Wonder why this has been flagged.
Bookmark https://news.ycombinator.com/active and you won't have to wonder if you're missing flagged posts with discussion.
nice, didn'tknow about that one :)
Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
181–190 of 205 posts
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#182Wonder why this has been flagged.
It is weird that HN isn't talking about tariffs at all - since this is probably the biggest economic mixup since COVID.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#183Wonder why this has been flagged.
It is weird that HN isn't talking about tariffs at all - since this is probably the biggest economic mixup since COVID.
Why would HN be talking about tariffs? That's the sort of mundane concern you'd find covered on TV news, and good hackers shouldn't find such things interesting. Let's talk about... umm... set theory? Graphics cards? Python?
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
So why the tariff on Taiwan, and why alienate Canada? Is European support not strategically useful? Who buys American weaponry to fund American military industry when countries don't trust us? Why would he create the grounds for civil unrest here, which would make decisive military action much harder? How can we have leverage when other countries are dealing with an O(1) problem while we are dealing with O(N) harm to…
He wants to devalue the USD to make manufacturing more cost effective. For that he needs leverage. Plus tariffs raise money so can fund tax breaks. Read the essay I linked to in my other comment. It's all there.
You completely avoided interacting with the concerns I have in good faith. I understand that's the marketing pitch, I even understand there is some truth to it, but can you try to see the bigger picture and zoom out of an individual policy to see overall strategy? At the absolute best this is incompetence.
Even if we figured out manufacturing, wars are frequently won with technology, and those researches that fled Germany to get away from oppression are now fleeing America because colleges are robbing them of their dignity in expression and attempting to exploit them by taking the fruits of their labor, without the experiencing the "cost" of their own person-hood and individual beliefs.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd put my chips on the formula being $(LLM_OF_CHOICE), given the lack of attention paid to details like, say, uninhabited islands near the Antarctic. https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2025/04/critics-suspect-...
I don't think it's LLM, not everthing is AI, just because that's the hot topic of the day. This forumla is too simple, it's essentially 0.5 * (their_portion_of_trade_deficit / total_trade_deficit_with_country) % . It's not complex at all and that formula fits all the % calculated by Trump's board of "liberation" too closely to not be essetially what he and his cronies came up with. Likely one of the DOGGie boys
But how do you explain an uninhabited semi-independent (as i understand it) island with no trade with the US getting higher tariffs than Australia, the country it's broadly part of?
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of that makes sense as fighting China. Especially not the Greenland thing. He makes China looks good which is quite a feat. > He wants to choke them with tariffs (and now has leverage to get the rest of the world to join in). Like, how? You expect the countries to put tariff on Chine, risk to have tariffs put on them by both China and unpredictable USA? He is loosing leverage here rather then gaining it. > They…
It's all here. This seems to be their playbook: https://www.hudsonbaycapital.com/documents/FG/hudsonbay/rese... They'll tie the defence umbrella to tariffs and good behaviour.
Who will be dumb enough to believe American security promises anymore? America won't defend anyone no matter what they promiss.
If they wanted to sell defense, threatening annexation of countries they are supposed to have current defensive arrangement with is inconsistent with that. Allying yourself with Russia is inconsistent with that too.
And above all, an attempt to use past help as a reason to make the other country your colony for materials extractions while trying to sell their parts to Russia ... makes you untrustworthy.
Greenland is not threatened by China right now, they are threatened by America.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#187It makes plenty of sense if you consider that it wasn't designed to benefit the US, but rather to drive US trade to our competitors.
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…
Don't forget that bigballs was fired from one of his last jobs for... selling company secrets to a competitor.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
for countries that pay a worker $10 a day, put a tariff on the goods produced by that worker to total $10 for countries that pay a worker $15 dollars a day put a tariff on the goods produced by that work to total $4 therefore someone importing goods produced by one worker in one day from the lower wage country would spend $20 for the goods from the lower wage country but only $19 for the goods for the higher wage cou…
If the shirt costs $10 in labor, and the pre-tariff wholesale price is also $10, how does the manufacturer make a profit? Surely the wholesale price would at least include some markup for profit? So like $10 labor + $3 markup (per employee-day) + $10 tariff ($23) contrasted with $15 labor + $3 markup + $4 tariff ($22), in your scenario. But now you see that the low wage manufacturer has a third option, $10 labor + $1…
That's not really what I mean.
What I'm saying is set a minimum wage on imports. Set a global minimum wage. Anyone importing something from somewhere that doesn't meet that minimum wage would have to pay a tariff greater than the amount saved with low wages.
The goal is to increase competition and improve fairness between locations. You wouldn't want to do it all at once at first, rather a gradual increase. You wouldn't want to distort the local economy too much so don't insist somewhere pay 10x the median local wage. Lots of things you would do which are more complex with an eye for fairness and competitiveness and definitely not trying to raise everyone by force to American levels of wages, but always measured amounts of pressure.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s a nice idea, but I’m skeptical—where is the new wealth coming from that will allow Lesotho to pay its workers more? It’s not an issue of strong-arming some bad guys in Lesotho to pay their workers more using tariffs as a negotiation tool. I feel that conflating tariffs with some sort of negotiation tool to bring about positive global change is disingenuous, because the real aim is clearly protectionism.
It's clearly not protectionism, because you wouldn't put tariffs on everything - including all the raw materials and parts you need to import, if you wanted your local industries to succeed. And you'd have a coherent industrial policy to go along with it.
Protectionism is France and England putting tariffs on each others cheese. America putting tariffs on Canadian lumber.
Putting tariffs on places that have a 20x factor difference in wages is something else.
And protectionism isn't necessarily a dirty word. It's often valuable to save your local industries from being wiped out and to not have a foreign country have complete control of a necessity.
Re: Trump's Tariff Formula Makes No Economic Sense. It's Also Based on an Error
#190Instead of trying to make sense of the formula, it's much more likely the administration needed a global 30% and then they made up the formula (and the constants, etc) to get to that number.
Anyone who's trying to make arguments based on the formula itself is the dog being wagged.