This is useful (and their attempts to appear intellectual darkly humorous), but it does repeat the Mad King's lie that it's a "reciprocal" tariff. It's a tariff, or, if you want to get fancy, a unilateral tariff based on a total misunderstanding of what a trade defect its.
2) The formula itself is incorrect. Logically they should use the US’ TOTAL TRADE as the denominator and then you would get a fair percentage of a country’s trade balance. Using only the value of imports raises the numerator and thus the anount of the illogical tariffs.
1) tariff fees should not be based on a % of total trade, or imports as we see in the formula below, but on the ability of the US to supply that product.
If we can’t grow bananas, then why charge more for them? If Americans already at full employment don’t want to work making shirts to sell at Walmart because they can earn more elsewhere, why put tariffs on shirts?
A right wing think tank that inspired these guys, wrote that the cancelled out values are wrong and in practice the divisor should be four times larger
So if a country is too poor to buy anything from America but America buys lots of their low paid, exploited labor cheap products... the country is hit with a massive tariff and doubly screwed....high tariffs and now no jobs....not sure how penguins figure into it.
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If we can’t grow bananas, then why charge more for them? If Americans already at full employment don’t want to work making shirts to sell at Walmart because they can earn more elsewhere, why put tariffs on shirts?
I can’t think of a single thing.
He put tariffs on penguins and not Russia or Belarus