It's both simple and stupid algorithm, though.
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
> 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 did do one-off exceptions though. They excluded Iran, North Korea, and Russia from the list.