Comment by gjsman-1000
8 days ago
> Is the US just matching the tariffs set by the other countries?
No. Trump claims that the new tariffs are a 50% discount on what those countries tariff US goods at. (Even if that's questionable - is VAT a tariff?)
If he's correct, or anywhere close, this is a "tough love" strategy to force negotiations. We'll see how it goes. It also plays to his base - why should we tariff any less than they do us? And they have a point, it's the principle of the thing.
> If he's correct
He's not.
According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.
According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.
The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.
Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.
Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)
America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.
[1]: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1907533090559324204/photo/1
[2]: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/southeast-asia-pacific/vi...
[3]: https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/news/vietnam-gives-us-tax-b...
It's so quaint to me that people actually believe his rhetoric. How long do you think people will put up with high prices before they turn on him?
If high prices are inevitable, what’s their endgame? Are they actually incompetent or are people too pessimistic about what they’re attempting to do?
Prior to yesterday's announcement, the claim regarding tarrifs was that the goal was to bring manufacturing back to american soil. This is unlikely to happen in any case, but it requires at minimum that consumers put up with high prices for a while (with "a while" being measured in years, if not decades). Actually, the "liberation day" tarrifs strongly agree with this goal: after speculation, the administration announced the formula for these new tarrifs, which has nothing to do with counter tarrifs or trade barriers as claimed, and instead comes from a ratio of the trade deficit in goods and the overall amount of trade. In other words, countries that export a lot of goods to the US (and the US doesn't have commensurate goods exports to) get high tarrifs. This makes sense if the goal is to incentivize manufacturing in the US, by making manufactured goods from outside more expensive.
There is another camp that thinks that trump doesn't really have a goal per se, and is rather doing all this as an exercise in showing off his strength and to draw attention to himself. This camp holds that eventually trump will get bored, or the public will turn on him, and he'll need to get rid of tarrifs to save face. We call these people "optimists".
> If he's correct
Trump is not in the business of being _correct_, or indeed caring about correctness as a concept.
And no, these are, obviously, not the actual tariffs, don’t be silly.