Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee890e-b400-800b-ac83-90a6147d32...
(edit: fixed link)
404.
> White House are just using ChatGPT
Likely, Grok? https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg%3D%3D_e8b4c405-3bb8-4f01-9...
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."
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...
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.
From one economist who was cited in the rationale:
> It is not clear what the government note is referencing or not from our work ... But I believe our work suggests a much higher value should be used for the elasticity of import prices to tariffs than what the government note uses. ... The government note uses a value of 0.25 for ‘the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs’, denoted with the Greek letter phi. But our estimates found a value of 0.943 — very close to 1 — for this elasticity.
From another:
> this is where the discrepancies between our work and the table that President Trump showed arises ... our results suggest that the EU should not be tariffed, and yet they set high tariffs against them. Finally, our range of optimal tariffs is substantially lower than the ones the Administration just announced.
But it does provide a convenient fig-leaf rationalization for the class of over-confident economically illiterate folks to cling to, so it seems to have succeeded.
see: https://www.ft.com/content/bbaa8daf-b7b0-4dca-bc23-c2e8eee68...
non-paywall: https://archive.ph/wip/JMgcP
IIRC he is a lawyer, a field where strategically deploying intellectual dishonesty is particularly advantageous.
This is a real human being making these apologetics and using classic distraction and whataboutism techniques
(He's also getting about as close as you can get to the "out-and-out racism" line as you can get without maybe technically crossing it. Though I think he did cross it when it comes to Irish Catholics.)
You state this as fact that we should all agree on. Why should we do this? Why not rely on our allies and friends to do what they do well, while we continue to do what we do well? Is trade not the basis of peace? If we stand alone, we must ask why we must.
Generally, the clamoring for domestic production comes down to: 1. Employment. But because we are more prosperous, our employment is aimed elsewhere. We have jobs for people that are less dangerous, less manual, and better paid.
2. A fear that without domestic production, we're at a strategic or military disadvantage. But it's not that we _can't_ produce in an emergency, we can and have historically (see: oil in the 1970s). What protects us most is hegemony, which is threatened by things like across-the-board trade wars.
3. Nostalgia for the good ol days. Look, if you want to work in a factory, we have lots of them here, still. Nobody will stop you from putting on the hard hat. But in all likelihood you have a less stressful, less dangerous, and better-paying job today.
There really isn't an argument for this. Our trade was - as all trade is - mutually beneficial. Right now we're pushing the glass to the edge of the table when it was perfectly fine where it was.
One other important note: there are things we literally cannot produce domestically due to lack of natural availability (food products, certain textiles)
1) mandatory saving for future, like a Social Security for the country (which is ironically also comprised of Social Security)
2) investments made into the future of the country. People buy T-bonds because they're reliable returns. Low risk, relatively low reward. If suddenly our future looks less bright, our debt will slow, but it will be a pretty telling canary in the coal mine.
It's baffling to me that people generally don't grasp this. They treat it as though we're just ... buying stuff on a credit card.
I somehow keep eating 6-10 eggs a week despite not having a chicken.
The US is in the envyable position of having developed a globally dominant service sector. Putting that at risk of retaliation by imposing tariffs on all imports, including the lowest margin stuff like screws and bolts is utter insanity.
https://www.ft.com/content/aee57e7f-62f1-4a57-a780-341475cd8...
Cargo culting "manufacturing jobs" isn't actually a plan.
(I also notice nobody is talking about bringing back switchboard jobs or typing pool jobs)
Is laying our heads at the GDP idol's feet a reasonable measure of what these activities contribute to national welfare?
https://qz.com/1269172/the-epic-mistake-about-manufacturing-...
That it's relative share in GDP is down during that time means that other sectors were growing even faster (think Google, Netflix and so on, so services instead of things). That the service sector gains in relative importance is actually a sign of an advanced economy, every modern economy looks like that, not just the US.
Basically if you ignore computers, there was zero growth in manufacturing sector. If you take computers into account but ignore processing power increase, there was zero growth. So pretty much the only driving force in the manufacturing sector for the last 20 years was Intel, AMD, Nvidia. This is even with the increased productivity per person in manufacturing sector (so there was also massive reduction in employment).
It is highly concerning and the numbers were very much cooked up.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/uni...
You might as well say we "de-agriculturized" because we automated farming.
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
https://bsky.app/profile/chrismurphyct.bsky.social/post/3llu...
"Do _____ and maybe we can cut you some slack on the tariffs"
If there is a point and it's not just absolute stupidity.
Sure, they might be trying to do this. But I'd give that a ~3% chance.
There is no 'there' there.
They are 'burning down your house to cook a steak.'
The emperor has no clothes.
There are many more ways to say it, but as truly unbelievable as my mind keeps insisting it is, these people are just plain-jane morons.
The exact same kind of fail-upwards, born on third thinking they hit a triple, grindset grifter, loser mid-level management nepobabies.
Could not have put it better myself.
Welcome back.
Huge swaths of midwestern farmers will go bankrupt if tariffs are imposed. Subsidies and exemptions are being specifically added to prevent the complete collapse of multiple red state economies due to the harm from the tariffs.
Even things like oil and mines aren't guaranteed safe, because of complexities around where refineries are, loss of export market, or weakness of dollar offsetting any nominal gains when looking at actual purchasing power.
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
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.
Yes everybody, we are taxing all of your groceries - but all of those American coffee and banana farms (!) will be protected.
So given that, I would have assumed that this administration would focus on making things more affordable. Instead, I'm seeing people try to explain to me that, actually, raising the prices across the board is a good thing!
To put it plainly, it seems like the administration raising prices is, in fact, not a good thing for Americans. And I don't see how American labor can produce things that are more affordable than what we can buy now. So it seems like a net negative, because ultimately they are choosing to make everything more expensive for consumers.
I'm sure there are more companies, but that is all I've seen so far.
That tanks the revenue from the tariffs, which would make them an ineffective replacement for income tax.
I mean he's gone bankrupt 6 times including managing to bankrupt a casino a business where on average people give you money to get less money in return... He also confuses simple economic terms like equating trade deficits with tariffs.
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.
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.
Besides, if the trade volume is what determines the tariff, why would any country want to have a trade surplus with the US? The best solution for other countries is to artificially limit their exports, or find more reliable trading partners.
I do agree that this madness will only encourage other countries to conduct their trade elsewhere.
Because the U.S. can buy from Uruguay only as much as 3.5 million people in that country can produce.
Next that's always going to be imbalanced because they produce goods cheaper and can't afford as much as the equivalent chunk of people in the US.
Assume good faith.
So we've exported our worst paying, most environmentally damaging industries? I mean the rivers catching fire was probably exciting but I'm not exactly pining to bring that back...
Tariffs can only set those industries up for internal markets, other countries will just continue to buy from the cheaper source so the protected industry has to continue to be protected.
Additionally who's going to work these labor intensive industries? We're already at 4.1% unemployment, there's not vast masses of people waiting for low paying work as seamstresses and one of the other major prongs of the Trump ideology is reducing immigration drastically so we're going to squeezed on that end too.
Finally we've done mass tariffs before and it always ends badly. Remember Smoot-Hawley? it deepened the Great Depression because people thought they could turn to protectionism to prop up and bring industry to the US. It just doesn't work when broadly applied.
https://imgur.com/a/jBTiz7T
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.
https://x.com/KushDesai47/status/1907618136444067901