alt Hacker NewsFor extra sauce on the "they're barely even thinking about this" cake someone figured out where those crazy "Tariff Charged" numbers were coming from, they're taking the trade deficit and dividing by the total imports from that country.
edit: The White House deputy press secretary posted their formula and it is just trade_deficit/2*total_imports per country just dressed up with a lot of fancy language to make it seem smarter but the two extra terms are constants.
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Good to see that Trump will be providing subsidies on goods imported from Australia to balance out the -107% trade relationship they have with them.
Oh wait its a 10% tariff on Australia too. Better make a new version of this chart with a -117% benefit to the US then...
I've seen this comment a couple of times. What would be a better way of doing it? Also consider that if they would've had a more complex formula, what would be the cost of needing to explain it publicly? Would they then need to start defending the fairness of each tariff vs doing it the simple way and having a single formula across the board?
I just asked ChatGPT with a lazy prompt: "Come up with a formula to impose reciprocal tariffs that will reduce America's trade deficit to zero" and it came up with basically the same formula.
Oh man if people in the White House are just using ChatGPT...
https://chatgpt.com/share/67ee890e-b400-800b-ac83-90a6147d32...
(edit: fixed link)