‘Trump Declares a Trade War on Uninhabited Islands, US Military, and Economic Logic’

Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump’s tariff trade war is:

Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit.

Brendan Duke, on X, shows that the fancier version of their formula — which is fancy in the way that Vertu phones are “fancy” — is even stupider, because the two Greek letters they chose to glam it up just cancel each other out.

Back to Masnick:

This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to “make my wrong econ math look more scientific.” The document even admits that they couldn’t figure out the actual tariff rates, so they “proxied” them with this formula instead. That’s a bit like saying you couldn’t find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.

The fundamental problem here isn’t just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It’s that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They’re not the same thing. At all.

Let’s back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be:

  1. “Deficit” sounds bad
  2. Therefore, trade deficits must be bad
  3. Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us
  4. Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to “level the playing field”

This sounds like it must be an exaggeration for comic effect, but it’s not. That’s how Trump’s mind works. This is what Trump has been saying about trade deficits for decades. It’s like how he understands “asylum” to mean “insane asylum” and so when he talks about political asylum he starts talking about “the late great Hannibal Lecter”.

★ Thursday, 3 April 2025