These tariffs are a soft blockade carried out as part of a decapitation strike[1] against America.
Imagine you are Russia, and you want to stop American support of Ukraine or that you are China and you want to annex Taiwan. You can't enact a blockade or take military action against America yourself, but you can attempt to destroy us from within by compromising people in positions of power. Oligarchs have more in common with each other than with their countrymen.
This administration lies with the truth. It is true that there are trade deficits harmful to America and that not being able to produce our own masks is a national emergency, but enacting a policy like this is insanity. Those trade deficits are born out of financialization[2] which is a result of the exorbitant privilege[3] of managing the reserve currency.
I can't imagine anyone who writes software intuitively supporting this. Radical changes in policy/code break things. Maybe you do it with something vestigial, but would you do something like this to your databases? The economy, the beating heart of the country, is being put at risk.
[1]Timothy Snyder -- Decapitation strike: https://archive.is/1xkxK [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financialization [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
China can subsidize 10-20% tariffs for a few months. They CANNOT subsidize a 54% tariffs.
This will have COLOSSAL impacts on China.
They can't fix domestic real estate, subsidize industries, build their military, fund the Belt & Road, etc, etc with this level of tariffs from their largest customer.
bravo, i like the current admin of the US
some say trump is the cause of the current state of the United States, well, in fact, trump is the result of the current state of the United States
This is the most important investment in our economic future in a generation.
I remember discussing with a Juniper guy back in 2008 or so about how Huawei would just rip off their designs. Back then it was conventional wisdom that China could just copy, not build. Now, Huawei can make state of the art routers with home grown chips. Turns out all the Reaganites got sucked into just handing China our economy. It’s not sustainable. I don’t want my kids having to learn Chinese and become immigrants (as if China would even allow that) because we shipped the last shreds of our economy over there.
In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, the big chart the administration showed with "tariffs charged to the US" was not real.
They used trade deficit numbers in the "tariffs charged to the US column". The numbers in that column are not actually tariffs charged to the US.
The entire "reciprocal tariff" claim was based on a big lie.
Trump also repeated claims that the US trade deficit with Canada was "close to $200 billion" when the official trade deficit is significantly less.