The dude is a moron: to think there was any thought behind this is to be insane.

Astronomical tariffs in some cases, trade wars and dramas, alienate all allies and from all of this they got only $130B ?

Maybe that was never the point. You present it as retaliation against 'countries that are out to get us'. Introduce the tariffs, companies pay the tariffs by increasing prices for consumers, get the inevitable loss in court, return the tariff money to the companies.

You just transferred $130B of wealth from citizens to companies.

Bonus: people are now used to the higher prices, so post-tariffs your profits are also higher.

Maybe I don't understand as I'm an outsider, but as per my recent comment on this topic [0], I fail to see the logic of how "other countries" pay the US when the tariffs are paid by the importer and not the other country which is exporting.

I do acknowledge that import taxes can in theory help local industries, especially if the other countries are subsidizing exported goods.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47238951

> tariff war against enemies

This is an interesting way to frame a tax on Americans, but it aligns with this administrations actions.

I am old enough to remember when the great minds at DOGE found $10T a year of fraudulent Social Security spending which would have cut the total governement spending from $7T a year to negative $3T.

The DOGE refund cheque is of course, in the mail.

They need to refund it *with interest*, according to filings cited in the article.

The $130B is only part of the economic costs of the tariffs. Many companies and people changed their buying behavior, either paying more to a domestic company or maybe a company in a country with a lower tariff rate or changed their behavior to not require an item all together. We've also heard about small companies that have gone out of business.

I'm not an economist but I assume economists are writing papers about this kind of thing to estimate the effects.

Friends? America has no friends, only client states.

The rest is financed by debt. The theft-class stole the rest from the govt thru debt, and expect the rest of us and the following generations to deal with the fallout while they sit on top of their obscene gobs of cash insulated from the fire they created.

this reminds me of the Indian government's (read Modi's) demonetization efforts of 2016 which caused 80+ deaths and huge headaches for the common people. In the end, more than 99.3% of the demonetized money came back in circulation. Elect a clown, expect a circus. true for the oldest democracy in the world and also true for the largest democracy.

> Astronomical tariffs [...] and from all of this they got only $130B ?

Which is it? A number can't be small and large at the same time.

The point is to bankrupt the country so the robber barons can buy up all the assets for pennies on the dollar.

I had the same thought, but really I think a lot of it is just spectacle for his more gullible followers.

I mean, FFS--we have a nominally Republican candidate who campaigned on raising taxes and was elected anyway!

You'd have to be pretty gullible to think that raising taxes on imported goods won't result in price hikes at the checkout counter.

"Trump brags in Oval Office that his billionaire pals made a killing in stocks after he pulled the plug on tariffs"

> “He made $2.5 billion, and he made $900 million! That’s not bad!” Trump said, pointing to financial investor Charles Schwab and then NASCAR team owner Roger Penske.

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/trump-brags-oval-office-billionair...

> All the propaganda and extortionist language about how all countries will pay up to USA.

Sounds a bit like Brexit.

It's clear that there was no reasoned thought behind the tariff push. Tariffs can work if implemented in a principled way and coupled with a complementary industrial policy to develop critical sectors of the economy.

Instead, we had a completely chaotic implementation of tariffs which seemed to be completely at the whim of Trump with zero supportive industrial policy. So much so that the term 'Taco' https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_Always_Chickens_Out was coined to describe Trump's approach.

The charitable explanation is that Trump had no plan and was making it up as he went along. The less charitable explanation is that the chaos was an intentional feature to enable a quid pro quo of favourable policy in exchange for under the table payments via crypto or 'investments' in his family's various businesses.

When you couple completely illegal application of a supposed 'emergency' to invoke tariffs with a chaotic, whim based implementation, is there any wonder that they failed?

It's unbelievable he's still given any semblance of credence for anything he does. Trump is just palpably stupid. He is bad at absorbing information, he is bad at analytical thinking, he is impatient, vain and rash. Aside from his tenuous legal justification, he never once publicly expressed even a fundamental understanding of the basic mechanics of tariff collection nor what balance of trade actually means. You'd constantly see his proxies on TV just put words in his mouth to bend his foolish policy into some coherent. And we're seeing it again with the attack on Iran. No strategy, no achievable objectives, no comprehension of basic facts on the ground. He's really really really just stupid.

I mean 130 billion is a significant amount of money, and it's more remarkable given the tax is unnoticeable to the average consumer and primarily impacted foreign manufacturers (either forcing them to move to the US or more friendly countries). The deficit wasn't built in two years and I don't think it could be solved in two years either.