The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Mister Agenda]

22 weeks apart.



The Economist Op-Ed: "Donald Trump has committed the most profound, harmful and unnecessary economic error in the modern era. Almost everything he said - on history, economics and the technicalities of trade - was utterly deluded."

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Trump’s new tariff math looks a lot like ChatGPT’s

Economist James Surowiecki quickly reverse-engineered a possible explanation for the tariff pricing. He found you could recreate each of the White House’s numbers by simply taking a given country’s trade deficit with the US and dividing it by their total exports to the US. Halve that number, and you get a ready-to-use “discounted reciprocal tariff.” The White House objected to this claim and published the formula it says that it used, but as Politico points out, the formula looks like a dressed-up version of Surowiecki’s method.

In case you weren’t sure, Surowiecki calls this approach “extraordinary nonsense.” So why did Trump’s team use it? Well, like plenty of people who’ve realized their homework is due in three hours’ time, it seems like they may have been tempted by AI.

A number of X users have realized that if you ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or Grok for an “easy” way to solve trade deficits and put the US on “an even playing field”, they’ll give you a version of this “deficit divided by exports” formula with remarkable consistency.

https://www.theverge.com/news/642620/tru...laude-grok

So the more stuff we buy from a country, the more we increase taxes on ourselves for buying their stuff. Maybe that's why that little country on a mountain in the middle of South Africa is getting tariffed at 50%.