alt Hacker NewsIt 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).
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I think you might be granting the administration too much benefit of the doubt. They aren't based on "tariffs + trade barriers", they're just based on trade deficit alone.
> milk quotas (Canada)
You mean the milk quota on imports that (a) trump negotiated and (b) the us has never hit?
VAT is not a "sneaky backdoor tax", it's imposed on all goods, regardless of where they're produced or imported from.
DMA (and similarly, GDPR) are enforced in EU countries just as much. It's just that the US tends to have more gigantic tech companies that do shady things with user data. Apparently the US doesn't care, but the EU actually does, and so it enforces its laws.
Comments like this make me wonder why some Americans think they should be able to move on every other country “like a bitch”.
In some places, dollar is not god. Important, but not god.
It doesn't make sense because it is not a table of tariffs (including or excluding trade barriers) at all.
It is a table of the current trade deficit against each country as a ratio.