Many people including doctors and health professionals apply restrictions to their diet including avoiding complex carbs or proteins, or reducing their salt or sugar intake while talking about balance diets. No complaints.

But when I decide to reduce all foods by at least 10%, lower my protein and carbs by 25%, pledge I'll remove at least 30% of metals from my diet and will be doing a 4 day fast twice a week in order to become an olympic level athlete by next year, people say I don't know what I'm doing!

How can people possibly be against nuanced thoughtful dieting yet be against my sudden do it all at once approach? It's totally inconsistent, what idiots everyone else is.

Here in the EU, you'd generally just pay VAT of imports. And to be clear, we pay the same VAT on internal goods.

To make it convenient for consumers, large foreign platforms would automatically handle VAT at point of sale, reducing friction and thereby pushing more import.

Some specific things had tariffs - e.g., nuclear reactors, and chinese electric cars - but it was by no means the norm, and I don't think citizens liked this. The Chinese car tariff in particular feels like German automotive lobbying, stifling competition. Tesla, pre-DOGE, also showed that we would have an unsatiable hunger for import of competitive cars, it's just that an F150 isn't a competitive car in EU.

Now, because if the trade war, we end up with blanket retaliatory tariffs and a strong push for buying local products, killing imports, that just wasn't there before. US and China was already in a trade war, so I guess that was the current state of affairs there.

Well because they are applying them in a blanket fashion with no warning basically everywhere.

Tarrifs are a tool. They have both positive and negative consequences. It seems like the manner they are being applied are just random and will get most of the negative consequences with very little of the positive.

Why? Because the US is smarter than the others. By having open trade, we've benefited greatly. Now you could argue that other countries have benefited more, and that made me true but the benefits of free trade are that the pie keeps growing. So other countries getting a bigger slice is not shrinking our slice.

For what it's worth, I bought a $2000 robotic hand from US a year ago, and paid about €400 in VAT and €32 (so like 2%) in import duties / tariffs.

Obviously VAT isn't a "trade barrier", if anything it's a "consumption barrier" and it's the same for every business that EU citizens give money to (i.e. if I bought a robot hand that cost $2000 to make from an EU company, I'd likewise be paying €400 VAT on top of that).

It would help if people answer than downvote. Both these kind of questions and economic answers are getting buried.

My understanding so far based on buried comments is: other countries have tariffs on individual products they're historically good at manufacturing and they want to retain it. e.g. Milk in the Nordics, Cars in Japan and EU, Bikes in India, etc.

keyword: "selective to retain"

US is applying it across the board blindly, not to retain something that's existing, but what appears to be a blind hope of starting everything from scratch.

Buried comments say "strategy" is lacking, because these tariffs also apply on the very raw materials needed to start from scratch. The policy does not intelligently select and separate items by their current or future use to the US industry.

There is a prediction that this blunt hammer will not yield to a more productive situation, in couple of years it would only have to be quietly rolled back and strategic thinking would have to be re-applied.

The counter-counter argument is, maybe a real strategy is being worked upon, and this blunt hammer is just a leverage tool. But so far there are no concrete signals of strategic thinking, so it's currently perceived as "let's keep turning one knob after another". The lack of accompanying software updates, calculations, projections, personnel planning, etc all contribute to the notion that there is no strategy.

And at this point, it devolves into emotion and personality, which is better to stay away from.

The United States maintains the world's most powerful corporations and attracts exceptional talent, yet appears to be hastening toward what some consider an inevitable conflict—one that exists largely in political rhetoric rather than reality. Setting an ambitious four-year timeline to rebuild manufacturing capabilities seems impractical. More concerning is how this approach risks dismantling the global governance system that took generations to establish, while alienating allies who could be valuable partners rather than burdens. The potential costs of such a strategy are immense, explaining why many observers question whether there's a coherent strategy behind these actions.

> What's amazing me is the lack of consistent thinking by the commenters here.

I feel your "consistency" is based on a facile model where big percentages correspond to badness and that's everything.

An analogy:

1. Roommate Trump who falsely claims you're in a common-law marriage: "You're running a trade-deficit with your grocery store, so every time you buy groceries from them I'm going to punish you by taking 25% of the cost. If you don't like it, you should work there part-time to reduce the deficit. You're about equal in paying friends for food versus them paying you for food, but they need you more than you need them, so to make you hustle I'm still taking 15% from any money that goes out. Finally, you have an extreme trade-surplus with your regular employer because they just send you checks, hurray!... That'll be 10%, because reasons."

2. Critics: "That idiot is insane. That's not how any of this works. Find a divorce lawyer ASAP."

3. You: "You guys aren't consistent thinkers! I mean, why aren't you complaining about how Mrs. Johnson adds a 100% cost onto Mr. Johnson's purchases of cigarettes, as a way to get him to quit? 100% is a much bigger number, so obviously Mrs. Johnson's the real villain here, and you don't seem to care!"

____________

If you're so certain Trump has a coherent and non-dumb strategy, please describe how it's supposed to work and why you expect the results to be good things.

Well, why only consider just goods and not consider services? US is mostly exporting services while other countries are exporting goods.

Why not consider US prints dollars which are used for global trade? That means other countries are subsidizing US inflation and US economy.

Why not consider the massive investments other countries have made in the US economy when buying shares, bonds, securities?

What if they impose tarrifs on US financial and IT services? What if Amazon cloud and Netflix start costing 30% more?

What if they quit using dollars for trade?

What if they start selling US stock and securities? What if they start selling US dollars?

>Many other countries, including EU members and China, already apply tariffs and non-tariff barriers far in excess of what the US is applying now.

>So why no complaints about them?

Because that's not true.

> Many other countries, including EU members and China, already apply tariffs and non-tariff barriers far in excess of what the US is applying now.

Source?

Can you provide an example, especially for the EU?

From what I read, the average tariff applied by the EU is under 1%. Other comments say Trump has just divided imports by exports to calculate his tariff rates.

>Many other countries, including EU members and China, already apply tariffs and non-tariff barriers far in excess of what the US is applying now.

This has been persistently claimed but I have yet to see evidence on this. In most cases it's including VAT which doesn't make sense since local manufacturers pay that as well.

If the US doesn't apply non tariff barriers and the EU, for example, does, why us the EU flooded by Chinese cars and smartphones and the US isn't?

It's not really inconsistent as as far as I'm aware the US is the only country in the world with a universal baseline tariff on all imports. Other countries have tariffs that seek to protect certain industries and balance this with trade agreements that cover other goods or certain countries.

For example Japan wants to protect its farmers so has tariffs on rice. But that is not a simple tariff on all rice imports. There are various rules and a tariff free allowance. The largest importer of tariff free rice to Japan is the US.

I think there's a few things wrong with Trump's go to of tariffs as weapons:

- America seems to want total freedom to trade on its terms, not as partners. E.g. expecting countries to import American goods that do no satisfy customer demand or local laws.

- Trump's unpredictability will mean that companies will be hesitant to make large investments if they think the policy will change on a whim. US policy is largely controlled by a single, unpredictable, vindictive and fragile ego. That's not a good environment to build a stable and healthy company.

- The hyperbole such as calling international trade raping & pillaging. This is voluntary trade we're talking about.

- The main issue is that it's not solving the real problems of the average American. Globalization has big issues, it's kept some countries in poverty and contributed to declining living standards especially in western manufacturing. However it is just one factor amongst many that are causing hardship for small town America. A reversing of globalisation does not solve massive wealth inequality, it does not intrinsically solve low wages or abandoned factory towns. At the same time that Trump installs tariffs he's making it easier for the wealthy to concentrate ownership of assets, increase inequality, reduce employment laws and erase social protections. 14 billionaires with elite projection are not working to benefit the average American, they're working to benefit their own average.