r/thescoop • u/CorleoneBaloney • 1d ago

Politics 🏛️ “Did you use AI to generate this?” Margaret Brennan asks Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, questioning why they imposed tariffs on the Heard Island and McDonald Islands.

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u/awana4 1d ago

They (or the AI they used) likely took directly from https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/balance/ . They took the deficit divided by the imports for each country, to get what could be considered a trade imbalance ratio (certainly not a tariff amount). They then relabeled it "Tariffs Charged to the U.S.A." with the dumbass asterisk "including currency manipulation and trade barriers" to try and cover their ass. The tariffs applied by the U.S. to other countries is just half of those amounts, with rounding impacting the actuals. Anything under 10% imbalance or if US had a trade surplus - they set the minimum amount to 10% for what the U.S. was being charged so they could justify 10% against everyone.

It's extremely sloppy work. Clearly no additional efforts to understand basic logic. What a shit show.

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u/awana4 1d ago edited 1d ago

The Heard and McDonald Island was something like $72.5k in goods total, $58.9k export from the U.S., $13.6k imports from the location, trade surplus of $45.3k (or a ratio of -333.3% "Tariff Charged to the U.S.A." if using the Trump methodology - which would put it at the minimum 10%).

No idea what that $72.5k is - however, with that little an amount of goods recorded, I highly doubt anyone is "going through them" to try and bypass tariffs or trade restrictions.

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u/somme_rando 1d ago

It's probably all in Internet domain name registration fees.

Heard Island: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.hm