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Comment by jdb47 | Hacker News Reader

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jdb47·

Would be good to know -

Who are the people coming up with these specific rates?

How are they modeling this system?

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I am certain they didn't use any liberal math or science or history to arrive at these numbers. It's all just made up by incompetent yes men.

It's trade deficit divided by total exports divided by 2.

According to the BBC reporting, it appears that for each country he's charging 50% of the tariff they place on US goods coming into those countries, or a baseline of 10% for some countries like the UK.

(sorry, this is a BBC live news ticker link):

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A3a34...

And a picture of the chart they had showing the per-country tariffs:

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/c1dr7vy39eet?post=asset%3A7f78...

its not tariffs

Trump took the trade surplus the US has with those countries and calcuated the percentage from that.

Interesting - I haven't seen that mentioned in any of the coverage, do you have a source for that?

A lot of comments have already mentioned that. You can also calculate it by yourself.

For example, in 2024, the total value of US trade in goods with China was approximately $582.4 billion, comprising $143.5 billion in exports and $438.9 billion in imports. [0]

(438.9-143.5)/438.9=67.3%

[0] https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/china-mongolia-taiwan/peo...

The trade deficit the US has with those countries, or the surplus they have with the US, as a percentage of the country's total exports to the US.

It's an incredibly simplistic calculation that definitely doesn't equate to the country's tariff rate.

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