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“There can be permanent tariffs... there are things we need beyond tariffs. We need open borders." [1]
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Date: 2025-04-07
President Donald J. Trump’s unveiling of worldwide tariffs last week sent the American economy into a tailspin, and John Oliver zeroed in on the faulty math that went into Trump’s tariff calculations during his opening monologue on Last Week Tonight.
He continued: “It’d be like trying to figure out the square footage of your home by dividing your phone number by your dog’s age. Or taking your temperature by measuring your head’s distance to the sun. It’s not going to get you the answer that you’re looking for.”
Oliver first mocked Trump for his impromptu comments outside on the White House lawn on Wednesday, where he modeled a chart he could hold to brace against the windy conditions. “It shows they really thought of everything that might go wrong while announcing their plan to shoot the economy in the dick,” Oliver zinged.
“Unfortunately that chart is ridiculous for a number of reasons,” he added. “For one thing, it features an estimate of tariffs charged to the U.S.A. by other countries that no one could figure out until a financial journalist realized it was just how much we export to that country, minus how much we import from them, divided by how much we import from them. Which is just stunningly dumb, because those things have nothing to do with tariffs.”
www.thedailybeast.com/...
Let’s start with the biggest mistake. The office said it calculated its reciprocal tariffs at a level that would theoretically eliminate trade deficits with “each of our trading partners,” one by one. Is that a reasonable goal?
It is not. Trade imbalances between two countries can emerge for many reasons that have nothing to do with protectionism. Americans spend more on clothing made in Sri Lanka than Sri Lankans spend on American pharmaceuticals and gas turbines. So what? That pattern reflects differences in natural resources, comparative advantage and development levels. The deficit numbers don’t suggest, let alone prove, unfair competition.
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