The rates were supposedly based on the US Trade Representative’s calculations of “tariffs imposed against US products”. But they didn’t come from any obvious rates that were actually imposed, as Paul Krugman pointed out.
…
Here’s what the White House and its crack team of trade investigators seems to have done: Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate.
This is how they ended up doing things like imposing a tax on imports from uninhabited islands full of penguins.
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Anything more complicated and Trump would have lost interest or truly just made up numbers.
I don’t think it’s that, so much as that the other countries (and uninhabited islands) didn’t have much in the way of tariffs, and there wasn’t any reason to impose an import tax, so they came up with a nonsense calculation.
This administration brought to you by grok.
Grok has become the dumb-dumb version of Skynet.
The entire world’s economy is now about to crumble under the thumb of a fucking half-baked toy probabilistic model [and its enablers].
This is one of the most humiliating outcomes for humanity.