Well, every transaction Trump has ever been a part of has, in fact, had a loser.
In Before: At President Trump’s suggestion Lesotho has agreed to grant American eternal rights to all the minerals in Lesotho in exchange for lifting the tariffs on their country.
Lesotho: Dear Donald … We are familiar with warmongering colonialists - remember Isandlwana
Here’s another article which details how the formula the United States is using is based on trade deficits, not the tariffs of other countries.
Interestingly, It mentions that the US has a trade surplus with the United Kingdom.
That means, of course, that the US is ripping off the UK and cheating, right?
Nope; since it benefits the US, that’s the US being a “winner”. It’s only being ripped off if somebody else is profiting.
Remember, it’s not about “fairness” in the sense a normal person would think about it. It’s from a perspective that’s selfish to the point of borderline solipsism. Anything that benefits another nation is by definition “bad”, while the US profiting is never wrong.
There’s a few different meanings of ‘ok’. You could mean whether it’s fair to do. You could also mean whether it’s wise to do.
A nation has some desire to be self-sufficient and that’s difficult if some developed country comes in and sells products that are better and cheaper than any local can create. Or a foreign company might use local labor and production, but ship all the profit back home to the parent company and no one in the local economy has an opportunity to get up out of the bottom income bracket.
If your country has never had paved roads, never had indoor plumbing, etc. and you’re looking to modernize, then it may make sense for the native government to invest in local businessmen and protect the early industries from having to compete with far more professional, far more powerful outside competitors.
(This is a spectrum, but to give the end range.)
But, likewise, doing it that way would always be slower. For a very small country, it might not be feasible to have businesses that build all the components of the modern world. Bhutan would probably have a hard time recruiting enough labor to reinvent, develop, manufacture, and distribute all the components of modern plumbing, HVAC systems, cars, smartphones, radios, TVs, etc. With the amount of labor that they have available, they won’t be able to do more than crude, barbones versions of those things, if at all.
At some point, it’s to your advantage to decide what your strengths are and what your weaknesses will be, and use targeted laws to allow others to supply products and components that you’re never going to be competitive on, while continuing to protect the businesses that - one day - might advance to the top of their industry and compete on the global stage.
But, outside of that slim zone, you’d be dumb to put tariffs on anything else.
At the end of the day, the cost of a product is the cost of all the labor that went into producting it. Even when you buy a component from someone else, in some foreign currency, you still are paying the price that the producer paid to his workers to create the thing.
And those workers all need to buy food, buy TVs, buy smart phones, etc. If those products all cost more, then the workers need higher wages. If the workers need higher wages, then you need to raise your prices.
Products that have high prices will always lose to products that have lower prices (assuming they’re relatively similarly featured). If your country is tariffing goods that the country doesn’t make and that don’t need protection, you’re just making the country uncompetitive. You’re forcing yourself to make everything domestically, with fewer heads. Your people will have worse, more crude and more barebones products relative to the rest of the world.
If you’re at the bottom, tariffs let you build a foundation so that you can start moving it into the world and take a place at the table.
If you’re at the top, tariffs just push you down lower and make you weaker, poorer, and less capable.
This is true, but few countries are still so poor that they have hardly any paved roads — or see a need for big tariff walls. In addition to rich countries, all the countries in South America, and most in Africa, have signed onto the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which limits tariffs, and, unlike the U.S., they abide by the rules. Their tariff levels are almost always a fraction of Trump’s. Sometimes there is a small favored industry that gets big tariff protection. Dairy commonly gets protection. But big tariffs are, or I should say were, not general.
Another big issue is that tariffs are negotiated in complex long rounds of talks. Companies that are considering building factories thus know in advance what the tariff rules in coming years are likely to be. Because of Trump’s sudden and arbitrary change style, planning is impossible. There also is the possibility of Democrats regaining power and reversing what Trump did. So, there is no way to predict whether moving production from, say, China to Trump’s America, makes economic sense. Therefore, Trump’s chaotic tariffs rates will not bring back much industrial production.
Trump verbing about noun is bullshit. I 100% agree!
In fact it’ll do the opposite, by reducing demand for American products abroad and the ability of Americans to afford anything made inside the country.
This sort of merchantilism didn’t go out of fashion because capitalists and governments are a bunch of selfless altruists; it went out of fashion because it’s a bad idea. From even a purely self interested perspective. Trump is just incapable of admitting that since it’s contrary to his view of how the world works.
And trailing only slightly behind are knit women’s suits and non-knit men’s suits:
If that dumb sumbitch costs me my brand new non-knit Basotho suit, I’m gonna’ flip! 
[Yes to this being a way to armbar the rest of the world. Yes to this being very similar to “You know why those 42% of American’s don’t pay any Federal Income Tax? Cuz they’re poor.”]
That’s why we ‘only’ got lumbered with 10% tariffs.
The UK government is currently planning genuine reciprocal tariffs to be brought in if this isn’t reversed. Anyone know what products are imported from America, so I can avoid buying them?
It looks like such a gesture would put a serious cramp in your lifestyle:
United States exported $78.3B to United Kingdom. The main products that United States exported to United Kingdom were Crude Petroleum ($10.2B), Gold ($7.96B), and Gas Turbines ($5.32B).
My gas turbine budget was a bit low anyway. Who would it most annoy Trump to start buying oil from? Venezuela?
The US is exporting gold?!?
Minister Colbert, who was Louis XIV’s main minister of state, would be appalled! The whole point of mercantilism is that countries should never export their gold, but hoard it. Trump’s gotta get on that issue too, and shut down the gold trade.
That’s mercantilism 101!
It’s been done before:
Yes. If Trump had gone to Congress and said, “Take this math formula to calculate the trade deficit by nation, then let’s write a law to increase tariffs against those nations towards those targets at a rate to each the calculated target in 20 years.” Then that would actually have the effect that he (claims he) wanted. It would give the markets a chance to adjust to the legal and financial incentives and would, over time, probably produce some amount of change in the manufacturing world.
And then, at some point, we’d determine that nothing positive was happening and either hold things in place at that point or start shifting them the other way.
Whether you want to go down the cliff is one question. Maybe you should, and there’s a reasonable argument. Maybe you shouldn’t, and there’s also a reasonable argument. But, definitely, there’s no reason outside of stupidity or a desire to harm yourself that says you should jump off the cliff, rather than climb down with a rope and harness.
There is such a thing as choosing a good idea but doing it in the dumbest possible way. Lose weight? Good. Do it by only drinking celery water and snorting cocaine so you can dance all night? Not so good.
But that’s how Trump do.
The 47% tariff on Madagascar makes me wonder if Trump thinks this is literally where gas cars are made.
The Trump tariffs are a scam to fund his tax cuts to the 1% with a national sales tax which disproportionately impacts the bottom 50%, all while promising that bottom 50% that tariffs will bring them high paying jobs - 1950’s/1960’s steel mill type jobs rather than the Triangle Shirtwaist Company type jobs (dangerous sweatshops) that are the best-case scenario for jobs created by the tariffs.
Not taking a position yea or nay, but there is an asymmetry in cost of goods between countries so that while it may make since for one country to have tariffs it may not make since for their partner to have a similar tariff.
Or, someone mispronounced it “Mad At Gas Cars”, and he’s punishing them for being woke.