alt Hacker NewsThe whole table doesn't make sense. We (NL/EU) don't charge the US 39% to import . Apparently orange guy (not the Dutch) doesn't understand VAT rates.
Car? max 4.5 + 21% VAT = 25%. But it simply doesn't matter bc we don't want their cars.. Except for thee Dodge RAM, which can be converted to a tax efficient company car (crazy)..
What amazes me even more is that Elon doesn't seems to understand it either.
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The thing is that Europeans wanted the Tesla cars. They fit perfectly into the Europeans identity - had Tesla kept on and kept the Tesla cars competitive without any political interference, then that could have been great car exports from the US to the EU.
Seems he is using trade deficit percentages in his chart instead of tariff percentages ... :/
> Except for thee Dodge RAM, which can be converted to a tax efficient company car (crazy)
You can no longer do that since 1st of Jan 2025. The BPM discount for company cars was removed.
But then by the same logic isn't income tax a tariff.
Brave of you to assume that comrade muskov understands anything.
> But it simply doesn't matter bc we don't want their cars..
But is that cause or effect?
As found elsewhere on this thread, the rate is based on trade deficit. Trump believes that having a negative trade balance with a country means that they're cheating somehow, as opposed to meaning that you just buy a lot of manufactured or raw goods for them.
And no, that does not make any sense, and you're not missing anything. He believes this because he's a fucking idiot. He's aggressively racist, comically petty and thin-skinned, and overtly authoritarian, and as far as I can tell actively wants to permanently destroy American science and civil society out of spite, but he's also really, really, really dumb. In this case, he's managed to combine his powers to take a goal that's born out of racism and xenophobia and then implement it in the most idiotic way possible, and somehow the result is even worse than the sum of its components.
It doesn't make sense because you didn't read the original board. It clearly states 'including trade barriers'. You're attacking a strawman.
Countries, including the EU, like to have 'low tariffs' and then have sneaky backdoor taxes or outright bans on US goods through things like milk quotas (Canada), 'biosecurity' (Australia) or EU courts issuing spurious fines on US companies (based on vague laws that only get enforced against US companies, like DMA).
They calculate (export-import)/import also they try to hide it behind complicated formulas
https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/114272487006550281
On top of that they excluded services and only recognize goods for the calculation.