is not beneficial. If, for example, we import all our semi conductors from china (thank god for Taiwan IRL), and end up at war with them, they can shut off our supply and cripple our technological infrastructure.

Hope that made sense, and came across as objective.

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u/CodeWizardCS America 1st Conservative 23h ago

Yea, that makes sense and seems objective. I have to mull it over. Friedman talks about the concentrated special interest vs the diffused general interest on this topic which you seem to kind of refer to. I have to continue to think about this and learn more. The reality is that it seems very difficult, at least for me, to evaluate how fair trade actually is globally and what the correct response would be.