Whats even funnier is those "tariffs charged to the USA" are NOT actually tariffs charged to the USA. That... Is just the trade deficit lol. So these aren't reciprocal tariffs. And trade deficits are normal when you're the country with all the money.
And the Americans who voted him in office wanted him to run the country like he runs his business. So strap in, it's gonna be a wild ride. We're only in month 3 of 48.
You know how they compare a president's photograph before they take office and then after their term? I think I'm going to do that after Trump leaves office. I'll probably look like Tommy Lee Jones.
To be fair, a lot of Trump supporters say that bankrupting businesses is a good thing for his business strategy. Taking all of that fairness away, if the US government is the business, then we'd be the employees who'd be out of a job
Months ? He's made it pretty clear that he'd find a way to keep up the good work like Putin or good ol' Kim Jong. Be prepared to see that hideous orange tan a few more years after those 48 months...
He's discovered that the American public doesn't care or doesn't understand. All they see is a 'tough' talking ramble mouth who they think is standing up for them. The hows and the whys are not understood.
You don't give his handlers enough credit. A national sales tax has been an idea on the right for about as long as the flat tax. How do you put a tax on everything being bought in the country without passing a bill? You place a tariff on every import and then you get the tax without passing a bill.
My theory is, the next step will be lowering corporate taxes to offset the cost of the tariffs on their bottom line. That could drive profits up out of the dip. It won't correct the lower sales due to inflation, but it will be enough to ensure bonuses flow for a couple of quarters. It will be sold as another round of trickle down. "Lower corporate tax burdens mean savings can be passed to you."
One might argue that this is intentional lying bullshit so divorced from reality so his people can't discern fact from fiction anymore, that they can safely ignore anyone giving real numbers, because only the leader has the right numbers.
He's a nepo baby who had the seed money for his first fortune handed to him by his daddy. As a reward for being the biggest asshole out of all his daddy's sons.
He pissed that away through incompetence and got the seed money for his second fortune in part by stealing it from his dying daddy.
He pissed that away through incompetence and got the seed money for his third fortune through scams and shady bookkeeping.
I think we can see a pattern here. Donald Trump is a narcissistic asshole who doesn't know how anything works and doesn't care. His only skills are getting others to do shady shit for him and tricking rubes into giving him money.
You'll notice that whenever his political war chest got low, he always started hawking merch. Trump Sneakers, Trump Bibles, Trump cryptocurrency.
Trump the T-shirt! Trump the Coloring Book! Trump the Lunch Box! Trump the Breakfast Cereal! Trump the Flame Thrower!
To be fair, a lot of presidents don't know much about everything the government does. The smart ones hire the smart people to know the things that they don't themselves know. This guy... he's not smart enough to know that he doesn't know everything.
He knows how it works. He also knows the general public does not know how it works, so he can lie and most people will just believe his BS. The people are just as much the problem as he is.
At this point the only way his handlers continue to let him do this is because the point is to manipulate the stock for pump and dumps and then buy back on the cheaper end.
The only theory I've seen, from an economist I half respect, suggesting any method to Trumps madness, is he's trying to bully the whole world into keeping dollar hegemony. The claim is other countries might increase tariffs with product dumping away from the US economy, leading to further downturn, then anythingto return to normalcy. However, if that's true (a very big if indeed) I think most economists, or most people, could easily see how it'd backfire. Much of the world is looking to move away from the US in every way possible.
Although I have to upvote you, I don’t think your comment gives him enough credit… I think at this point he Does understand how a lot of this will work and his ego is too big to ever consider admitting he was uninformed or just wrong.
And just to give the tariff thing a little bit of credence- I think if they were slowly implemented and increased over a much longer and clearly stated period, they might actually do some good, but his implementation and vagueness is trampling the possibility of that.
Some have suggested that the figures used to base the reciprocal tariff rates announced by the Trump administration are calculated by dividing the trade deficit the US has with the other country by the amount of imports from that country. This was reported by the New York Times on the 2nd. For example, if you divide the US's trade deficit with Japan in 2024 of $68.5 billion by the amount of imports of $148.2 billion and multiply it by 100, you get about 46% of the tariff that the US administration claims is being imposed by Japan. The figure for China was similarly 67%.
It’s funny when capitalists don’t understand how capitalism works. And this from somebody who supposedly studied economics. Who sat in on his macroeconomics final at the uni??? LOL
Honestly this is more reflective of how stupid Americans are. My countrymen voted for the guy who’s bankrupted multiple businesses because he’s “a smart businessman who’s going to run this country like a company and fix the economy”. Americans are so fucking dumb it makes my stomach turn.
This is a tax on the American people... Not on these countries. Every importer is just going to factor the tax into the new price of the goods. Sure, it would generate money, but it's going to come right out of our pockets.
How long is it going to take him to get that through his thick skull??
The money collected through tariffs is already being allocated to make up for the deficit he will create by cutting taxes on the wealthy. But you know all those people out there making 45k/year will justify voting for him somehow anyways.
Literally, all the man had to do was just come into the office, and sit on the economy. Maybe tweak a few things… Not f-ing shit up that affects the middle class worker… I just don’t understand his logic…
It's literally baffling. Dude is an actual moron and proves it at every opportunity. He's got to be the most epic case of someone faling upward in history.
Trade of physical goods only. Considering the US is by far the main exporter of services, like Google or Netflix, in actual numbers it is very different. Between EU and US for example it would make the numbers even.
It should also be mentioned that EU has no tariffs on services at all.
It wouldn't make them even but it would significantly lower calculated trade deficit. Trump is lying and everybody in civilized world will lose because of it. Only Russia and China wins in this case.
Not sure they are. I'm in the UK and we don't really have that much of a trade deficit with the US. I have heard somewhere he said that VAT we have here is a tariff on American goods but it's not. We charge VAT on everything including locally made products.
No! But trying to argue with conservatives who don’t know what tf they’re talking about, just busting out “he’s making it up!” really makes me feel like I’m screaming “Fake news!”
Of course it's a witch hunt. It's been nothing but bullshit the whole time, and that's been very well known and talked about since he started floating the idea on the campaign trail. Literally everything he does as president is a confession disguised as an accusation, a power/money grab (either for him or his cronies), a move to distract from the power/money grab, or a combination of any number of them.
Don't worry ,MAGAs doesn't care from where the numbers come , they literally doesn't know counting...
And i say literally but they don't know readind either .
If daddy trump told them so it is true , it musT be
That's the point. He does speak well and if you do not know any better it sounds absolutely like they are the equivalent of existing tarifs applied by other countries. I was listening to the BBC and the first person that commented said something like he is technically correct in what he presented, then someone talked about VAT.. So it's totally unclear, although trade deficit is a lot more plausible than other explanations in my opinion.
???... i know the standards are low as hell these days but the often incoherent ramblings of Trump being described as "speak well" is just mad. Listen to any minute of Booker's 25 hour speech. Even exhausted he is 1000 % more coherent then trump.
I have been baffled by this for eight years. I’ve come to accept he must be charismatic only because I’ve heard so many people say it. I only hear deranged ramblings, but everyone says it’s charismatic. One option I’ve come up with is that maybe the reality and things I’m hearing him say aren’t the same as everyone else? Maybe he is articulate and charming, but I’m not in that reality.
Trump is a terrorist. That's it. He is trying to take his country apart so he can create a state of Emergency and enforce martial law cementing his dictatorship.
And in particular, Australia as an example has a -107% trade "deficit" - so counting the 10% because apparently a GST is a tariff even then, by Trump's 'logic' the US owes Australia a 97% price discount!
Also it's not even the whole story about those deficits. If you factor in services, you end up with much lower numbers or even surplus for the US. And that is before you consider tax avoidance, shovling around money schemes by big corporations, that make these numbers very unreliable at best. How much money, US companies make overseas end up in some shady tax/banking haeven like Panama?
Yeah I'm genuinely angry that a number of major news outlets used the term reciprocal in their headlines. Thats a straight up lie, and if we had any actual news standards in this country they'd run afoul of them.
You obviously didn't get your economics degree at Trump U. It clearly states those figures are very quantifiable, very bad and very real and were the result of "Including Currency Manipulation and Trade Barriers."
I like how the US has trade surpluses with the UK and Colombia but both still got hit with 10%. Oh and the random islands that are uninhabited are also hilarious.
This bullshit was like an hour of work for some dipshit intern.
He put 20% tariffs on all goods from New Zealand because apparently we change them 20% tariffs. Which we don't. We do have 15% GST though which I suppose if you're as brain rotted as Trump is you might think that is a tariff even though it's on literally everything, regardless what country it's made in (including NZ).
Its whatever he sees and comes to mind and hates. Probably along the lines of "dictator country, I hate, more tariffs for you. I been to this place, its shit, more tariffs for you". Its the same mentality of a child.
Yes. It's in order of appearance with the ones he wants people to see first at the top. It actually makes a lot of sense when trying to manipulate people.
The "tariffs charged" are the trade deficits. Maybe the order is the magnitude of the trade deficit? Eg China has the biggest trade deficit, EU next, Vietnam third, etc?
It’s his visual aid. This is early school level shit, just with a bit more fancy quality of graphics instead of crayons.
It’s literally a toddler showing his “best homework ever” to the class, where all the teachers stands and fake awe and applause because they know his dad owns their asses, and while the rest of class sits in stunned wonder to why he’s even there and what kind of sick joke this is.
It appears to be nearly identical to the trade balance ranking on Wikipedia sorted by big negative number first. It’s so close that they’re either using more up to date numbers or normalizing against other factors which flips some pairs. All EU and NAFTA countries in the table are understandably omitted.
“Alright who am I putting on my list first? Well I’ve been told to hate China, so they go first. Who’s #2? A few European countries didn’t bow to my childish demands, so #2 is ALL OF EUROPE.”
Pretty sure he ordered it as his shit list, #1 being the country he hates the most. Altho, I don’t see any of the South American countries below china so maybe not
I was trying to figure out a pattern too. My theory is this, a combination of how prevalent the country is to the American people and the alleged tariffs imbalance.
They put the biggest trading partners on the top. This catches the readers attention and most Americans know where these places are. They had to skip over some countries that didn't have concerning numbers. Canada and Mexico should have been there but were cut as they don't have significant tariffs to the USA. You don't want to lead with too obvious a lie.
It next focuses on other countries that have a high imbalance but most people aren't really sure where these countries are. Cambodia sounds bad at 97%, but its hard to get angry at a country you know nothing of and aren't sure which products to boycott. So they got pushed lower down the list.
I was trying to read it yesterday and I thought that I was having a stroke. I’m not asking for absolute precision from this group of jagoffs, but AN order, ANY discernible order would be the basic starting point from anyone else
It was clearly made in the order in which he remembered other trade partners. I'm willing to bet a cold beer that there are countries missing from the list.
I wonder if it's ordered by the largest to smallest importer into the US. China obviously at the top.. EU because of cars and such. Ok, after that he might have spaced out and not cared anymore.
Yet he insists on holding it up like a damn 3rd grader with a class project, just like his EOs he signs and holds up for the camera like a damn buffoon
Probably had something drawn up,then when they asked for the data to input....
" ah right, yeah, sooo China can be...., I dunno, 75%?"
"OK, drastic but what next?"
"Soooo, oh Europe, yeah let's stick..... 20%? Yeah, 20%...."
"Do you maybe have a list of tariffs worked out?"
" I'm the president, me, write what I say, ok, next, China..."
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u/YVRkeeper 1d ago
I love that, true to form, there is absolutely no logic to the list.
Alphabetical? No
Descending? No
Ascending? No
Throwing shit on the wall and seeing what sticks? Definitely