- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Among the reciprocal tariff levels Trump announced:
China: 34%
European Union: 20%
South Korea: 25%
India: 26%
Vietnam: 46%
Taiwan: 32%
Japan: 24%
Thailand: 36%
Switzerland: 31%
Indonesia: 32%
Malaysia: 24%
Cambodia: 49%
United Kingdom: 10%
Rest of the world: 10%
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Trump clearly has some feelings about Vietnam. He used his “bone spurs” excuse to avoid being sent over there back in the day. Lmao
What a pussy
In case anyones looking at this and asking question like “Why has Cambodia been dunked with 49% when they’re clearly not a competitor to the US” or “Why is Trump claiming that the European Union has a 40% tariff on the US when the actual mean tariff on US goods into the EU is less than 5%”, here’s your answer to how these figures have been calculated.
- Take the US trade deficit with a given country (eg. China is $292bn)
- Take the total good imported by US (for China that’s $439bn)
- Divide the first figure by the second! Why? Who knows! It’s a number! Less talk more first grade arithmetic (if you’re still following that gives us 67%)
- That gives us a random number which we’ll pretend is that country’s tariff of US goods even though it’s completely unrelated in every way. We’ll divide it by two to get the new tariff rate for imports from that country. Why? Honestly if you’re still expecting there to be an answer to that question I’m wondering if you’ve been following. (that gives us 34%, well actually it gives us 33.5% but I’m not sure the Trump administration understands the idea of fractions so we’ll just round it up from there)
The “reason” behind this is that Trump seems to think trade deficits are really bad, which is bad news for the US because it’s had a trade deficit for the last 50 years. We’ll ignore the fact that based on per capita GDP it’s been the wealthiest country in the world for that time though.
Anyway, just to give everyone an idea of how completely, utterly unrelated to anything meaningful that figure is, let’s take Cambodia. The country is very poor compared to the US so can’t afford to buy anything that the US manufacters (Cambodians aren’t driving round in Teslas or IMessaging each other). Some US companies use it for clothing manufacture because labour is cheap in Cambodia (see the previous bit about Cambodia being much poorer than the US). This means that Cambodia imports close to nothing from the US compared to what it exports, giving it a close to 100% trade deficit, so we wind up with a 49% tariff on Cambodia.
I genuinely don’t understand the mindset that looks at the US’s explotation of cheap labour in Cambodia and interprets the US as the victim in that relationship, but hey-ho maybe I’m just not biggly-smart enough to understand the 4d chess moves at play here. . .
Reference (because unfortunately none of what I said was made up and that geniunely is the calculation): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists
Been browsing the conservative subreddit this morning just to see what they all are thinking. There is a surprising number of “This is a terrible idea” comments but its also funny seeing a whole bunch of republicans who now suddenly like higher taxes, inflation and stock crashes.
GlObAL ReCESSioN
Can they fucking stop threatening us like we’re stupid children? Life has been getting more expensive worldwide for a decade and we all know now who is to blame.
I don’t fucking care about new toyota prices in the us, I want to buy potatoes in poland. Fuck off with your recessions and bullshit economies.
isn’t this just going to fuck up the US economy rather than meaningfully affect any other country? you don’t fucking produce anything worth a shit anymore.
It will have an effect on other countries, but fuck up the US economy the worst. Other countries have the benefit of having 190+ other countries to do trade with. Over the next few years, they will increasingly go for alternatives to whatever they’ve previously traded with the US. Thanks to the stable genius, the US will permanently be left poorer, while other countries will soon have economic growth again.
Trump has no idea how the economy works, his wealth is propped up by Russian oligarchs laundering money through his assets.
This move is almost certainly being directed to him through foreign agents the traitor has as advisors (though they consider themselves handlers) on behalf of Putin and other regimes hostile to the US who back door’d their way into the situation through his greed and lack of morality.
Also intentionally crashing the economy to hurt political enemies and cause civil unrest (mass government firings = lots of educated qualified people out of work, also drives down wages of other educated qualified people). Techo-fascist corporate cities and Gilead don’t need a Dow Jones index.
The overabundance doesn’t just vanish. When the poor have less, the wealthy have more. There may be more homeless people fighting over food but the billionaires will be able to get a fleet of yachts.
This is really not true. The wealthy aren’t playing 4D chess with the economy, they are just as short-sighted behind closed doors. The Great Depression fucked a lot of wealthy people up and turned the entire nation against them. It can happen again.
Edit - and for the record, the abundance does vanish in a depression scenario. Factories shut down, productivity collapses. The world will literally extract, refine, process, and build less of everything. You can’t build a fleet of yachts without a functioning economy.
The Great Depression fucked a lot of wealthy people up and turned the entire nation against them. It can happen again.
One might argue it already is happening. Right now. In real time.
Be safe.
Just like how a rising tide raises all boats, a sinking ship takes everyone down with it. The billionaires think being on the life rafts will make them more wealthy compared to those that are sinking.
He is gambling on the fact that Us economy can hold off longer than other countries and they’ll cave
It’s like two people holding their breath bad for both but neither wants to lose
Cave about what though?
Tariffs. Donald wants other countries to have less tariffs on American products
Those numbers on his poster are made up and don’t reflect actual tariffs that exist and can be cut.
Yep, they just took the trade deficit to each country and turned it into a tariff 😆
Most of the kit that is made in US uses parts distributed by other countries… So even domestic sales of US created products are likely to be impacted. Gotta give it to Krasnov, he’s doing a bloody good job at the task he’s been set.
Could you imagine if Biden declared what essentially amounts to a 10% sales tax?
Oh no. We produce stuff. The best weapons for killing people are made here.
In 2020, I thought Covid might crash the economy. You know, history repeats itself. But oh, was I wrong; it’ll all be caused by a single fuckwit which deserves to be tortured.
Fuck anyone involved in making the world a worse place. I hope they all die in fucking agony.
The crash in 2020 was twice as deep as it should have been. The markets were spooked by a president repeating conspiracy theories instead of reassuring people while health organizations were scrambling and panicking.
Together, we can make that happen
“The corporations own the government” made sense for a while, but Trump has done enough to hurt said corporations lately that I’m actually starting to question that idea (it’s definitely true for the majority of Democrats though). The only real reason I can think of where it would make sense to do stuff like this is to cause a crisis making it easier to abuse power later on.
Is he using a random number generator?
bamboozle them with bullshit
Imma just post this video here: https://youtu.be/5RpPTRcz1no
What the current administration is doing tracks with this video fairly accurately. Basically, “Network States” are what they want. It’s basically what exists in Honduras right now in the form of "Prospera, which is a network state that operates in that country.
The following quote from ChrisO_wiki on bsky
“@chriso-wiki.bsky.social Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn’t actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us.” Just about sums it up.
Damn, I’d like to see the data on that.
No, it’s half the tariff those countries place on American goods. Or so he claims. I have no idea where those numbers come from.
He doesn’t understand what VAT is.
He doesn’t understand anything. Here’s what he said about income taxes and tariffs today.
They established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government
That’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read.
So far*
Today
by the way that was his first presidency too, he did the same thing.
And, for wrecking their business, had to bail the farmers out with the tariff money lol
That’s probably why you’re not the president.
LOL.
I’m not sure that that’s necessarily wrong. Excise taxes, import duties, etc. have been around for millennia. In the US, the income tax has only been around since the Civil War (which it was created to pay for).
Taxes on citizens have always been used to run the government those citizens live under. Doesn’t matter if it’s base on income or something else.
The only way to make other countries pay for your government to operate is to invade them and steal all of their resources… like Hitler did.
It’s really not worth trying to make sense of anything this guy says. He is the definition of a bullshitter.
Why would someone run a business exporting goods into a country if they couldn’t charge more than the cost of duties, labor, and materials for the goods?
Don’t forget land sales tax which happened a lot after the Louisiana Purchase and the Gold Rush.
It’s probably like his net worth, where “it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings”, “even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day”.
https://money.cnn.com/2011/04/21/news/companies/donald_trump/index.htm
Like he would even know what that is.
Apparently ChatGPT.
I don’t know what the actual reasoning is but the 49/46% on Cambodia and Vietnam sounds an awful lot like how we still embargo Cuba like decades after failing to overthrow Castro.
The number for a tariff is a trading deficit divided by total export of a country. It’s simplistically stupid.
Reminder that after setting the political stage for the Khmer Rouge to take power with the carpet-bombing of Cambodia, the US Government continued to recognize Pol Pot as its rightful ruler all the way through to the early 1990s, simply because the actual Cambodian government of the 80s was installed with Vietnam’s help.
The USA seems to be on an never-ending quest to fuck Indochina over for no fucking reason.
Lots of good cheap building materials and cloth come from Vietnam. Trump publically thinks that by cutting off these it will bring the rust belt back. Absolute lunacy.
I swear that if we could just all ignore him unless he does nice things, we’ll make him stop. The tariffs are not his plan. That’s someone else pulling the strings. He just likes the attention. Giving a malignant narcissist any kind of supply is just going to make him worse. His fans already treat him like the messiah.
Gray rock the shit out of him. Remove his name from the internet, hack Fox news - take it all down, and only give it back when he behaves like a good boy.
this would have worked in 2016, I doubt it would now. the oligarchs who put the administration in power want their pound of flesh, and they will get it regardless of whose name is in the daily headlines.
hundreds of thousands of federal workers have been fired, research and education slashed, unprecedented damage done to institutions, and civil rights violations not seen in peacetime in generations. no, I’m afraid ignoring Trump isn’t going to solve anything.
the oligarchs must be stopped. one way or another.
I’d love to open the news one evening and not feel like we’re another step closer to the apocalypse.
Honestly, fuck Trump. Where my Luigis at?
He was inside you all along
You can’t get close to orange fuck for anything like that. You gotta hope for a natural luigi to show up and say “time’s up bitch”
Not even via a trebuchet?
Trebuchets:
A superior siege engine for today’s trying times!
If Trump would be killed by a medieval seige weapon, then I will believe in god again.
Imagine he’s golfing and a fucking engine block of a 1982 Buick Regal comes sailing through the air from 200 meters.
One can only dream.
I love this idea, make it so fast that it just rolls right over his fat ass, but just enough to put him at deaths doorstep. 15 mins until total death. Put a report next to him. What does he say?
Reporter:
Mr. President, would you say that that trebuchet was reciprocal?
He missed.
Trump: Meta will invest $500 billion.
Truth: Meta will invest around $60 billion.
Thats a gross mis representation of what’s factually correct in monetary terms.
This fucking asshat is going to sink the American economy. No major company is going to do this. Why would TSMC spend “$500 billion” to build a factory?
Them just paying the tariff would be less than building a new factory. They just need to survive trumps term and frankly, when the U.S. can’t get chips at an affordable price from Taiwan, those tariffs will fall away like a pillar f sand during high tide.
Absolutely dumbest fucking turd on the planet.
Americans will be paying the tariffs, not foreign companies.
Well they’ll also be paying it in reduced revenue lmao everyone loses
Lol no , if anyone thinks that its the best indicator that they dont know first thing about corpos … theyll just jack the end price
Yes, but when things are expensive people buy them less and corporations make less money
I think he was just making a point about how outsized the price of the factory was. Like even if they had to pay the tariffs, it wouldn’t be worth it to build a factory, so it’s double stupid of Trump to do this.
I wish TSMC would open a factory in Europe.
Not only would it be very advantageous for the EU, it would sting like hell for the US.
They are already building one in Dresden, others are planned to follow. The CHIPS act is at last having an effect.
Oh cool!
Holy shit the post-market drops for SPY and QQQ are insane. I haven’t seen a post/pre market move this sharp since Covid
They’ll try to spin it in tomorrows finance news, so it may be sharp but not as sharp as it should be.
China: 34%
Added note that this is cumulative so it’s 54% total. Confirmed by Press secretary earlier.
