- cross-posted to:
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- 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%
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 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
Edit: After making fun of Trump for not understanding the enconomy, I went and conflated per capita GDP with GDP. Doh! Now corrected.
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.
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.
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 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!
Lol, the bitch waited till the markets closed to announce it.
I’m not sure that’s any better, as traders and news have a whole night to digest it now. It might’ve seemed less bad with just an hour (before the next controversy consumes the cycle).
Trump announces “Things aren’t expensive enough.”
Putin’s bitch trying to further destabilize the world for daddy.
Switzerland 31%
What the fuck
Conveniently left Russia out. I wonder why.
Russia and North Korea.
It’s official. We are the baddies now.
Just stopped pretending to be good.
I am not.
I think you’re reading too much into that.
They’re either under “Rest of world” like the EU, or the US doesn’t import anything from it, which as it’s under sanctions, it shouldn’t - nor export to.
They are rest of the World. How dissrespectfull.
Russian asset undermining American interests and alliances. Can’t imagine why.
Why is Canada not on the list?
Maybe because he’s waiting until the election is over? He’s probably noticed by now that he’s hurting Canada’s Conservative Party.
That, or he might actually like Mark Carney. The entire tone seemed to change after they spoke.
He saw how much support Poilievre lost after he praised him, so now Mr Big Brain is trying reverse psychology.
Does anyone know what the top item is per country above? I guess the number is probably just a dollar weighted average as there are probably different tariffs on different goods.
So is the plan to drive the cost of everyday essentials so high that virtually everyone bankrupts and the billionaires buy all of our assets for pennies on the thousand dollars? That is all I can come up with trying to make a scenario where this has some coherent objective.
The trump regime was designed to TANK the US economy so that stocks, businesses, and industries can be bought by billionaires at rock bottom prices.
All is going according to plan.
Some of the architects who helped win the second American civil war say yes:
Firstly, it is essential to squash the democratic myth that a state ‘belongs’ to the citizenry. The point of neo-cameralism is to buy out the real stakeholders in sovereign power, not to perpetuate sentimental lies about mass enfranchisement. Unless ownership of the state is formally transferred into the hands of its actual rulers, the neo-cameral transition will simply not take place, power will remain in the shadows, and the democratic farce will continue.
So, secondly, the ruling class must be plausibly identified. It should be noted immediately, in contradistinction to Marxist principles of social analysis, that this is not the ‘capitalist bourgeoisie’. Logically, it cannot be. The power of the business class is already clearly formalized, in monetary terms, so the identification of capital with political power is perfectly redundant. It is necessary to ask, rather, who do capitalists pay for political favors, how much these favors are potentially worth, and how the authority to grant them is distributed. This requires, with a minimum of moral irritation, that the entire social landscape of political bribery (‘lobbying’) is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares. Insofar as voters are worth bribing, there is no need to entirely exclude them from this calculation, although their portion of sovereignty will be estimated with appropriate derision. The conclusion of this exercise is the mapping of a ruling entity that is the truly dominant instance of the democratic polity. Moldbug calls it the Cathedral.
The formalization of political powers, thirdly, allows for the possibility of effective government. Once the universe of democratic corruption is converted into a (freely transferable) shareholding in gov-corp. the owners of the state can initiate rational corporate governance, beginning with the appointment of a CEO. As with any business, the interests of the state are now precisely formalized as the maximization of long-term shareholder value. There is no longer any need for residents (clients) to take any interest in politics whatsoever. In fact, to do so would be to exhibit semi-criminal proclivities. If gov-corp doesn’t deliver acceptable value for its taxes (sovereign rent), they can notify its customer service function, and if necessary take their custom elsewhere. Gov-corp would concentrate upon running an efficient, attractive, vital, clean, and secure country, of a kind that is able to draw customers. No voice, free exit.
The architects of clowndom. Seriously reading this stuff makes me feel like I am losing brain cells at a rapid rate.
A poor America, with no friends in the world suits Vlad Pootang very well. It will be like the world has 2 Russia’s…
He wants to use tariffs (which act like a flat-tax) to lower income tax on the rich. There’s speculation he’s also doing something like the “Mar-a-Lago Accord,” which involves devaluing the dollar (causing inflation). If wages don’t rise with the inflation (which they don’t want), US labor will be more competitive, so people can work in factory jobs with pay analogous to current Chinese factory workers.
Project 2025 says he wants to have tariffs removed against the US. Assuming he’s really following it.
They probably want him to do it, but he’s too stupid to follow a script.
Yup.
And just like that every American good costs significantly more.
If your family income is less than about $200,000, congratulations, your tax rate has at least doubled.
How much do I have to make before my tax bill goes down?
Last I saw, it was 360k.
I have to get bigger bootstraps.
Well, at least I’ve got that, I guess
Fuck Cambodia specifically. Trump probably got a bad VD from there at some point.
The horrible cruelty regarding Cambodia is that the reason they have such a high trade deficit is that most Cambodians are too poor to be able to begin to afford anything that America has to offer.
It’s one of the poorest countries in Asia, they could cut their tariffs to 0% and the net effect would be less than the measurable rounding error on total American exports.
Trump is going to tank the economy of an already poverty-stricken country and plunge it into exactly the kind of instability that destroyed it once already just because “fuck you, give me more”.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1cbTKX4Lzo&list=PLf03ejEKGKxyGu4G3QCLWhXefQvgG1EEH
If anyone wants to learn more about America’s actions in Cambodia, check out Blowback.
Probably got a surprise when he went to grab a ladyboy by the pussy.
Cambodia one is based.