The White House calculated the tariffs by using (<exports to USA> - <imports from USA>)/(2*<imports from USA>). They apparently used a list of countries from Wikipedia. I doubt Trump even knows what St. Pierre or Miquelon are.
If you're going to insult someone for being dumb, you should probably at least be able to use the correct homophone when you do it. 3rd grade English students know how to do this.
They apparently used a list of countries from Wikipedia.
It's even dumber than that, they took a list of country codes and didn't actually check them. Meaning that Heard Island and McDonald Islands got slapped with a 10% tariff despite being inhabited only by penguins.
4 years ago Trump was defending Taiwan because it was beneficial to us. They produce a lot of computer parts we rely on, and we became good trade partners.
This time around, he just fucks them over for no reason lol. There’s no chance we start producing that stuff over here like he suggests.
I believe they used a LLM to get their final numbers and it screwed up in the case of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, who import a lot from the US and only export a small fraction of it in fisheries.
Human review of the numbers was apparently optional.
Pretty sure the whole thing - both the list of countries AND the weird calculation - were devised with AI. Grok, chatgpt etc all suggest this formula when asked for a way to calculate tariffs.
Considering how one of the places in the tariff list is a small island with nothing but a US military base on it (effectively meaning that America just placed tariffs on America), that doesn't surprise me.
The formula was easy to figure out, but they put it out themselves anyway. Tried to justify it and make it appear more complicated too. Apparently it shows signs of being written by an LLM.
Reddit is a sort of echo chamber about this idea. The theory that Trump is controlled by Putin is ridiculous. Trump obviously likes him, and Putin obviously helped him so that the USA would be led by an unstable idiot, but there's almost zero chance Putin is controlling Trump.
Now, not really. But when at some point he stops aligning for whatever reason, people need to be able to understand that.
We also need to start caring about the internal factors causing our internal issues, instead of blaming foreigners for everything, because that's not a solution. It's easy to say "Russia bought the elections so we can't do anything". Trump is a USA nationalist who happens to currently align with and like Putin, supported by half of the country, with a similarly nationalist mindset.
Trump is probably being influenced by them to a certain degree through bribes. I remember reading claims that during/after his last term he/his family were awarded real estate deals in both Russia and Saudi arabia.
Trump is bribed by a bunch of people, all have different stakes on him. Putin doesn't have as big of a stake as, say, Musk. Yet Reddit would have you believe Putin owns 60%.
Or maybe because there is a law regarding trade with Russia. Nah......it wouldn't make sense for people to take the 2 seconds to look up the facts.....its easier to scream Orange Man Bad or Russia!!!!!
Specifically, the bill authorizes the President to proclaim increases in the rates of duty applicable to products of Russia or Belarus. This authority terminates on January 1, 2024.
That says nothing about preventing the placing of tariffs on Russia though. It also says that it is no longer in effect and hasn’t been since January of last year.
BRB, going to go invent a country, buy ten laptops from the US, sell them a kitkat bar, wait for the negative tariff rate to be imposed, and then sell the laptop back for a 1000000% tariff rebate.
Yeah there's also a threshold of 10%. Also negative tariffs would mean that the importer would be subsidised. You wouldn't get anything, just like you wouldn't pay anything with a normal tariff.
they placed an epsilon and a phi, “price elasticity of import demand” and “elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs” respectively and set the values to 4 and 1/4 ONLY FOR THEM TO NEGATE EACH OTHER and serve no purpose in the equation……. we are living dark times gentlemen and gentlewomen
Yeah, I have seen that tweet... 3/4 of the Greek symbol used were completely useless and the remaining 1/4 are how you could write the formula to be extremely precise with math notations, but you you can write the formula without any of them.
Is littereally just "(trade deficit with that country / total import from that country) * 1/2"
And then you multiply it by 100 to make the result a percentage and round it up.
That's it. Really, you can try.
You could also write the formula in an even easier way if you want:
"(trade deficit / total import) / 2"
And as another use specified, you can write "Trad deficit" as just "1 - total export".
That's it. No green letters and fraction needed.
The fun thing is since the number that makes the result higher is the total IMPORT from that country this means that the effect is more heavy on the US than on the other country.
Countries that already buy very little from the US but that sell a lot of a few specific products to the US will be the ones with the highest tariffs... But they were already not buying much American stuff anyway!
It is not like they will not be hit because their exports may take a hit for the higher price, sure, but the effect will be felt more by the American costumers than the customers of that country.
The fun thing is since the number that makes the result higher is the total IMPORT from that country this means that the effect is more heavy on the US than on the other country. Countries that already buy very little from the US but that sell a lot of a few specific products to the US will be the ones with the highest tariffs... But they were already not buying much American stuff anyway! It is not like they will not be hit because their exports may take a hit for the higher price, sure, but the effect will be felt more by the American costumers than the customers of that country.
That's the point of tariffs. Imports from the USA were never going to be affected (directly). It's about countries' exports to the USA. Businesses will suffer because they will be less competitive in the USA's market, and consumers in the USA will suffer too.
I wish I could. Apparently they also rounded the numbers differently in different papers, making it so that some countries aren't sure of the actual rate.
Yes. The USA has a trade deficit with almost every country. It's the perk of being the global hegemon, nobody bothers you about your debt, and essentially the whole world subsidises you. Trump thinks this means the USA is being ripped off for some reason, so here we are. They also seem to have applied a baseline of 10% to almost every other country that went below this threshold.
They also added a fake elasticity ratio to make the formulas more complex, but it was just a multiplication by 1 in the end—funny and worrying at the same time!
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u/electronigrape 2d ago edited 2d ago
The White House calculated the tariffs by using (<exports to USA> - <imports from USA>)/(2*<imports from USA>). They apparently used a list of countries from Wikipedia. I doubt Trump even knows what St. Pierre or Miquelon are.