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.

Why do you think the White House aren’t simply saying that, then, rather than claiming it’s about reciprocal tariffs and trade barriers?

The "idealogical rationale" is not coherent or even consistent with the papers that the administration cited:

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

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.

rayiner does this pretty consistently - strawmanning the argument and acting confused, on most political threads on hn.

I notice he seems to have a GPT-level understanding of issues, offering a thin justifications of his viewpoints, and then just completely ignoring any substantive discussions and instead only engaging in threads where he is "winning".

IIRC he is a lawyer, a field where strategically deploying intellectual dishonesty is particularly advantageous.

That's why I’ve stopped feeding the troll — I just downvote or flag when necessary. It’s a shame because, years ago, he was one of the better commenters on HN.

He's done this since at least 2016 so you can rest assured he's not a bot.

This is a real human being making these apologetics and using classic distraction and whataboutism techniques

Rayiner of 10 years ago started his arguments from axioms other than "the Republican Party is correct" as he does now. I miss old Rayiner. His arguments against the Democratic position on e.g. Citizens United and Bush v. Gore were persuasive back then. Nowadays virtually nothing he says is persuasive, because it's incredibly obvious that he's starting from the position that the Republican Party is correct and working backwards from there.

(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.)