Does anyone else find it infuriating how the media is reporting that the tariffs are paused?
No, the nonsensical calculations are gone, and everything is just at the 10% minimum now.
That is...about four times higher than it was before. So still pretty big.
But on top of that, the tariffs with China were the major harmful ones, and they are still there. Our three largest trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and China. Put together, that's almost half of what we import. And those are the exact same places the Trump administration is putting large tariffs! Right now.
It's really funny to mock how uninhabited islands are being tariffed, but that literally doesn't impact us. Nor does us stupidly tariffing coffee...price will go up, demand will go down, people will live. Whatever. We taxed the EU, 10%, oh no, car prices might go up.
Canada, Mexico, and China are, uh, important. Both to actual consumers, and to companies that rely on them for sourcing for stuff they make.
Eh, I’m not a fan of tariffs at all. If the other guy is shooting himself in the foot, why join him?
Tariffs shouldn't be used to counter other tariffs, I agree. Where I think they should be used to is to counter unfair trade practices like a government deliberately subsidizing an industry to let it beat an American one, and then later raising prices after America's industry collapses.
But that requires a lot of smart people, and also requires a lot of decisions about what 'subsidizing' is. Are other countries subsidizing workers because of socialized medicine, for example? That's not there as a trade policy, but it could make things cheaper...OTOH, if both corporate and personal taxes are higher because of that, it's _not_ doing that.
Etc, etc.
This is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out, and we should use our soft power to work on things, and...well, I'm pretending it's three months ago, aren't I? We pretty much just burned all that down.
As for the whole labor rights/workforce safety standards thing, I get it and wouldn’t want to argue against it but those things are gameable in practice with Potemkin factories and the like and it’d end up being a pain in practice (though I get it in theory).
You'd have to have a pretty competent organization that watched for all that. I will admit, I'm not 100% sure it's possible, or could scale, but it's not crazy to try.
And the entire concept of setting up _someone else_ to do it is that we would not have to deal with it. Some independent group that we just dump some money in and hopefully we don't have to worry about. Maybe part of the WTO or something.
And, let’s face it, if I wanted to argue for tariffs at all, easy mode would be “reciprocal tariffs against fellow first world nations”
This is already pretty much how it was, though. First world countries occasionally use a tariff to protect an industry that actually exists (Unlike, say, our _coffee_ industry), and other countries then slap a tariff on something to protect something of theirs.
And no one tariffs entire countries, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
The fact that a non-zero number of fellow first world nations reluctantly dropped their own tariffs would be an argument *FOR* reciprocal tariffs in practice even for someone who is a market fundamentalist in theory.
...what are you talking about?
First world countries tend to average about 2.5% tariffs with us, which is about what we charge them. China is 3%, Japan is 1.9%, the EU is 2.7%, Australia is 2.5%, Singapore is 0% somehow.
Which are close to ours tares. It's hard to find details, but our average incoming tariff is (was?) 1.9%. But we, rather obviously, apply higher rates to things from wealthier countries. I'm not going to bother to track down and average the exact numbers, but we're within 20% or so. If someone wants to argue tariffs should be slightly higher, hell, you can join my club.(1)
I have no idea if you'd include India in 'first world countries', but there is one notable outlier, as India charges stuff from us at at 12%. I am not sure why.
Incredibly oddly, our top exports and imports from India _are mostly the same things_: Pearls and semi precious stones, electrical machinery and equipment, nuclear reactors, and mineral fuels and oils. Why we've decided to trade those things back and forth is unknown. Seriously, not making a joke here, I don't understand that. The only difference is they also get 'lenses, microscopes, medical instruments' from us, and we also get 'pharmaceutical products' from them, which makes it sound like we're supplying their pharmaceutical labs to make drugs for us! (Which at least makes sense, unlike trading nuclear reactors back and forth. WTH?)
1) My pro-tariff club says (Or said, this is nonsense now since Trump destroyed the world order) that we should tie tariffs to labor rights and workplace safety standards, and we should set up some sort of independent monitoring agency, maybe not even run by the US, but internationally, and say: The tariff are currently 4% on textiles from China (Or whatever they are), and next year they will be moving _up_ to 4.1% on that, _unless_ your company voluntarily complies and allows spot checks from these monitoring agency, at which point they will be 3.9%. And they will keep going up and down 0.1% points a year until they hit 5% and 3%, respectively.
2 weeks ago
And let’s face it, who would trust Trump to make an honest deal at this point anyway?
People need to understand how fascism works, philosophically. Fascism is, ultimately, a belief in natural hierarchies extended to the natural conclusion. This applies to everything. The part people tend to misunderstand is that they think this is _logical_. That you can make agreements to be subservient, and those agreements will be honored.
It is not. It is all lizard-brain nonsense. The lizard brain has a vague sense of where people belong, and a sense if if they 'know their place'.
This is, for example, why it doesn't require people to think they're at the top. It has a vague sense of where it belongs, too. It has as much genuflecting towards people above them as it expects genuflecting from people below them. This is why you get people like Trump cowtowing to people like Putin. He thinks Putin is above him, and it's entirely natural for him to give deference to him.
This also means, in their little lizard brain, that they see people who did not know their places but were forced into agreement with what they say not as 'making a deal', but that such people not only rightfully belong below them, but need to be forced there, forever.
Columbia caved to Trump instantly, and he decided to continue to destroy them. He will continue to humiliate them, forever. He thinks they challenged him, and they are forever his enemy.
Resistance, meanwhile, tends to actually scare them. Because if they have to back down, it make their lizard brain reprogram you into into an equal, because the other option is somehow their lesser beat them. So you must not actually be long there.
Practically speaking, you can remain safe from bullies, and fascists, and whatnot, by doing vaguely what they say, never challenging them, and never becoming their enemy, and hoping you never fall into a class of people they go after. Never look weak or like an easy target, but never strong enough to challenge them. Staying under the radar _does_ work, I will admit that.
But once you _do_ become their enemy, it doesn't matter how much you cower and beg and plea and agree to do what he says, he will continue to hurt you.
Foreign countries appear to mostly be understanding that they fall into 'a class of people the fascists go after' as a general rule, and are not going to cave. They're already his enemy, he already thinks they 'don't know their place', and they fully understand this.
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Does anyone else find it infuriating how the media is reporting that the tariffs are paused?
No, the nonsensical calculations are gone, and everything is just at the 10% minimum now.
That is...about four times higher than it was before. So still pretty big.
But on top of that, the tariffs with China were the major harmful ones, and they are still there. Our three largest trading partners are Canada, Mexico, and China. Put together, that's almost half of what we import. And those are the exact same places the Trump administration is putting large tariffs! Right now.
It's really funny to mock how uninhabited islands are being tariffed, but that literally doesn't impact us. Nor does us stupidly tariffing coffee...price will go up, demand will go down, people will live. Whatever. We taxed the EU, 10%, oh no, car prices might go up.
Canada, Mexico, and China are, uh, important. Both to actual consumers, and to companies that rely on them for sourcing for stuff they make.
Tariffs shouldn't be used to counter other tariffs, I agree. Where I think they should be used to is to counter unfair trade practices like a government deliberately subsidizing an industry to let it beat an American one, and then later raising prices after America's industry collapses.
But that requires a lot of smart people, and also requires a lot of decisions about what 'subsidizing' is. Are other countries subsidizing workers because of socialized medicine, for example? That's not there as a trade policy, but it could make things cheaper...OTOH, if both corporate and personal taxes are higher because of that, it's _not_ doing that.
Etc, etc.
This is a place where smart people belong in figuring this out, and we should use our soft power to work on things, and...well, I'm pretending it's three months ago, aren't I? We pretty much just burned all that down.
You'd have to have a pretty competent organization that watched for all that. I will admit, I'm not 100% sure it's possible, or could scale, but it's not crazy to try.
And the entire concept of setting up _someone else_ to do it is that we would not have to deal with it. Some independent group that we just dump some money in and hopefully we don't have to worry about. Maybe part of the WTO or something.
This is already pretty much how it was, though. First world countries occasionally use a tariff to protect an industry that actually exists (Unlike, say, our _coffee_ industry), and other countries then slap a tariff on something to protect something of theirs.
And no one tariffs entire countries, because that fundamentally makes no sense.
...what are you talking about?
First world countries tend to average about 2.5% tariffs with us, which is about what we charge them. China is 3%, Japan is 1.9%, the EU is 2.7%, Australia is 2.5%, Singapore is 0% somehow.
Which are close to ours tares. It's hard to find details, but our average incoming tariff is (was?) 1.9%. But we, rather obviously, apply higher rates to things from wealthier countries. I'm not going to bother to track down and average the exact numbers, but we're within 20% or so. If someone wants to argue tariffs should be slightly higher, hell, you can join my club.(1)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/04/04/trumps-tariff-rates-for-other-countries-larger-than-word-trade-data.html
I have no idea if you'd include India in 'first world countries', but there is one notable outlier, as India charges stuff from us at at 12%. I am not sure why.
Incredibly oddly, our top exports and imports from India _are mostly the same things_: Pearls and semi precious stones, electrical machinery and equipment, nuclear reactors, and mineral fuels and oils. Why we've decided to trade those things back and forth is unknown. Seriously, not making a joke here, I don't understand that. The only difference is they also get 'lenses, microscopes, medical instruments' from us, and we also get 'pharmaceutical products' from them, which makes it sound like we're supplying their pharmaceutical labs to make drugs for us! (Which at least makes sense, unlike trading nuclear reactors back and forth. WTH?)
1) My pro-tariff club says (Or said, this is nonsense now since Trump destroyed the world order) that we should tie tariffs to labor rights and workplace safety standards, and we should set up some sort of independent monitoring agency, maybe not even run by the US, but internationally, and say: The tariff are currently 4% on textiles from China (Or whatever they are), and next year they will be moving _up_ to 4.1% on that, _unless_ your company voluntarily complies and allows spot checks from these monitoring agency, at which point they will be 3.9%. And they will keep going up and down 0.1% points a year until they hit 5% and 3%, respectively.
People need to understand how fascism works, philosophically. Fascism is, ultimately, a belief in natural hierarchies extended to the natural conclusion. This applies to everything. The part people tend to misunderstand is that they think this is _logical_. That you can make agreements to be subservient, and those agreements will be honored.
It is not. It is all lizard-brain nonsense. The lizard brain has a vague sense of where people belong, and a sense if if they 'know their place'.
This is, for example, why it doesn't require people to think they're at the top. It has a vague sense of where it belongs, too. It has as much genuflecting towards people above them as it expects genuflecting from people below them. This is why you get people like Trump cowtowing to people like Putin. He thinks Putin is above him, and it's entirely natural for him to give deference to him.
This also means, in their little lizard brain, that they see people who did not know their places but were forced into agreement with what they say not as 'making a deal', but that such people not only rightfully belong below them, but need to be forced there, forever.
Columbia caved to Trump instantly, and he decided to continue to destroy them. He will continue to humiliate them, forever. He thinks they challenged him, and they are forever his enemy.
Resistance, meanwhile, tends to actually scare them. Because if they have to back down, it make their lizard brain reprogram you into into an equal, because the other option is somehow their lesser beat them. So you must not actually be long there.
Practically speaking, you can remain safe from bullies, and fascists, and whatnot, by doing vaguely what they say, never challenging them, and never becoming their enemy, and hoping you never fall into a class of people they go after. Never look weak or like an easy target, but never strong enough to challenge them. Staying under the radar _does_ work, I will admit that.
But once you _do_ become their enemy, it doesn't matter how much you cower and beg and plea and agree to do what he says, he will continue to hurt you.
Foreign countries appear to mostly be understanding that they fall into 'a class of people the fascists go after' as a general rule, and are not going to cave. They're already his enemy, he already thinks they 'don't know their place', and they fully understand this.