Americans should be ashamed that their president, whom the Electoral College elected, has inflicted a standard 10% tariff hike on all goods bound for the United States, which he falsely claimed would make the US wealthy and cause US manufacturers to return home. Donald Trump’s brag is a lot of crap for the simple reason that he is lying through his teeth when he claimed that poor US has been “raped, pillaged and abused by other economies.”
As analyst Zev Shalev argued in The Narrativ, the stupidity starts when Trump calculates the “effective tariff rate” by taking the US trade deficit with each country and then dividing that country’s exports to the US. The result is the strange but meaningless “effective tariff rate.” Where has Trump been? For example, Shalev said that Indonesia exports $ 28 billion (B) to the US with a $17.9 billion trade deficit. Trump then divides the trade deficit by the total exports ($17.9B ÷ $28B = 64%) and presents 64% as “Indonesia’s tariff rate on America.” This is the wrong arithmetic, a ploy that proves the geniuses in the Trump administration are coddling the ignoramus and validating his false ratios, making themselves worse than the resident dunce in the Oval Office.
Since when has the trade deficit divided by the value of total exports for a certain country become the formula for “effective tariff rate”? By using this bogus ratio, Trump is maliciously arguing that the entire world has been exploiting, oppressing, and abusing the helpless USA. The US has not been generous to its trading partners, and the US Trade Representative has been leading the charge in winning concessions in practically all countries, battering those that support their domestic industries and pressuring those that do not want to grant the US with tax holidays, lower tariffs, and even national treatment. The US is not an imperialist for nothing.
Americans should condemn Trump not only for deluding his equally stupid Cabinet members and pretending to know what he is talking about but also for tanking domestic and foreign markets as his fabricated numbers justify extreme, unpredictable tariffs. Shalev said, “American consumers will pay billions in higher prices based on fictional trade grievances. International allies are being falsely accused of applying non-existent tariffs, and Trump’s approach makes meaningful trade negotiations impossible.” What the White House can’t explain is why the federal government dumped tariffs as the main source of revenue at the beginning of the 20th century, with the income tax becoming the biggest source of cash for the US in 1913, or 16 years before the Great Depression hit. Trump lied when he claimed the Great Depression happened because America “dropped tariffs” and implemented income tax. The Depression worsened after the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act raised tariffs to record levels.
Shalev also slammed Trump and his surrogates, those considered to be the adults at the White House who could rein Trump and prevent his daily narcissistic rampage. He asked, “Why manufacture phony math when real trade data are readily available? Why not disclose the calculation methodology in the announcement? How did this pass through economic advisory review? Is this deliberate economic disruption or stunning incompetence?” Shalev noted that while other presidents have used tariffs strategically, no one has justified them with calculations that bear no relationship to actual trade policy. The global economy now faces turbulence based on a policy built entirely on mathematical fiction.
For his part, former US labor secretary Robert Reich said the tariffs will apply to more than 100 trading partners, including a new 34% tariff on Chinese goods (on top of the 20% tariff already imposed, bringing its total tariff rate on Chinese imports to a whopping 54%), a 20% tariff on imports from the European Union (EU), a 24% on goods from Japan, and a 26% tariff on goods from India. Reid said the unstable genius did it again. “It’s a colossally stupid move that will drive up prices for American consumers and manufacturers while eliciting retaliation from other nations. Stock and bond markets continue to slide,” Reich said in his April 3, 2025 newsletter.
“What should other nations do? My strong recommendation to Canada, Mexico, Japan, and the EU is to join together to create a free trade zone that excludes the US, imposing at least a 10 percent tariff on all imports from America. They should also threaten to limit US banks’ access to their public stock markets, put limits on what their citizens can invest in US companies annually, and increase taxes and regulations on US digital platforms. They will be tempted to negotiate, and do so individually. They should not. They need to negotiate from a position of strength. A non-US free trade union will give them that strength,” Reich concluded. Apart from earning universal condemnation, Trump’s tariffs signal a future of high prices in the US, not because the US may amass $6 trillion in revenues to pay for more than $4-trillion in tax cuts for billionaires, but because these tariffs kill all existing free-trade deals, such as with South Korea, as Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey reported.
Trump claims that South Korea has a 50% tariff on the US, but it is basing its tariff estimations in part on currency manipulation and trade barriers. Trump has no evidence confirming that such factors, insofar as they exist, are equivalent to a 50% tariff, Isabel Fattal reported for the April 3, 2025 edition of Atlantic Daily. Such all-encompassing tariffs will cost each American family thousands of dollars, economists predict. Americans will feel the effects at the groceries, in their auto insurance, or undertaking home renovations. Lowrey says these levies will increase inflation and slow down the economy in the longer term. She said Trump may have just essentially encouraged other countries to consider banding together to impose further tit-for-tat levies on the US, echoing what Reid has said. (DIEGO MORRA)
