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Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by how many concerns there are here related to how the tariff amounts were calculated.

It seems like they used a pretty simple algorithm to do it. Isn't that a good thing? Countries were treated the same and the tariff was decided primarily by the trade imbalance (with a minimum of 10%). Would we rather them use a combination of completely incomprehensible calculations and backroom deals?

Its open season for debating whether tariffs will work, or even what the underlying motivations are. Attacking the use of a simple algorithm across the board just feels lazy and either emotionally or politically charged.

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It's both simple and stupid algorithm, though.

Why is it stupid? They claim to be concerned with trade imbalances, and that those imbalances are a problem. Using those trade imbalances to calculate a tariff seems reasonable, assuming the concerns are right.

If tariffs are to be imposed, I'd at least rather be able to see how they were calculated and know it was done the same for every country.

The "numbers" appear to:

* Punish Ecuador, who uses the US dollar, for being a "currency manipulator", which obviously makes zero sense

* Punish Lesotho, whose population is too poor to ever afford US goods, because they export a lot of resources that we use

* Punish countries like Columbia for being big coffee exporters where there is no hope of building up a domestic coffee industry because that's not how agriculture works

* Tariff an island inhabited only by Penguins

It's just dumb.

Aren't you cherry picking to make a point though? Certainly there are impacts on other countries though, and they're likely aligned (in theory) with their stated concern that countries are leveraging trade deficits to take advantage of the US.

> Tariff an island inhabited only by Penguins

This would be a great sound bite, but its also entirely useless. If the only inhabitants are penguins then a tariff on paper means nothing, they just avoided having to write one-off exceptions.

>they just avoided having to write one-off exceptions.

They did do one-off exceptions though. They excluded Iran, North Korea, and Russia from the list.

Do we have any appreciable trade with them? I would have thought existing sanctions packages approved by congress would supersede this.

3 billion USD apparently. lots smaller than in the past, but still bigger than quite a few countries that did get listed.

It's stupid because trade imbalances aren't necessarily a problem, and are sometimes a good thing that you need.

That doesn't make the policy stupid, it means you disagree with the opinion that led to the policy.

A policy driven by a stupid opinion/belief is stupid.

If I have an opinion the Earth is flat, and form a policy based on it, like say how to navigate an airplane over a long distance, that makes my policy stupid.

If that's the line, the policy is st least in good company.

We have plenty of policies based on inaccurate, incomplete, or flat out wrong information. If bad information means stupid opinions and stupid policies, you'd be hard pressed to find a smart policy.

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