Reciprocal tariffs: you won’t believe how they came up with the numbers | There is some method to the madness — it’s just a nonsensical method

The rates were supposedly based on the US Trade Representative’s calculations of “tariffs imposed against US products”. But they didn’t come from any obvious rates that were actually imposed, as Paul Krugman pointed out.

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        Here’s what the White House and its crack team of trade investigators seems to have done: Take the US’s goods trade deficit with any particular country, and divide it by the total amount of goods imported from that country. Cut that percentage in half, and there’s the US’s “reciprocal” tariff rate. 

  

This is how they ended up doing things like imposing a tax on imports from uninhabited islands full of penguins.

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