Could it be that Trump's main goal is to stay in power? I mean not only for the next 3 years. But beyond.
If we look at his actions from this angle, could they make sense?
Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
61–70 of 205 posts
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Am I surprised they used a list of ccTLDs to get a list of countries? No. Am I mildly amused to know someone somewhere had to manually remove Soviet Union (.su) from a list of countries to put a tarrif on? Absolutely.
Why wouldn't they use ISO 3166 directly which doesn't contained outdated countries?
Americans and ISO? That sounds like an oxymoron.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#63Doesn't this formula also punish circular trade patterns in a strange way, like if the US imports $X of good from country B and country B imports $X of goods from country C and country C imports $X of goods from the US, and there are no flows in the opposite direction, then the US would impose an infinite tariff on country B since US imports from B are zero?
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#64I wonder if he and his friends opened a bunch of options the morning of and are now collecting their winnings... he does have a bunch of crypto pump and dumpers as advisors.
Not only that, but I assume they'll take more bites of the apple as they go down the list country by country and negotiate better rates for some kind of kickback and market manipulation opportunity.
it's kinda strange that the largest tariff is in a landlocked country a 5 hour drive from elon musk's hometown.
All the numbers on what a country is supposedly charging america appear to be a complete fabrication so we're forced to find other motivation for setting the numbers the way they did.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#65> if the US imports $100 million worth of goods and services while exporting $50 million to a country, then the Trump Administration alleges that country levies a 50 percent tariff on the United States The Trump Administration ignores the services and only looks at goods. So the base is already wrong.
They’re also rolling up local taxes like VAT as Tariffs it seems
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#66[deleted]
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#67By the time companies decide to open factories in the US, these factories will be run with Chinese robots by companies which wouldn't care about a 500% tariff on Chinese robots if they are still cheaper than the work of an American worker.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Considering how open they've been about their clear conflicts of interest (Trump launching a cryptocurrency on day 1 of his presidency, being in charge of a publicly traded company that he's made no effort to remove himself from, and the Diablo cheater being in charge of a department that gets to determine "efficiency" while also bidding on government contracts), I think we should really consider the possibility that…
> I debated doing that. I wish I had, I would have made a bit of money in the last few days. The details weren't public. You can stop feeling being bad about yourself.
Well, he announced when “liberation day” was going to happen. I debated buying one that expired on Friday.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want the people who work to make the things I use to earn more than $150 per month. A sane tariff policy would be set up to penalize these very low wage exporters to give competitive advantage to exporters and local producers with higher wages but also to incentivize higher wages in a way that set rates make producers more profitable if they paid workers more (and likewise other human development and environmental…
This makes sense. I think even MAGA might agree if you pitch it as "we use tarrifs to prevent American labor from being undercut. But it is clear that the reasoning here is "I want tarrifs, how do I easily get them". And then they found the easiest possible way to say something about 'countries putting a tarrif on the US'. The stupid theory behind this is effectively: not having a minimum wage is equivalent to puttin…
Pressure to improve trade imbalances is a good idea! Particularly with China and some of these extremely low wage countries. Democrats being silent on the topic or not wanting to do anything about it is one of the bigger deciding issues for the kind of moderates who would actually change their vote between parties.
The current administration is like... if you're being charitable you can imagine at some point someone had a reasonable set of ideas that got filtered through a long string of fools in a game of telephone so now we have an angry toddler with a gun destroying the global economy on the basis of ideas which very well may have been interesting at the beginning of the chain but have long since descended into incoherence.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#70Trump is only confusing if you think his policies are meant to benefit America.
If you don't believe that, then his policies are terrifyingly not confusing. If you believe his policies are primarily meant to benefit American oligarchs or Russia, his policies are even less confusing.
Withdrawing support for Ukraine and not putting tariffs on Russia, despite putting tariffs on uninhabited "Heard Island and McDonald Islands" is probably the least confused I've been since his inauguration. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...