US defends tariffs on remote island of penguins and seals
US defends tariffs on remote island of penguins and seals
A group of islands, occupied only by penguins and seals, has been swept up in Trump's trade war.
The worst type of person is the person who is so allergic to being "wrong" that they'll constantly double down with new bullshit to try to convince people why it wasn't a mistake in the first place. It's fucking exhausting.
It's honestly so many people! How did admitting you are wrong become so painful for so much of society?
This is the same generation that gave us ‘participation trophies’ so their feelings and their kids’ feelings didn’t ‘get hurt’.
I’m not quite sure where this plague of ‘treat my feelings with kid gloves, otherwise I might die’ got started, but we really need to do something about it.
I literally fired people for this in my IT career. Intolerable.
The problem with this is that the rationale they give isn't "wrong". The US has received imports through the islands and the article gives details on why that happens.
While all of this is dumb, those points will make sense to conservative voters.
tl;dr: They're claiming that it was to "prevent countries with tariffs from shipping through there to avoid tariffs."
The United States alleged the islands exported more goods to the United States than they imported, an allegation that appeared to be calculated from incorrect trade data. An analysis of U.S. import data and shipping records by The Guardian indicated some shipments were incorrectly labeled as coming from the remote islands instead of their correct countries of origin. According to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was "machinery and electrical" imports.[39]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heard_Island_and_McDonald_Islands
... Why were we allowing items into the country that were shipped through an uninhabited island to begin with? Like, that should be the red flag... They should treat it like losing your parking garage ticket, you pay the top rate.
Wasn't Russia left off the list? hmmm
Those penguins know what they did
those damn penguins. Damn freeloaders.
Look, obviously Trump’s a moron. But don’t go pretending that corporate leeches wouldn’t route their funds through some penguins for tax avoidance. They would totally do that.
Do you believe all of those tech giants were actually based in Ireland?
Yeah, but it would probably make more sense to just have like a universal 10 percent default rate for "other" as a category.
I feel like this is really just a distraction. When you have a base of 10%, then it gets applied to dumb stuff like this. That should be a given. Let's focus on the other wild shit that is happening.
What's the tariff on something made in international waters?