alt Hacker News> Is the US just matching the tariffs set by the other countries?
No. Trump claims that the new tariffs are a 50% discount on what those countries tariff US goods at. (Even if that's questionable - is VAT a tariff?)
If he's correct, or anywhere close, this is a "tough love" strategy to force negotiations. We'll see how it goes. It also plays to his base - why should we tariff any less than they do us? And they have a point, it's the principle of the thing.
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It's so quaint to me that people actually believe his rhetoric. How long do you think people will put up with high prices before they turn on him?
> If he's correct
Trump is not in the business of being _correct_, or indeed caring about correctness as a concept.
And no, these are, obviously, not the actual tariffs, don’t be silly.
> If he's correct
He's not.
According to [1], the White House claims Vietnam has a 90% tariff rate.
According to [2], 90.4% is the ratio of Vietnam's trade deficit with the US -- they have a deficit of $123.5B on $136.6B of exports.
The same math holds true for other countries, e.g. Japan's claimed 46% tariff rate is their deficit of $68.5B on $148.2B of exports. The EU's claimed 39% tariff rate is their deficit of $235.6B on $605.8B of exports.
Who knows, maaaaybe it just so happens that these countries magically have tariff rates that match the ratio of their trade deficits.
Or maybe, the reason Vietnam doesn't buy a lot of US stuff is because they're poor. The reason they sell the US a bunch of stuff is because their labour is cheap to Americans. (They do have tariffs, but they're nowhere near 90%: [3].)
America's government is not trustworthy. Assuming that what they say is truthful is a poor use of time.
[1]: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1907533090559324204/photo/1
[2]: https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/southeast-asia-pacific/vi...
[3]: https://www.investmentmonitor.ai/news/vietnam-gives-us-tax-b...