Trump’s tariff calculations would be comical if they weren’t so destructive. From Moon of Alabama at moonofalabama.org:
Presidential Message on National Financial Literacy Month, 2025 – The White House, Apr 1 2025
The foundation of American economic prosperity is a society empowered with the knowledge and tools to make informed financial decisions to achieve the American Dream. …
I welcome that message.
Teaching financial literacy must start at the top. The members of the Trump administration obviously lack the knowledge and tools to make informed financial decisions.
It is the only possible explanation for how they came up with these numbers:
China does not have a 67% tariff on U.S. goods (it’s 7.3%). The EU does not have a 39% tariff on U.S. goods (it’s 5.2%). The numbers are bollocks.
So where do they come from? The official explanation from the U.S. Trade Representative is here. Its baloney:
James Surowiecki @JamesSurowiecki – 0:22 UTC · Apr 3, 2025
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.
So we have a $17.9 billion trade deficit with Indonesia. Its exports to us are $28 billion. $17.9/$28 = 64%, which Trump claims is the tariff rate Indonesia charges us. What extraordinary nonsense this is.
…
Even given that it’s Trump, I cannot believe they said “We’ll just divide the trade deficit by imports and tell people that’s the tariff rate.” And then they decided to set our tariffs by just cutting that totally made-up rate in half! This is so dumb and deceptive.
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.. it’s actually worse than I thought: in calculating the tariff rate, Trump’s people only used the trade deficit in goods. So even though we run a trade surplus in services with the world, those exports don’t count as far as Trump is concerned.
