"@chriso-wiki.bsky.social
Just figured out where these fake tariff rates come from. They didn't actually calculate tariff rates + non-tariff barriers, as they say they did. Instead, for every country, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country's exports to us." Just about sums it up.
I'm not sure that that's necessarily wrong. Excise taxes, import duties, etc. have been around for millennia. In the US, the income tax has only been around since the Civil War (which it was created to pay for).
Why would someone run a business exporting goods into a country if they couldn't charge more than the cost of duties, labor, and materials for the goods?
It's probably like his net worth, where "it goes up and down with the markets and with attitudes and with feelings", "even my own feelings, as to where the world is, where the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day".