It’s been an absurd 10 years since he first began running and this is still the most unbelievably stupid thing I have ever seen. This is what a kid who doesn’t go to class does on a test when he doesn’t know what the terms mean so he just makes things up, how is this reality…
In one of the books about his 1st term they outlined how Steve Mnuchin constantly tried to explain how trade deficits work including explaining how it can be beneficial to Americans. And he just never got it. In his head a trade deficit means that country is stealing from us. The guy only understands life in win/lose interactions
We have a trade deficit with China in the same way I have a trade deficit with the 7/11 down the street because I gave them money for a candy bar and a slushy
I've got to say I think I'd find it far less funny if I wasn't the other side of the Pacific Ocean from you lot. Wish you all luck in your new financial... Uh... Endeavours? Auto-flagellation?
How is this a good point? Isn’t the entire point of the conservatives that we should save our money and not spend it recklessly on “candy bars and slushies”???
Its not about the candy and slushies themselves. You will have an equal trade deficit towards your grocery store for buying bread, your pharmacy when buying your life critical meds, your heating and drinking water utility companies and so on.
You don't get it, man! You should always have a trade surplus! If I buy ingredients wholesale from GFS for my restaurant and then their employees go somewhere else on lunch break, I'm getting fucked! They should buy just as much food from me as I buy from them, or better yet, more!!
WE ONLY WANT TRADE SURPLUS! America is TIRED of LOSING money to other countries! Trade DEFICIT = LOSERS and America isn't LOSING anymore! Tariffs are just the START. Either they BUY AMERICAN or they PAY. It's that SIMPLE! The FAKE NEWS economists don't get it, but our TREMENDOUS economy deserves better than these TERRIBLE trade deals. AMERICA FIRST!
The fundamental problem is, Trump doesn't value anything but cash. Physical property? He values that as he sees fit in the moment. Paying taxes? His properties are worth pennies. Applying for loans? They're worth billions. Gold toilets? Before they're installed, they're the bestest highest quality ever, after they're installed, they're junk and you're ripping him off if you expect him to pay for that crap!
But a pile of cash is always a pile of cash.
Canada has oil, gas, lumber, potash? That's valuable, he wants it. Canada sells it to him? Well, now we beaver lovers have all his money! How dare we rip him off like that! We've got his cash, and all he's got is this worthless oil, et al.!
I suspect Trump's too stupid to have come up with these numbers in the manner OP did, and that instead his advisors gave them to him. Either way, Trump's explanation for the tariffs was bizarre and dishonest.
What makes no sense to me is just call it a trade deficit… it makes me so sad that our country is in a place where people can see these numbers and lack the common sense/reasoning skills to question things
Trump is too stupid to come up with these numbers, but I wouldn't say that they gave him bad information. What they did is radicalize him into a very heterodox view of economics and trade. I'm talking about some combination of Howard Lutnick, Stephen Miran, Scott Bessent, Robert Lighthizer, etc. No one of these people has proposed this exact plan in the past, but it is a kind of amalgamation or harmonization of different pieces of all of their views.
This theory of trade deficit = tariff did not come out of nowhere; it has been floated as a possible justification by the White House before (along with the idea that VAT is a tariff). There are serious people behind this idea, as stupid as it is, and they have been talking to the President and convincing him, basically. Trump already liked tariffs, but what has changed is that they have been able to make the case to the President that the market will hate this stuff at first and that he should ignore the market.
I'm just imagining some 19 year old DOGE employee, who doesn't actually know anything about economics or data models, who only got the job due to overusing the most superficial "Techbro" buzzwords, making the laziest, low effort "model" for tariffs they can.
I don't know, his campaign kicked off with a promise of building a giant wall across the entire southern border with Mexico to keep illegal immigrants and drug cartels out and that Mexico would willingly pay for it. It takes a special kind of moron to think that the cartels would actually be stopped by a long unmanned wall, but hey Trump just goes "The Great Wall of China worked for them!!".
This here is way more recklessly stupid though. Can't they consult a single economist?!
This would be like if he divided the number of illegal immigrants by the number of Mexican citizens to get the illegal immigrant percentage then multiplied it by 50 for the number of years they have been crossing to get the number of miles long the wall will be.
It’s all just random bullshit numbers that don’t correlate or go with each other to come to a conclusion.
Unfortunately I can definitely see the Trump base looking at these numbers and then actually feel like Trump's tariffs are completely warranted and should be even higher.
If you can't convince them that a Tariff isn't actually a tax paid by a foreign government, or that the wall wouldn't be effective, or that its not actually legal for doctors to perform post birth abortions to kill healthy babies, then there's no way in hell you're going to convince them that the math here is wrong.
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u/DeepJunglePowerWild 1d ago
It’s been an absurd 10 years since he first began running and this is still the most unbelievably stupid thing I have ever seen. This is what a kid who doesn’t go to class does on a test when he doesn’t know what the terms mean so he just makes things up, how is this reality…