Comment by rtkwe
7 days ago
For extra sauce on the "they're barely even thinking about this" cake someone figured out where those crazy "Tariff Charged" numbers were coming from, they're taking the trade deficit and dividing by the total imports from that country.
edit: The White House deputy press secretary posted their formula and it is just trade_deficit/2*total_imports per country just dressed up with a lot of fancy language to make it seem smarter but the two extra terms are constants.
I just asked ChatGPT with a lazy prompt: "Come up with a formula to impose reciprocal tariffs that will reduce America's trade deficit to zero" and it came up with basically the same formula.
Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee890e-b400-800b-ac83-90a6147d32...
(edit: fixed link)
> chatgpt.com/share/67ee890e-b400-800b-ac83-90a61463212
404.
> White House are just using ChatGPT
Likely, Grok? https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_e8b4c405-3bb8-4f01-9...
The Terminator franchise had it that the AI has to nuke humanity and fight a giant war including time travel to take over.
Nah, all it has to do is offer to be "helpful" and do stuff for us and we'd be like "sure, go ahead, take over, here let me cut and paste your advice right into a policy document."
People keep asking me how AI will "take over", they don't like my answer "humans are lazy and delegate everything to the AI".
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I never know for sure if that's the source or if the bots are just reading the same "Tariffs for Dummies" source the administration is working from.
I can't believe that could be real at all, but then remembered we're still on the "Biff has the Grey Sports Almanac 1985" timeline
Good to see that Trump will be providing subsidies on goods imported from Australia to balance out the -107% trade relationship they have with them.
Oh wait its a 10% tariff on Australia too. Better make a new version of this chart with a -117% benefit to the US then...
[flagged]
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say. What rtkwe described is literally what they are? They didn’t say the tariffs are random (unless the comment changed, which would explain why yours makes no sense to me), they said they aren’t what the White House is claiming they are.
If you think trying to balance out the trade deficit with every single country without any other nuanced consideration whatsoever is a good approach, that’s one thing (a lot of people would disagree), but there’s no getting around that the information around this is either misinformed or deliberately misleading.
I'm objecting to his characterization that "they're barely even thinking about this." He makes it seem like they picked this formula out of a hat. But there is an ideological rationale to scaling tariffs up with the size of the trade deficit, as described in the article I linked.
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rayiner does this pretty consistently - strawmanning the argument and acting confused, on most political threads on hn.
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Nope my edit was to add the bit I helpfully marked edit to show where the White House had confirmed this was their method while attempting to deny it.
I've seen this comment a couple of times. What would be a better way of doing it? Also consider that if they would've had a more complex formula, what would be the cost of needing to explain it publicly? Would they then need to start defending the fairness of each tariff vs doing it the simple way and having a single formula across the board?
How about “not doing it at all”?
How do you propose to fix deindustrialization?
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Um, by picking and choosing what goods need protection in the long term?
Like, we can't make more fish. Avocados take a few years to grow new trees. Steel mills don't just appear in Ohio.
The worst part is that, even if you believe Donny, he's so mercurial with these tariffs that no one is going to give you a loan to do anything about any of this. This Katy Perry doctrine [0] he's established is just poison to any sort of capital investment. You've got no idea if any of these tariffs will make it to Monday, let alone to the time it takes the mortgage on your t-shirt factory to be paid off. And then you've got a new administration in four years and no idea if they will keep that protection for you either. How are you going to plant a whole vineyard and get it profitable in 4 years when grape vines take 7 years to mature to fruit bearing?
There's no point to any of this, even if you believe him.
[0] 'Cause you're hot, then you're cold You're yes, then you're no You're in, then you're out You're up, then you're down You're wrong when it's right It's black, and it's white We fight, we break up We kiss, we make up
Overall I agree, but I'm not sure there's literally no point. American primary producers will likely benefit - people who own mines, oil wells, farms, etc., and some American manufacturers too as long as they source enough of their raw materials from within the US that the price hikes on resources from overseas don't bite them too much. Still an overall loss that will be borne by American consumers, but a small section of the population who are already wealthy will greatly benefit...
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Exactly, tariffs may be a wise way to protect parts of your industry that need protection and investment. The Chinese for example have been using this tactic for decades. But you need to choose which sectors to invest in. The way Trump is doing is nothing more than an instant devaluation of the dollar purchasing power.
The problem is it's economically illiterate. Trade deficits aren't bad in themselves - they can be a sign that you're getting a good deal. Consider the case where a country with low wages exports raw materials to the US, and doesn't buy back as much from the US. This is the situation for lots of poorer countries who are exporting cheap raw materials to the US, and the US gains from these situations. Trump's policy simply makes all these raw materials more expensive.
Another way of reducing trade deficits would be to make Americans so poor that they can't afford to buy things from overseas. Eliminating trade deficits in itself isn't a rational economic goal.
Having said that, American manufacurers on average will likely benefit (though maybe not if their raw materials are too much more expensive), but this benefit will only come at the cost of American consumers, who are denied cheaper options from overseas by the tariffs
You’re calling Trump “economically illiterate,” but what you’re saying will happen is exactly the motivation of Trump’s policy. He just thinks it’s a good thing rather than a bad thing.
Trump’s bet is that the upsides will be borne disproportionately by his base, while the downsides will be borne disproportionately by Democrats’ laptop-class base. It’s not irrational to think that will be the result.
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Consider actual tariffs? A trade deficit isn't a tariff or trade barrier it's just the natural flow of commerce from them selling more stuff than they buy. They're dressing it up like these countries are charging US imports these crazy tariffs but they're not at all, especially not across the board.
That's imminently doable but would require more work than plugging in 2 numbers from the US trade delegation website so we get this complete lie instead. Trump has had it in his head for ages that trade deficit == tariff (or is lying about that to make his supporters swallow this as the US just fighting back) and it's a completely broken understanding of trade.
> Consider actual tariffs? A trade deficit isn't a tariff or trade barrier it's just the natural flow of commerce from them selling more stuff than they buy
That’s just defining what a trade deficit is, it doesn’t explain why trade deficits arise. For example, other countries have cheaper labor and laxer environmental regulations. Simply looking at the country’s tariff rates on U.S. goods doesn’t account for the whole picture.
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