I didn't say that Madagascar was an uninhabited island.
The article didn't say anything about Madagascar not importing Cybertrucks. I'm the one assuming that, and it's a good assumption. Cybertrucks are not sold in much of the world. A Tesla exec has said that it doesn't meet pedestrian safety standards for the EU, so that's why it's not sold in Europe (the US doesn't have pedestrian safety standards for vehicles). What do you want Madagascar to buy from the US?
Weird that we have a trade deficit with uninhabited islands.
The US exports goods to Madagascar. Madagascar tariffs those goods.
If the article you're reading is telling you Madagascar isn't importing cyber trucks you are reading a political article not an economic article.
Every country on Earth is "poor" relative to the US.
Should we let every country take advantage of us?
We're $36 trillion in debt. Our middle class has been gutted and our industrial base has been exported to benefit the rich at the expense of our own poor and middle class.
The status quo is killing the country. Something needs to change.
Just want to wish you the very best of luck AdultEddy.
Even you realize that this is a really stupid idea and could be disastrous for the US, but you're somehow required to post 1000 times a week defending it and calling all the people you know to be right 'morons' and 'idiots'.
Nope. Trump has tariffs on uninhabited islands now. His "reciprocal" tariffs were calculated solely on our trade deficit with the other country. If we sold them $1, and they sold us $1.50, he go $1.5/$1.00= 1.5 or 50% more than us, and then divide that by two for the number, which would be 25%.
Axios has a good example of why this is not a logical way to do things. Madagascar is a poor African country that can't afford to buy most American goods. How could they afford a Cybertruck? But they have a lot of vanilla beans to sell to us. We love vanilla. It makes sense to buy vanilla from Madagascar, there aren't that many suppliers. Trump slaps Madagascar with a 47% tariff on everything they export to us (not just vanilla). Now they'll sell their vanilla beans to other countries because Trump made vanilla way more expensive for US citizens to buy vanilla. Instead of putting real vanilla in our recipes, we'll get more artificial, chemical, fake vanilla in our foods. And that won't make Madagascar want to buy any more Cybertrucks from us.
Madagascar has also recently signed a rare earth's deal with the U.S. in the hope it would avoid a large tariff. They don't buy much because it's a very poor country, not because they're "taking advantage of America".
They've tried to be friendly with the U.S. and placatate the mad tyrant in the White House, but still get slapped with 47% charge on all goods.
Interesting. So Trump just taxed the rare earth minerals that we'll buy from Madagascar 47%. We want Madagascar's rare earth minerals and vanilla beans but we'll tax ourselves 47% for the privilege. Brilliant guy. Thanks, Trump.
The stock market has nothing to do with the real economy knucklehead. It is a rigged gambling casino for the oligarchs.
Average Magatards have no assets, live in a trailer park, and live off food stamps. The American economy to these welfare queens consists of a payday loan center. Of course they don’t care when the stock market collapses because they can’t afford a share 🤣
Which countries have zero tariffs on imports from the USA?
No countries have zero tariffs you fool.
The average tariff the EU places on foreign goods is 5% across all sectors and countries. The UK and Canada both apply 3.8%
But that's just an average and many sectors are tariff-free and countries have signed trade deals with other countries to get tariff-free access, including with the US.
Trump may be unhinged, but at least for now he is the powerful unhinged leader on our side who is necessary to counter-balance the psychotic unhinged world "leaders" conspiring to annihilate 95% of the world's population such as "F*ck Boy" Macron, Sholz the Degenerate, Lunatic von der Leyen, "Cos Play" Schwab, "Genocide Bill" Gates and the rest of the cast of characters.
The economy isn't getting fixed in a few weeks or months.
Trump is aiming for a turn around by the midterms.
Tariffs do work. The people squealing about tariffs would tell you whatever the orange did was wrong no matter what he did.
So the best case scenario is that the economy two years from now is half as good as it was two years ago? You’re in a cult.
More seriously, how bad do things have to get before you admit the tariffs were a mistake? Inflation above what percent? SP500 down how much? Unemployment above what rate? How much time do you give for things to turn around?
Weird that we have a trade deficit with uninhabited islands.
The US exports goods to Madagascar. Madagascar tariffs those goods.
If the article you're reading is telling you Madagascar isn't importing cyber trucks you are reading a political article not an economic article.
Every country on Earth is "poor" relative to the US.
Should we let every country take advantage of us?
We're $36 trillion in debt. Our middle class has been gutted and our industrial base has been exported to benefit the rich at the expense of our own poor and middle class.
The status quo is killing the country. Something needs to change.
Just want to wish you the very best of luck AdultEddy.
Even you realize that this is a really stupid idea and could be disastrous for the US, but you're somehow required to post 1000 times a week defending it and calling all the people you know to be right 'morons' and 'idiots'.
I fully appreciate it's a very tough job.
I haven't called anyone anything on this thread and you can see I'm still receiving the vitriol as always for simply not agreeing with you.
No one here has any idea if this is a stupid idea or not. It depends entirely on how the world responds which we do not know yet.
The economy isn't getting fixed in a few weeks or months.
Trump is aiming for a turn around by the midterms.
Tariffs do work. The people squealing about tariffs would tell you whatever the orange did was wrong no matter what he did.
So the best case scenario is that the economy two years from now is half as good as it was two years ago? You’re in a cult.
More seriously, how bad do things have to get before you admit the tariffs were a mistake? Inflation above what percent? SP500 down how much? Unemployment above what rate? How much time do you give for things to turn around?
Perhaps tearing your hair out and screaming that the sky is falling 10 minutes after the tariffs were announced is a tad premature.
Inflation was at a 40+ year high not long ago and you were making fun of people for complaining about grocery prices.
The stock market is not a good indicator of the health of the economy.
Unemployment is a garbage metric. The labor force participation rate is much more useful and we still haven't recovered from the pandemic.
$8T of that (plus interest) as from the last time the fat orange man was president. Anyway, $4.5T in tax cuts oughta fix that right up.
Biden added $8T of his own and he didn't have COVID relief as an excuse.
60 cents of every single dollar rhe government spends also goes to Democrat entitlements so $22T of that debt is 100% on the Democrats no matter who's in office when it's spent.
Thanks for the education. Can you please post a series of links to articles and videos from MSM saying that “100% of these tariffs” are doing exactly that?
So you think the MSM is providing unbiased coverage of the tariffs?
Is that what I said? You made an asssertion. I asked you to provide proof of the assertion. That doesn’t mean I made a different claim that I need to prove.
So you think the MSM is providing unbiased coverage of the tariffs?
Is that what I said? You made an asssertion. I asked you to provide proof of the assertion. That doesn’t mean I made a different claim that I need to prove.
If you think the MSM isn't biased against Trump and need proof there's no reasoning with you.
Is that what I said? You made an asssertion. I asked you to provide proof of the assertion. That doesn’t mean I made a different claim that I need to prove.
If you think the MSM isn't biased against Trump and need proof there's no reasoning with you.
You don’t need to rely on my reasoning ability. Make it idiot-proof. You made an assertion that you should be able to support with facts.
Help out any onlookers who might be interested in seeing that you don’t rely on lies to make your points.
You claim that “media would have you believe 100% of these tariffs are being levied on countries with no existing tariffs.”
So just provide examples of media doing exactly that. As a matter of fact, I’ll give you some leeway: Instead of ensuring that they say exactly what”100% of these tariffs are ..,” you can just show how overwhelmingly their rhetoric strongly implies that it’s 100% and that it’s even extremely close to “no existing tariffs” rather than exactly “no existing tariffs.”
Tariffs do work. The people squealing about tariffs would tell you whatever the orange did was wrong no matter what he did.
OK. You claim that commentary against tariffs is based solely or even primarily on loathing for Trump?
Apart from a very select application of tariffs, from what I’ve seen, the vast majority of economists currently against tariffs have been for free trade and against tariffs for their entire professional careers. In many, many cases, those careers pre-dated Trump’s entry into politics.
A number of pundits who have not been pro-Trump, especially those who are lifelong conservatives, have been opposed to him for many reasons, but one is that from the beginning of his candidacy in 2015, his bona fides as a policy maker and the economic policies themselves — like tariffs — were things they opposed. So you’d be disparaging them for having integrity of those views (if you can make a very, very good case for tariffs, you can call their consistency a foolish consistency, but that’s a very different argument from saying they are motivated by “Orange man bad” thinking or something like that).
But in terms of mindlessly falling in line, I am aware of the Heritage Foundation turning its collective back on 50 years of economic principle to kiss the ring. Whether tariffs are a good idea or not (I’d say that broad-based tariffs really, really are not), I don’t see any major examples on the anti-tariff side as apparently being so brazenly motivated by groupthink and partisanship as that.
This isn't true. I beg you to find ONE economist who is praising these tariffs as constructed.
Seriously one.
Originally when I saw the chart I thought, "ok, this is a negotiating tactic if a country is charging us 50% tariffs, and the tariff we set for them is lower than that, no one can complain about that, and if they want lower tariffs, they can lower their tariffs to us."
(That makes sense from a fairness narrative even if I don't think it's great economic policy. If Vietnam wants to have some 10% tariff on something, I'm not sure why we need a 10% tariff on shoes which we're not going to make here).
But that isn't what the chart depicts. The tariff rates Trump depicted other countries charging aren't the actual tariff rates at all. They really reflect if each country has a trade surplus or deficit with us.
See this:
This is truly amazing. The Deputy White House Press Secretary is claiming that I'm wrong, and that the "tariff rates" on Trump's chart were calculated by "literally" measuring every country's tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers.
"it divided our trade deficit with a country by our imports with that country, and then multiplied by 0.5 (because Trump was being "lenient"). Oh, and if our trade deficit/imports with a country is less than 10%, or we have a trade surplus with a country, Trump slapped a flat 10% tariff on that country."
So Vietnam which is dirty poor and exports a ton of stuff to us like clothes and shoes, was listed as having a 90% tariff on US goods. That isn't the case. They even had recently reduced their tariffs to the US to try and get in good favor.
But what they really do is export a ton of goods to the US and import very little. I'd argue Us consumers are better off. We generally don't want people here working on an assembly line putting shoe laces in sneakers. We want them making better goods. Vietnam has already reduced their tariffs on US goods, now they're just more likely to buy German cars, etc.
We generally should be supporting having things made in Vietnam rather than China.
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