White House publishes a table of steep percentage fees charged on imports from various countries that make little sense, claiming it’s based on a rigorous and complex system of economic calculations

Somebody notices the percentages for all these countries are just the trade deficit divided by imports, which is a formula as simple as it is arbitrary

White House lackey says “Nuh uh, we have a totally complex formula for this” and publishes an imposing equation full of Greek symbols and letters

Turns out the Greek symbols refer to arbitrary values set by the White House that cancel each other out, and the letters just represent… the trade deficit divided by imports.

tl;dr: They used a dead-simple, arbitrary formula for their economy-wrecking trade war and tried using fancy-looking math to cover it up

Direct from USTR.gov:

To calculate reciprocal tariffs, import and export data from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2024. Parameter values for ε and φ were selected. The price elasticity of import demand, ε, was set at 4.

Recent evidence suggests the elasticity is near 2 in the long run (Boehm et al., 2023), but estimates of the elasticity vary. To be conservative, studies that find higher elasticities near 3-4 (e.g., Broda and Weinstein 2006; Simonovska and Waugh 2014; Soderbery 2018) were drawn on. The elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ, is 0.25. The recent experience with U.S. tariffs on China has demonstrated that tariff passthrough to retail prices was low (Cavallo et al, 2021).

He has statutory emergency authority which can be checked by Congress if abused, except, what Congress?

(Also the tariffs are enforced by CBP, an executive agency.)

Potential legal problems for Goldberg if he continues eavesdropping after realizing the chat is real.

Tyranny.biz

I voted for Sanders in the 2016 primary. In hindsight, he would have been obliterated, McGovern-style. Clinton and Biden treated him with kid gloves, but in a general election all of his questionable past – his unemployment, his wife’s involvement with that college financing thing, his honeymoon in the USSR, the rape essay – would have come out and been hammered relentlessly by Republicans (and a good chunk of Democrats).

I like Reich, but this is dumb. They never railed about bureaucrats “destroying government,” they railed about them destroying healthcare, education, the economy, etc. – and they didn’t even give a shit about those things, they were just cynical covers to defend privatization of those areas. Destroying “Shrinking” government has been their stated goal since at least Grover Norquist, and they love that it’s being done now (even in a way that actually does destroy healthcare, education, and the economy).

Updated, thanks.