Comment by chris_wot
7 days ago
Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.
And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins).
Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor?
Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...):
> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.
In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.
Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?
Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.
The Guardian has investigated further: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
In the case of Norfolk Island, it was apparently some mislabeled shipments from Timberland (based in New Hampshire, NH <-> NI) and from two companies based in Norfolk, UK.
For Heard & McDonald Islands, it was mislabeled machinery that actually originated in Austria and Germany.
Pity the Faulkland Islands, population 3,200 and about a million penguins. They have a 42% tariff.
Are you feeling great again, Americans?
2 replies →
Now it is 1.4 mln, in future this could be 1000 more, if this will help with overcoming tariffs. Check what happened with Germany export to Kazakhstan in 2022.
4 replies →
It could be a clerical error — intending to choose Haiti or Honduras, or maybe Hong Kong, and clicking or typing HM by mistake.
Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.
That may be the stupidest explanation I have heard yet.
It must be the correct one then. :-)
1 reply →
I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them."
That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.
Doge should look into this inefficiency.
I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%.
So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
But some of those places aren’t even countries. As already stated - weird.
It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
> It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
Joke of the month.
Thankfully this is the only thing which this administration hasn't thought out as well as it should have.
Only barely four years left, yaaaay!
I'm not saying they make sense but according to the US Trade Representative this is the equation used to calculate the tariffs:
https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
For many countries patter look like ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import.
> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.
Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.
, while Ukraine gets 10%.
The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
10% is the hard minimum, nobody has less than 10%, so ergo 10% is actually the most favourable rate.
Even the UK gets 10% which is truly mad given we have balanced trade and tarrifs (if anything the US tariffed the UK more than they did them).
^So essentially MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports)
6 replies →
Then that list is wildly inaccurate. Norfolk Island hasn’t been an external territory of Australia for some time (about a decade) - it is literally part of the Australian Capital Territory and they vote in the electorate of Bean.
The Trump admin couldn’t arrange a pissup in a brewery.
I've seen a suggestion that they're using ccTLDs.
Which might explain why the British Indian Ocean Territory - population, one US military base - has such a high tariff. The BIOT, aka Diego Garcia, has the ccTLD .io.
In that case, where is the tariff rate for USSR (.su)?
10% on British Indian Ocean Territories, whose sole inhabitants are US soldiers at the Diego Garcia base.
It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story.
Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.
3 replies →
It's like they pulled a list "All Countries the US Trades With" off wikipedia and used that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa...
Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
Very likely that is literally what they did.
Strictly speaking it also includes some British military and contract staff from other countries (cleaning, landscaping etc, whatever they need).
Where is this list posted by the US Government? These countries aren't in Annex I of the Executive Order.
It has British in the name of course. Gotta tariff those leeches. /s
Probably because the tariff table was put together by an ignorant acolyte. They are not serious people.
> Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.
Should have set that to 99% then eh?
Tax the 99% seems pretty accurate.
It's a tariff, it could be infinity percent
Well, you know, you can go even higher, you don't have to stop at 100% :) Infinity is the limit here ;D
Seems like a business opportunity to set up an import company on the Macdonald Islands and sell the goods to the poor folks in Norfolk Island.
If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.
They knew what they were doing. They created a meme, a dead cat.
Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.
This is to stop the practice of shipping things to a place, making a small change, then re-exporting from there to avoid tariffs.
Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?
The problem is that the truth, that this was some haphazard nonsense thrown together at the last second using some ChatGPT prompts, is hard to believe, so people try to insert rationality where it doesn’t exist.
2 replies →
That doesn’t hold water if you’re talking about uninhabited Antarctica territories.