According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...):

> Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.

In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year.

Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?

I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them."

That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins.

Doge should look into this inefficiency.

> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.

Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.

10% on British Indian Ocean Territories, whose sole inhabitants are US soldiers at the Diego Garcia base.

Probably because the tariff table was put together by an ignorant acolyte. They are not serious people.

> Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years.

Should have set that to 99% then eh?

Seems like a business opportunity to set up an import company on the Macdonald Islands and sell the goods to the poor folks in Norfolk Island.

If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.

They knew what they were doing. They created a meme, a dead cat.

Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.

This is to stop the practice of shipping things to a place, making a small change, then re-exporting from there to avoid tariffs.