FAFO, Donald, by Robert Gore
Liberation Day has come and gone. If Trump’s War on Foreign Goods (WOFG) is genius, we’ll take idiocy. It’s a stitched-together concatenation based on meretricious metrics, a Son of Smoot-Hawley that will ensure Trump a place in the presidential pantheon right next to Herbert Hoover. Like Hoover, Trump has a business background; like Hoover he never shuts up, and like Hoover he will preside over a disastrous tariff regime.
Start with the metrics the Trump team used to calculate the tariffs for each country. How did they determine a trading partner’s tariff on U.S. exports to that country? They didn’t take the country’s actual tariff rate, then perhaps add in a guesstimate percentage for non-tariff trade barriers and go from there. Rather, they took the U.S. trade deficit with that country and divided it by that country’s exports to the U.S. Thus China, which levies an average 7.3 percent tariff on U.S. goods, and Europe, where the average tariff is 5.2 percent, have 67 and 39 percent tariffs on U.S. exports according to Trump. If they had no actual tariffs or trade barriers at all, they would still have close to those percentages. (Zero tariffs would probably lower their trade surpluses a bit.)
Source: https://ncrenegade.com/fafo-donald-by-robert-gore/
