"Protectionism is when a country does to itself in times of peace what its enemies try to do in war."
Consequences of the US 2024 Presidential Election: Global Geopolitics Edition
- Thread starter CommanderJameson
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One of the things I learned from memes (and then looked up the actual information)...they included 10% tariffs listed on places like the Heard and McDonald Islands which has zero population (it's apparently an Australian territory and Antarctic research station). I'm not a Wharton grad, so I don't understand the economic reasoning behind it. Forbes link with list of all tariffs
I should have clarified, it's the max of trade imbalance or 10%. I can practically see the formula in the blue column in the reddit spreadsheet.
Given the number of times Trump has backed off on Canada I think there's an equally likely (though far from guaranteed) scenario where he just makes a big noise and then backs off.
The 10% is the baseline tariff - every country gets a minimum 10% tariff.
60 countries get a higher tariff rate.
Not that he ever deserves any credit, but at this point I suppose he could say to countries that previously had tariffs against the US, that he will drop our tariffs if they drop theirs,
Basically say that IF we want Free Trades lets ALL have free trade.
BUT the truth is he is still in the 1920's, hates the ides of paying taxes, and actually thinks we will raise enough money to finance the government with tariffs.
Basically say that IF we want Free Trades lets ALL have free trade.
BUT the truth is he is still in the 1920's, hates the ides of paying taxes, and actually thinks we will raise enough money to finance the government with tariffs.
When the stock market crashes tomorrow, will Republicans call for impeachment? Neither them nor their donors nor their constituents called for their retirements and investments to blow up.
More actual action by Senate Dems; as an, admittedly likely symbolic, bill has been passed that acts to rescind the "emergency" allowing the tariff action against Canada in particular. Naturally, not likely to pass the House.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/republicans-democrats-canada-tariffs
Which brings the question, does anyone know what excuse, if any, Trump is using to tariff the world outside NA and China?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/02/republicans-democrats-canada-tariffs
Which brings the question, does anyone know what excuse, if any, Trump is using to tariff the world outside NA and China?
A friend of mine sent a letter to her Arkansas Republican congressman (who also happens to be a neighbor of hers) . The congressman wrote back and said that he doesn't think Trump has committed treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors to justify impeachment.
He voted to impeach Joe Biden in 2023.
Those responses have to be replied to with a loud and forceful "Then I look forward to removing you from office, loudly and without hesitation." There must be at minimum, a follow-up making clear what this is costing local politicians. Until they fear their constituents more than they fear Trump, this won't change.
I mean, we're in Arkansas, so that's definitely not happening.
An interesting point of flow-on impacts from these tariffs, the USA imports over 80% of the potash used for fertilizer from Canada. That's a massive impact down the line for all types of farmers & agbusiness.
"Also, please keep buying my weapons that are deliberately hobbled as has been publicly confirmed by our Commander in Chief!"
Well, they recognize that, that's why it's "only" a 10% tariff on it. Another option ol Carny might want to look at for an export levy, though.
Aside from the headache-inducing logic behind the tariffs, it also completely destroys even the semblance of reasoning.
“We’re punishing countries for trade imbalances against the US with tariffs”
“Okay, but you have a trade imbalances against us”
“OK, then fuck you anyway!”
As if anyone really believed the justification, but they can’t even be internally consistent with their ridiculous “logic”.
It's even worse than that. They don't take into account the service trade in the calculation. You know, that one type of "goods" in which the US runs a massive trade surplus globally?
So the expectations of the Trump administration is that the rest of the world runs massive trade deficits importing services and at the same time make sure to not export a single dollar more of physical goods than they import so that they can "enjoy" the chance of only being under 10% import tax in the US economy.
There is only one way to sum this up: Imperialism and colonialism. Trump sees himself as the world's emperor and everybody else as his vassals that need to pay tribute to him.
I got that wrong. But it's even dumber than I thought.
The column labelled 'Tariffs charged to the USA' is simply the ratio of last year's trade deficit between the USA and the other country divided by US imports, or a flat rate of 10% if the balance of trade is in favour of the USA.
So China doesn't actually impose a tariff of 67% on US goods - it just exports more than it imports. In 2024, the US trade deficit with China was $US295.4 billion. US imports from China were $US438.9 billion. Dividing the deficit by the imports equals 67 per cent, which is the exact figure shown next to 'Tariffs charged to the USA' on Trump’s chart.
It seems to have escaped the geniuses behind this scheme that maybe some countries simply want less stuff from the US than the US wants from them.
Yeah, they conveniently forget all the intangible goods in the picture. I don't honestly know if it is incompetence or malice at this point. It's just so dumb.
Even if trade deficits were inherently bad, it would apparently never do for MAGA to admit they should simply make more things the "customer" (here: the rest of the world) WANTS. That would be too
As someone pointed out, everyone can now understand how he managed to bankrupt his own casinos.
With this administration, never attribute to incompetence, that which can be explained by malice.
Here's the thing, even until the end I was secretly hopeful that Harris would win. I was certain that there'd be enough wealthy Republicans that while they love winning the culture wars and owning the libs, they'd come to the conclusion that they love money, trust funds, etc more.
It turns out many of them were not paying attention ("Trump's first term wasn't so bad")
Many of the highest tariffs are on south-east Asian countries: Cambodia (49%), Vietnam (46%), Thailand (36%), Indonesia (32%). The USA is doing everything in its power to encourage these countries to ally themselves with China rather than the USA.
Mind-bogglingly stupid.
Mind-bogglingly stupid.
It's even doubly stupid since one of the rational for "We won't commit to defending Europe" is that they need to pivot to fight China.
Way to go sabotaging all your attempts at building a coalition in the Pacific.
There's a new wrinkle: what if someone asked one of the AIs "easiest way of calculating tariff rates" and they came back with the same algorithm the White House is using?
Because it seems that's true - but the AIs might have digested today's news already and started repeating it.
Edit to expand:
Either AIs sourced the formula MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports) from some popular book or internet posts, or have been fed it today. I don't use any of the popular AIs to check, and there's no "Internet Archive" for AI that can show us how AIs behaved last week.
Second edit: I found a source I'm happy to use (the previous one I had was very unreliable)
View: https://bsky.app/profile/amyhoy.bsky.social/post/3lluo7jmsss2w
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So I'm gonna try to buy as little as possible for the remainder of the Trump presidency. Also, the deminimus provision is still in place so ironically, you can bypass the tariffs with aliexpress...
Here is how the top farming counties in the US voted in 2024.
Clearly, they wanted a repeat of increased prices and decreased exports.
And they will, already China, Taiwan(!) and Japan are banding together, something that initself is mind boggling.
Not sure why it has kinda pissed me off so much but pity Lesotho.
I'll wager 95% of Americans wouldn't know it was a country. I would wager 99.5% couldn't find it on a map.
Lesotho is one of the poorest countries in Africa with a TOTAL gdp of 2.4 billion usd and yet it is being hit with a 50% tariff, the highest rate among all countries on trump's list. Does Lesotho apply crazy tariffs on US products? Nope. It applies the same tariffs as South Africa does along with Namibia, Eswatini and Botswana. Yet somehow Lesotho is getting nailed with 50% while SA, Namibia, Botswana and Eswatini are getting hit with 30/21/37 and 10% respectively. Why, why nail a country whose people make about 3.50 usd per capita a day with tariffs like this?
Well, sorry Lesotho, you are too poor to buy anything from the US so because you sell 236 million usd a year of stuff to the US but only buy 7 million, you are clearly taking advantage of the US! Doesn't matter if you can't literally afford your next meal, you are not buying enough stuff from the US. And sorry Lesotho, there is nothing you can do about it - they can't change their tariffs to reduce US ones because that 50% tariff is not based on any tafiff they actually charge. Oh, and sorry but you can't do anything about closing that trade gap because, well, being poor, you simply don't have enough money to buy US products.
Oh, for fun, the main reason trump says he places these tariffs is to get production back to the US. Ok then, well, 47% of Lesotho's exports are diamonds.......uh, how do you manufacture diamonds in the US?
What is even dumber, these tariffs will make structural imbalances like this even worse - Lesotho's 2nd largest export destination is the US so applying 50% tariffs on their products will make people there even poorer....and even LESS likely to be able to buy US products!
This doesn't even address that historical US policy regarding development is being reversed who followed US advice in the past - they used to get preferential access to encourage development, recognizing that trade was a great way to reduce reliance on aid to get places like this out of poverty and maybe put them in a position to be able to buy US goods. I suspect they will learn a lesson from this - don't trust the US. If the US happens to buy more goods (ignoring of course US service surpluses), well, tough luck for you if you are a commodity or low income economy.
So yea, fuck trump and the US in the ear.
I'll wager 95% of Americans wouldn't know it was a country. I would wager 99.5% couldn't find it on a map.
Lesotho is one of the poorest countries in Africa with a TOTAL gdp of 2.4 billion usd and yet it is being hit with a 50% tariff, the highest rate among all countries on trump's list. Does Lesotho apply crazy tariffs on US products? Nope. It applies the same tariffs as South Africa does along with Namibia, Eswatini and Botswana. Yet somehow Lesotho is getting nailed with 50% while SA, Namibia, Botswana and Eswatini are getting hit with 30/21/37 and 10% respectively. Why, why nail a country whose people make about 3.50 usd per capita a day with tariffs like this?
Well, sorry Lesotho, you are too poor to buy anything from the US so because you sell 236 million usd a year of stuff to the US but only buy 7 million, you are clearly taking advantage of the US! Doesn't matter if you can't literally afford your next meal, you are not buying enough stuff from the US. And sorry Lesotho, there is nothing you can do about it - they can't change their tariffs to reduce US ones because that 50% tariff is not based on any tafiff they actually charge. Oh, and sorry but you can't do anything about closing that trade gap because, well, being poor, you simply don't have enough money to buy US products.
Oh, for fun, the main reason trump says he places these tariffs is to get production back to the US. Ok then, well, 47% of Lesotho's exports are diamonds.......uh, how do you manufacture diamonds in the US?
What is even dumber, these tariffs will make structural imbalances like this even worse - Lesotho's 2nd largest export destination is the US so applying 50% tariffs on their products will make people there even poorer....and even LESS likely to be able to buy US products!
This doesn't even address that historical US policy regarding development is being reversed who followed US advice in the past - they used to get preferential access to encourage development, recognizing that trade was a great way to reduce reliance on aid to get places like this out of poverty and maybe put them in a position to be able to buy US goods. I suspect they will learn a lesson from this - don't trust the US. If the US happens to buy more goods (ignoring of course US service surpluses), well, tough luck for you if you are a commodity or low income economy.
So yea, fuck trump and the US in the ear.
if only there were a way to get Trump to leave...
Trust comes on foot and leaves on horseback, right? So, regardless who is in the White House in the (near) future it will take a long time, if ever, before the same level of trust returns and I'm doubtful it ever will.
There are quite a few Americans who seem to struggle with finding the USA on a globe
Our lunchtime Politics Live programme featured four guests, one of whom was a member of the Republicans overseas. Needless to say, he tried his best and was good-humoured as he was corrected a few times.
no it isn't. Most people are aware that trump is an anomaly and that the establishment GOP wouldn't do any of this crap once he's gone. Ron Desantis wouldnt do this.
DeSantis who leads the push to remove the child labor laws? That appointed a conspiracy loon as Surgeon General? That DeSantis? Come on, be real here, if Heritage pumped their money into DeSantis all he would ask would be "How high do you want me to jump"
heritage wouldn't push for tariffs though. The GOP establishment is free trade. This is because of Trump personally, who had his prime in the 1980's when the trade threat from Japan occupied his mind.
I doubt that's what most people outside the US is thinking. That was the thinking during Trump's first term; "well, maybe they didn't realize what they were voting for". Then the US elected Trump again. Most people outside the US don't make a difference between "establishment GOP" and MAGA, rather, they are asking if the US could elect Trump twice, who are they going to vote for next time, or the time after that? Vance? MTG? Boebert? The corpse of Hitler? Musk (but I repeat myself)? A potted plant (not a bad choice, if I may say so myself)?
The first term was an abberation, written off as a "moment of madness" before returning to business as usual. Electing him for a second, non-consecutive term? There's obviously enough support amongst the American people that this could be the status quo from now on. For that reason the USA is no longer reliable, any promise it makes - even by a future Democratic party government - is overshadowed by its peoples evident willingness to elect Trump and all the others who are enabling him.