The stupidity is extraordinary

The cited justifications for Trump's trade tariffs are painfully stupid, as is a lot of the commentary from the British side.

One of the most commonly cited justifications for Donald Trump hammering Britain, the EU, and various other economies with trade tariffs is the existence of VAT, which is being misleadingly portrays as a tariff on US goods.

VAT is not a tariff because it’s applied to all qualifying products and services, regardless of whether they were produced domestically or overseas, while tariffs are applied to imported goods, creating an advantage for domestically produced goods.

It’s not like sales taxes should be incomprehensible to Americans, given that all but four US states (Delaware, New Hampshire, Montana, Oregon) levy some kind of state wide or regional sales taxes of their own.

Things get much stupider from here though, because none of the tariff rates the US is claiming that other economies apply on US goods actually align with taxes applied on US goods in those economies, whether or not sales taxes are misleadingly counted as trade tariffs.

In reality what the Trump administration has done to generate these figures is to divide the US trade deficit with a country by that country’s total exports to the United States, and in cases where the US has a trade surplus with a country (like the UK) they’ve applied an arbitrary 10% tariff.

The methodology for calculating the claimed tariffs on US goods in other countries is utterly bizarre

In the case of Vietnam, Trump is claiming that they impose 90% tariffs on US goods which is absurd, but if we look at their exports to the US of 136.6 billion minus their imports from the US of 13.1 billion, that leaves a deficit of 123.5 billion, which is exactly the 90% on Trumps chart.

If we take Jordan as another example, they’ve been hit with a 20% tariff, one of the highest rates in the middle east, despite having been one of the first economies to sign a free trade agreement with the US in 2000.

The reason they’ve been hit with a 20% tariff isn’t because they charge the US high tariffs, it’s merely because they sell more goods to the United States than the United States sells to them.

It’s the same story across the board, the United States government is presenting their trade deficits with other countries as if they’re tariffs being applied to US goods exported there.

It’s an extraordinary display of economic illiteracy.

Britian getting whacked with 10% tariffs is a blow to the radical-right Brexity types who idolise Trump, but they’re seeking to present Trump’s attack on the UK economy as some kind of win because he’s attacked the EU harder with 20% tariffs, as if that’s somehow a benefit of Brexit, rather than a consequence of the Trump administration’s utterly bizarre methodology for drawing up their claimed tariff rates.

Trump hasn’t favoured Britain at all, in fact he’s applied an arbitrary 10% tariff on the UK because under their absurd calculations the UK would have ended up with a negative tariff rate due to the US trade surplus with the UK!

Keir Starmer’s response to this howling nonsense from the US is pathetic too.

Instead of pointing out Trump’s tariffs are based on absurd calculations and a ridiculous arbitrary 10% rate on countries where the calculations break down so badly they result in negative tariffs, he’s still attempting to suck up to the United States by insisting that he doesn’t want to get into a damaging trade war with them.

The problem is that the UK is in a damaging trade war with the US, and refusing to respond in kind is an act of surrender.

Both Starmer and the Brexiteers are hyping up the proposed UK-US trade deal as a solution to the Trump tariffs, but this is taking wishful thinking to a bizarre level.

Trump has just wilfully torn up the United States’ trade deals with dozens of other economies by unilaterally imposing these tariffs, as well as brazenly flouting World Trade Organisation rules.

It’s beyond obvious that the US is no longer a trustworthy trade partner, because they’ll just rip up the agreements they’ve signed on Trump’s whims.

The UK could seek to win Trump’s favour by signing up to a deal to carve the NHS open for the benefit of private US health profiteers; flood the UK economy with substandard agricultural produce; and hand vast tax cuts to US tech corporations … but why would anyone trust the US to not just walk away from any aspects of the deal that are in any way favourable to the UK?

The way Trump’s tariffs have been calculated is utterly bizarre, and instead of calling it out as the damaging economic illiteracy that it is, Starmer and the Brexiteers are trying to pretend that the sane course of action isn’t just inaction in the face of madness, but to negotiate a trade deal with an administration that has just proven itself wildly untrustworthy.