Everyone is entitled to their opinion so in keeping with that maxim, I would suggest everyone get a solid grip on this part of OP's post:
The numbers are not what other countries are tariffing us, but rather, a formula based on our trade deficit with a variety of countries.
It's the formula that nobody seems to be paying that much attention to and why the media thinks they have a gotcha when it comes them restricting their reporting to other country's tariffs. Other country's tariffs are just one aspect of the whole picture.
Say, for example, a country's government gives an industry a substantial subsidy that competing American companies in that same industry don't get from our government. Canadian lumber is a good example of this. Canadian lumber mills produce lumber sometimes BELOW the cost to harvest it because the government subsidies make that possible. Canada's tariff on US lumber is low or nonexistent because they've made their lumber so cheap it's uncompetitive. Trump's formula takes other country's subsidies into account.
Doing a tariff vs tariff comparison is disingenuous, at best, because it doesn't take subsidies, tax policy, regulatory environment, and a host of other factors that make competition difficult into account.
Yeah but that Canadian example is good for us not bad. It means we get very cheap lumber essentially because Canadian taxpayers are paying for part of it. It’s basically us taking advantage of their subsidy. That’s a good thing for us, not a bad thing.
Not if it means the collapse of our industry. Without industry the only thing left is low skill low pay jobs. The long term impact of losing these conpanies are stagnant or slowly rising wages and a reduction of buying power.
A major contributor to the record median salary growth in Trumps first term was due to industries returning to america pre2020 when that became impossible before biden took over and it was no longer worth the investment.
I'm not a fan of them at a fundamental level, but thats something I haven't seen noted before. Thats important to take note of for when people just parrot the tariff calculation part. Still weird how he marketed it though, being very misleading about the calculation.
Honestly, most of the calculation is, most likely, simply the trade imbalance with the nation in question.
If this is the fact of the matter, that's actually better because a nation with tariffs could remove them saying "ta-da" and then simply provide their domestic industries tax breaks, incentives, subsidies and so on achieving the same end.
The whitehouse wasnt misleading about the number, trump and the rest of the administration was clear this was not just tarrifs, its all the reporting and discussion that was misleading, most of which was intentional.
In brief, Canada is paying their lumberjacks to cut trees that the market doesn'tneedcut.
This happens across all industries and around the world, then they all agree among themselves to point at us and say America is bad for the environment.
Well, consider an industrial product like, say, steel. We used to be the world leader in steel production. Today, China is the leader and their production is greater than the next 7 or 8 producers COMBINED. All the steel production moved to China. How can China produce steel at such lower costs than we can such that it's cheaper to pay to ship ore to their foundries and ship the finished product back and it's STILL more cost effective than what we can do here?
Simple. They lack labor, safety and especially environmental regulations that our steel producers here have to factor in to their final product cost. That and China's government controls the value of the yuan there to make their currency artificially weak against everyone else's. Try that in a democratic country and you have a change of regime...but not in China.
We could, tomorrow, cut our greenhouse gas emissions to near zero...and the climate challenge persists because we have countries like China and India who will simply take up the slack and pollute far worse than we ever did. This is already the case.
Hasn't the UK been calling themselves "Carbon Neutral" recently, but it's only because they're buying natural gas from Russia so Russia is polluting more to supply the UK?
I don't know the UK's particular solution but I do know Germany made a big fuss about shutting down their domestic nuclear and coal power generation plants and using Russian LNG all to achieve their green agenda.
Brilliant move, paying the belligerent guy next door then having a huge problem on what he's spending your money on.
Yep. That's another head scratcher. I'll never understand why the EU decided to give Putin a crazy influx of excessive income. Not to mention that nuclear power is untouchable when it comes to clean energy and reliable power. There is some waste, but holy smokes is it small in comparison to coal, oil, and natural gas.
Remember how "deranged", "unhinged" and just plain wrong Trump was when he was taking Europe to task over guzzling Russian LNG like it was crack back in his first administration? Warned the Germans specifically that it was such a bad idea and their response was to laugh at him and do whatever they wanted anyway.
And now they've been busily shitting their collective pants over Ukraine ever since Trump left office. Minus the profits they make from exported energy, Russia simply doesn't have the economic capability of pursuing a war of aggression like they have in Ukraine since 2022.
The EU directly financed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. There is simply no other way to spin that.
Yet Trump is the one enabling Putin...it's unbelievable how blinded by rage they all are just because the good advice is coming from someone they don't like.
Doing a tariff vs tariff comparison is disingenuous, at best, because it doesn't take subsidies, tax policy, regulatory environment, and a host of other factors that make competition difficult into account.
Totally agree, there is no math for non-tariff barriers. I.e. how can you quantify the constitution of the United States into a math equation. You can't.
Which is why the formula is, pretty much, based on the trade imbalance with the trading partner in particular. The formula is expressed via the imbalance. There isn't a single country in the world we have a trade surplus with.
Our trade deficit was nearly $1T just last year. The last time we had a trade surplus was 1975. We have been shipping American wealth out of the country at a breathtaking pace for many years...and it cannot last.
Absolutely right, even the old WTO rules didn't use math in the sense the original poster seems to want to.
The WTO itself was fundamentally built on a reciprocal balance of trade concessions. It was only once all WTO members considered the exchange of trade concessions (including non-tariff concessions such as protecting intellectual property rights and special considerations for developing countries) to be sufficiently reciprocal that MFN obligations kicked in. MFN does not operate in a vacuum. It is preconditioned on reaching a state of rough equivalence in trade concessions, understanding the different economic status of various countries. But once this reciprocity is seriously out of kilter, applying MFN no longer makes sense.
https://ielp.worldtradelaw.net/2025/02/how-the-us-reciprocal-tariff-plan-could-save-the-wto.html
Getting Redditors, especially liberals, to understand such a nuanced situation is going to be tough, but I applaud you for trying. Treasury Secretary Besset has done a great job of explaining the situation, but most people aren't paying attention to those kinds of detailed explanations from experts, rather they are taking cues from liberals, who always get this stuff wrong, like this poster did. Thing is, we don't even have to worry about other nation's retaliatory measures much here because the imbalances are so significant with US being the main importer on the planet that in all situations we have the leverage. This is going to be a win/win for US when the dust settles.
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u/Euroranger Texas Conservative 1d ago
Everyone is entitled to their opinion so in keeping with that maxim, I would suggest everyone get a solid grip on this part of OP's post:
It's the formula that nobody seems to be paying that much attention to and why the media thinks they have a gotcha when it comes them restricting their reporting to other country's tariffs. Other country's tariffs are just one aspect of the whole picture.
Say, for example, a country's government gives an industry a substantial subsidy that competing American companies in that same industry don't get from our government. Canadian lumber is a good example of this. Canadian lumber mills produce lumber sometimes BELOW the cost to harvest it because the government subsidies make that possible. Canada's tariff on US lumber is low or nonexistent because they've made their lumber so cheap it's uncompetitive. Trump's formula takes other country's subsidies into account.
Doing a tariff vs tariff comparison is disingenuous, at best, because it doesn't take subsidies, tax policy, regulatory environment, and a host of other factors that make competition difficult into account.