alt Hacker NewsI don’t understand what you’re trying to say. What rtkwe described is literally what they are? They didn’t say the tariffs are random (unless the comment changed, which would explain why yours makes no sense to me), they said they aren’t what the White House is claiming they are.
If you think trying to balance out the trade deficit with every single country without any other nuanced consideration whatsoever is a good approach, that’s one thing (a lot of people would disagree), but there’s no getting around that the information around this is either misinformed or deliberately misleading.
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rayiner does this pretty consistently - strawmanning the argument and acting confused, on most political threads on hn.
Nope my edit was to add the bit I helpfully marked edit to show where the White House had confirmed this was their method while attempting to deny it.
I'm objecting to his characterization that "they're barely even thinking about this." He makes it seem like they picked this formula out of a hat. But there is an ideological rationale to scaling tariffs up with the size of the trade deficit, as described in the article I linked.