Call a press conference, build up to announcing the 9000% tariff but then end the conference promising to come back next week and make the announcement.

Wouldn’t it have to be 9001%?

Yo this motherfucker put tariffs on Antarctica?!!Heard Island.jpg

Oops, wrong one. Still close. <img alt="Heard and McDonald Islands world heritage area" src="https://lemmy.ca/pictrs/image/371efb88-a4c6-4dfa-beda-c883c03702c7.png">

def calculate_tariff(trade_deficit, total_imports):
  # Calculate the deficit ratio as a percentage
  ratio =(trade_deficit / total_imports) * 100
  # Enforce a minimum tariff of 10%
  return max(10, ratio)

# Example usage:
tariff = calculate_tariff(20e9, 100e9)
# $20B deficit on $100B imports yields a 20% tariff
print(f"The tariff rate should be {tariff}%")

Those penguins are trying to rip off America! It’s about time they pay their fair share

shocked_pika
thanks for the honest lol

Woah, and biden waited until the very end of his term to do something as benign as removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Man, whoever is voting for establishment democrats in primaries is really just helping Republicans at this point.

for everyone everywhere

This is all so the American companies don’t actually have to compete with anyone else. Instead of lowering their prices to be competitive to give better deals to customers, they game the system and force everyone else to raise prices to match theirs.

There are people who are benefiting from this. People like elon musk who don’t need to worry about, say, affordable electric vehicles from China.

I’d like to call Republicans the Party of Useful Idiots, but I genuinely believe they’re working in tandem with the Establishment Democrats at this point. It’s a two-pronged strategy to ensure the disparity in wealth never decreases.

The rich get richer while the working class squabbles over bullshit.

You don’t like hearing about made up currency with no backing that’s primarily used for pump and dump schemes and money laundering?

The price of speculative speculation dropped

It’s heartbreaking, really.

The UK is like a kid who just got his face covered in mud by bullies, and goes “aren’t my friends wonderful for playing with me?”.

The UK already shot themselves in the foot turning their back on the EU… they have no one left, they are done for

Heads up, UK, the US will use you as a toilet every chance you give it, and we’ve just dropped all pretense, however thin it may have previously been, about caring about our “allies”. Speaking as a US citizen, I would strongly advise against considering yourself a close friend to the US until we get our shit sorted.

ok, then…

i have a huge trade deficit with walmart.

i buy way more from them than they do from me ($1200-1500 a year vs $0); just like the u.s. buys more from many countries than those countries buy from the u.s.

like the leaky diaper’s new tariffsimport tax, i should charge myself a ridiculously high extra tax on purchases from walmart until they buy $1200-1500 a year of some mythical product from me to even out the ‘unfair’ imbalance?

yea. that’ll work.

Thank you! Neither the BBC nor the Flemish public tv seem to say this yet (they just repeat the statement Trump gave)

Just unfathomably stupid.

Nope, not for every country. Russia is missing from the tariffs

Overview In January 2025, United States exported $34.9M and imported $196M from Russia, resulting in a negative trade balance of $161M.

Yes that would be amazing and a great stimulant for EU companies to start developing a competing platform of it’s own (we have BeReal, Dailymotion, Medal and Dumpert, but they aren’t very big AFAIK)

I recently read an article that suggested the best retaliation would be to stop enforcing US intellectual property in the EU. One of the biggest exports they have is media, if we would stop enforcing their copyright it would cost them a lot of money.

We can only hope.

Advertising should just be illegal.

It gives an unfair advantage to those who already have an unfair advantage.

I recommend installing an addon called AdNauseam to block ads in addition to sending data that you’ve clicked them.

Please everyone. Try to understand that being a useful idiot is the norm these days. It’s what’s cool.

or something ultra specific that is super easy to source from any other country, to exclusively hurt the american businesses

17% and they’re already crying about it.

Ironically it’s the closest the US has gotten to a BDS policy in its history with Israel.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerationism

End goal.

Seems to be what a lot of the far right want. It’s essentially what Brexit has done to us in the UK

Don’t worry, they are working on removing those as well.

He’s imposing tariffs on uninhabited islands… what a fucking moron…

They’re mostly [Trade deficit]/[Exports to US]

Which is a fucking stupid basis for tariffs.

This is unironically a great deal for him and his cronies and an awful deal for the working class.

I swear, it’s just distraction after distraction, obstacle after obstacle that keeps us from toppling the ruling class. Anytime we get anywhere close to doing something significant, it’s like the useful idiots come out in droves to make sure “NOPE NOPE NOPE, gotta keep history repeating itself!”

I wish I took my teachers and intelligent peers more seriously as a kid. I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be surrounded by such great, smart people. I took them for granted, and now that I’m out in the real world I see exactly how stupid the average idiot is.

It’s scary. Terrifying, even. There’s so many of them and they all use that as justification for why they’re right.

I am stealing “HitlerPig”

A trade world war that wreckz western economies and evens the playing field for Russia, China, Iran, etc. is a good thing! /s

You had me right up to “I didn’t vote”.

I don’t think this is a generational thing, personally, unless we’re talking about the Boomers.

The Boomers took a vibrant, beautiful world and spent two generations driving it into this McDonaldized hellhole we live in, after reaping the benefits of the most prosperous economic period for workers in our history in the 1960’s. They’re still profiting now thanks to the lopsided tax policies that favor people with wealth.

The vast majority of the country only has one or two choices when shopping for necessities now, so I can’t really blame them for the world that they were born into. Calling young people consumerist is just blaming them for circumstances of which they had no real control.

You can’t just flip a switch to have manufacturing moved to the United States overnight or even five years. Not to mention that even raw goods needed to even start the process that are being tarriffed like aluminum just doesn’t come out of nowhere. This is a dumb sledgehammer approach that’s going break more things than it fixes

You need to have a plan in place before doing this to even think about bringing manufacturing back here. And tariffs need to be like the last part of the plan

Maybe calculated tariffs on commodities where companies are contemplating outsourcing, but that’s a step you take in advance in order to dissuade their action. This is like making the whole school sit with their heads down through recess because one specific kid was unruly.

Edit: There wasn’t even an unruly kid. The Principal is just vindictive, has a hangover, and hates children.

I think you’re kind of being unfairly downvoted because it’s definitely underappreciated how much tariffs are used in modern trade deals.

Putting selective import tariffs on certain goods (like say car manufacturing) might be a wise move if you want to encourage the US to develop a manufacturing base. It’s worth noting that the US, and most other countries have been doing this selectively for years.

This is reeeaally far from the tariffs that have actually been anounced though, which are the highest rate the US has had in around 100 years, and applied pretty indescriminately. There are some goods that the US just can’t produce itself (like certain rare earth minerals that aren’t in the USA) but even worse, because of the insane logic of applying them to countries as they have been done, it opens up this type of event:

• A comany like Apple might assemble laptops in the US, but import parts like chips from, say, China.
• They now have around a 40% tariff on all chips, which is really going to drive up cost, and leaves them with two options.
• Option one, they bring all manufacturing into the US, which would take a long time to build up the infrastructure, and still really ramp up the price because wages in the US are so much higher than they are in China
• Option two, they outsource everything to say Mexico or Canada who don’t pay the tariffs on Chinese chips, and just pay the wholesale import tariffs are needed to bring things from Mexico/Canada to the US. They also get to skip out all the reciprocal tariffs that other countries are placing on the US in retaliation for the recently announces ones when they import out to, say, Europe.

Even option one is bad, because Apple might sell laptops internally, but the newly increased price makes them super uncompetitive with rival firms overseas, so it might still lead to a loss in overall jobs for US workers.

I’m not pretending this doesn’t suck - but US based international companies like Apple have a clear incentive to just forgoe the US as much as possible now. This kind of risk is why countries have traditionally been very conservative with changing tariffs.

I think you’re probably right that there might be an argument for countries to be less conservative than they have been, but the US government just cranked up the dial from 0 to 11 and we’re all about to find out what that might look like in real time.

U.S. factories in most cases cannot produce goods that are competitive in a global market. Our labor costs are too high.

This idea that we can revive American traditional manufacturing of basic goods is a complete fantasy. The factories in Vietnam aren’t going anywhere, because they will still be selling to the other 95% of the globe outside the U.S. Even if factories are stood up in the U.S., they will be constrained to producing higher-priced goods exclusively for the domestic market, with all the attendant inflationary impacts from start-up costs and higher labor costs.

Meanwhile, retaliatory tariffs from other countries will cause the collapse of U.S. exports. We’ll lose markets for the sectors where the U.S. is still competitive, like agriculture, advanced manufacturing, and even services.

Trump’s approach is similar to the failed development strategy of import substitution industrialization, except in this case he thinks it will cause the U.S. to reindustrialize. In any case, it will fail for the same reasons ISI failed in Latin America.

But tariffs are the only thing that actually forces companies to put the factories back to the USA. Or do you have a better idea?

I mean no… And, how about accepting that the US is no longer a manufacturer, and that’s just fine in a global economy

The conversation would be different if people stopped attributing authorship to him

Is there a lemmy channel for those conversations?

AI would make a lot of sense, considering that there are uninhabited islands on the list.

Heather Cox Richardson, historian of the republican (Lincoln) party said that in her daily newsletter. She cites all her sources.

They published their “methodology” today, and it’s as dumb as you’d imagine: ustr.gov/…/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

I’m dumb but that just means that every product will be 30% more expensive for Americans, right? And the 30% is just… Going to the state or something? So it’s just taxing your ppl?

I’ve been saying this for years - why does anyone listen to him? He has no credibility - his whole life bio shows this clear as day.

Who cares what the russo nazis think

It’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost? $10?

youtu.be/Nl_Qyk9DSUw

It would be like that scene in Braveheart, where the Prince is having servants walk in front of him holding a full length mirror, so he can constantly admire himself.

No thoughts. Only anger at being confused.

More then racism, Trump’s appeal is being a simple answer to a complex question. Which happens to mean racism when applied to race relations, but also harebrained economic policies or injecting bleach into yourself. This is the same man who used a sharpy to change the path of a hurricane on a map rather then admit he misspoke.

I hate the fact that you are correct.

no. the US is still the boot

buffoon

Try grok and you’ll get an exact match.