We Should Have Taken Trump Literally, Not Seriously
He's a joke, but he's not joking
What’s your most cherished Liberation Day memory? Decorating the Liberation Day tree? Sharing some laughs with your neighbors at a Liberation Day block party? Mine is watching the entire field of economics have their brains explode as they discovered the spacetime-altering stupidity of Trump’s tariffs. Here’s a window into the general mood on Econ Twitter:
The proximate cause of the entire economics profession wondering “should we just Jonestown ourselves?” isn’t just Trump’s idiotic tariffs; it’s the stupidity with which his idiotic tariffs have been implemented dumbly. Because the less-completely-retarded rationale for tariffs is that they’re a tit-for-tat measure that punishes countries who put up trade barriers; in theory, a brief trade war could push countries to lower barriers and level the playing field. But Trump didn’t slap higher tariffs on countries that have higher barriers; he slapped tariffs on countries that happen to have a trade surplus with the US, no matter what their policies are. Notoriously closed-off economies like Iran and Saudi Arabia got off relatively easy (10 percent tariffs on each), while trading partners who have been playing by the rules like the European Union and Japan got hit hard (20 and 24 percent tariffs, respectively). Also: We put tariffs on a remote island chain in the Indian Ocean inhabited only by penguins. It is now the official policy of the United States that we will restore trade balance by keeping rockhopper penguins from poaching our manufacturing jobs.
And it gets even dumber: The Deputy White House Press Secretary didn’t understand how the rates were calculated. And he flaunted his ignorance by getting into a public spat with one of the economists who discovered the randomness of Trump’s method — here’s the exchange: