What a bunch of buffoons.
If men could actually die of shame, then Donald Trump’s economic team would be toast—instead, it is only their reputations that have been buried.
As I have been writing for some time, Donald Trump’s most fundamental character flaw—his laziness—has been his country’s saving grace, at least at times. Trump is an aspiring caudillo whose political models are Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping, and a would-be tyrant who attempted to stage a coup d’état after losing the 2020 election to a barely sentient Joe Biden—but, as bad as he was and is, he could have been and could be a great deal worse if not for the fact that he is unbelievably lazy, a Fox News-watching, social-media-addicted couch potato of a chief executive who might have wielded the levers of power to greater malevolent effect if he had bothered to work at his craft a little bit.
But the so-called reciprocal tariffs are shockingly lazy even by Trumpian standards.
Tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers (which include things like environmental and safety regulations that disadvantage U.S.-sourced goods in overseas markets) are a complex subject: Like most advanced countries, the United States works from a shared international system for classifying goods for tariff purposes, with more than 5,000 categories of traded commodities that comprise about 98 percent of all the products involved in international trade. Trump talks about tariffs as though he were talking about a bank setting loan rates: “They charge us 20 percent, we’ll charge them 20 percent,” that sort of thing. In fact, most countries that collect tariffs collect them at different rates across that group of 5,000 commodities, and most advanced countries, including the United States, collect at different rates depending on their trade relationship with the country in question. There’s no single number that captures it. There are potentially thousands of variables for each country with which we exchange goods and services.
Also, many commodities are traded in only one direction: For example, U.S. fruit wholesalers import mangosteens from India and Thailand, and there is a tariff category for that fruit, but there isn’t any reciprocal duty on U.S.-grown mangosteens exported to India and Thailand, because there aren’t any U.S.-grown mangosteens.
“Consumers of Bangladesh-made T-shirts (garments are the country’s largest export) are going to be subjected to a 37 percent sales tax by the Trump administration because Americans are being brutally victimized by the wily Bangladeshis, who have conspired their way to a median monthly income of less than $300.”
That’s a little thing (unless you are a mangosteen farmer) but the same holds true for major manufactured goods, too: Switzerland has a very sophisticated and productive economy, but there are no major automobile manufacturers based in the country (there are a couple of boutique firms) and, hence, nobody thinks much about tariffs on Swiss-made cars. Japan is a major automobile manufacturer, and, in spite of what you’ll hear the American president claim, Tokyo charges no tariffs on imported U.S. cars. (U.S. automakers have a tough time selling cars in Japan for other reasons, such as GM’s reputation for producing horrible junk.) Japan does have a tariff-and-quota system when it comes to imported rice, and U.S.-grown rice is taxed at $2/kilogram if imports exceed 770,000 metric tons per year. The United States is the largest exporter of rice to Japan, and total Japanese imports of U.S. rice typically do not run much more than half the quota figure, meaning U.S. rice exports to Japan are effectively tariff-free. Trump claims Japan imposes a 700-percent tariff on U.S. rice, which is, per usual, an idiotic lie.
Accounting for all that—thousands of categories of goods, hundreds of trading partners, complex quotas, several different kinds of trading relationships—would take some work.
And these Trump people hate work. That’s why Elon Musk’s idiot DOGE boys and their colleagues get into so much trouble by doing things such as eliminating Ebola-prevention programs: They are too damned lazy to do some reading and figure out what they are actually dealing with. That’s why they deport the wrong people and text their war plans to what’s-his-name over at that magazine. They’re lazy. They don’t do the reading, and they don’t do their homework. They won’t look past their phones.
Rather than actually figuring out what tariff rates would actually be reciprocal, the Trump administration has come up with a completely meaningless calculation: The “reciprocal” tariff rate has nothing at all to do with tariffs charged by our trading partners—it is simply the trade deficit (goods only; services are excluded) divided by total goods exports divided by two. Why two? No reason. It just sounded good to somebody.
My old National Review colleague Kevin Hassett currently serves as director of the National Economic Council, and if he hasn’t died from embarrassment over this buffoonery or committed whatever is the economist’s version of seppuku, he ought to have his doctorate revoked. Working for Trump has never been good for anybody’s reputation, but who wants to end his career as the Rudy Giuliani of economists?
Tariffs are not the only reason—or even the main reason—for imbalanced trade among nations. U.S. firms and consumers buy a lot of tropical fruit and low-cost goods from firms in poor countries where the people do not buy a lot of Boeing products or $300 selvedge jeans made in the United States on account of their being, you know, poor.
The notion that international trade ultimately should balance overall is questionable, but the notion that bilateral trade relationships should balance—that exports from the United States (GDP/capita: $83,000) to Bangladesh (GDP/capita: $2,550) are going to match up with exports from Bangladesh to the United States—is entirely bananas. The United States consumes about 15 percent of Bangladesh’s exports, which adds up to a few billion dollars in our $28 trillion economy—but 15 percent of U.S. goods exports would equal the entirety of Bangladesh’s private consumption or nearly 70 percent of its total GDP. And 15 percent of total U.S. exports would exceed Bangladesh’s GDP. But consumers of Bangladesh-made T-shirts (garments are the country’s largest export) are going to be subjected to a 37 percent sales tax by the Trump administration because Americans are being brutally victimized by the wily Bangladeshis, who have conspired their way to a median monthly income of less than $300. Apparently, we’ve got to get us some of that top-level economic thinking.
