It Ain’t No Good
By 
My thoughts on our Liberation…
We have been liberated! Yesterday, President Trump announced the imposition of a vast array of tariffs on nearly every country.
The tariff barriers make the United States the most protectionist major economy in the world and indeed rival the highest barriers that the US has ever imposed on imports.
It’s not clear yet what we’re being liberated from, but for now, the best bets seem to be “job security,” “prosperity,” and “a healthy 401k.”
It was not immediately obvious how the Trump administration arrived at the tariff rates, which bear no clear relationship to the actual tariff rates in the targeted countries. James Surowiecki determined that the numbers tend to be a crude calculation involving the US trade deficit divided by exports to the US.
If we are to take this seriously (and the tariffs are quite serious business, even if their intellectual foundation is anything but serious) it suggests that the Trump administration considers it America’s right to have a trade surplus with every country in the world, a goal that would need several rounds of therapy and medication to ascend to the level of “criminally insane.”
It’s bad. No way to make it look good. FWIW Trump is now raging at both Kentucky senators…
Photo credit: By James 4 – Own work https://www.usitc.gov/documents/dataweb/ave_table_1891_2016.pdf, https://fraser.stlouisfed.org/title/237, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59321865