Schrodinger’s Tariffs:
You don’t know how much you’ll pay until you open the box.
Maybe Schrödinger explains why Trump “generously” reduced the amounts by half.
Yes indeed it is:
This is not going to end well for the idiot in charge:
Industry does not keep a lot of rare earth minerals on hand:
China produces over 90 per cent of some of the world’s most critical rare earth minerals such as yttrium, dysprosium and terbium, and the new export restrictions sever their supply lines to users around the globe.
Industry experts are concerned that if the export halt lasts longer than two months, it could deplete existing stockpiles of these minerals built up by customers.
China halts critical rare earth mineral exports as Trump teases new tariffs | The Independent
Magnets are also a critical component of a lot of production:
China also restricted exports of its magnets, which account for 90% of the global production.
Rare earth magnets currently make up a tiny share of China’s overall exports, so the controls would have a relatively smaller impact to China than its prominent trade partners.
China suspends rare earth, magnet exports – report - MINING.COM
US imposes tariffs of 3,521% (yes, that’s a comma, not a dot) on imports of solar panels from south east Asia:
“See?!? We TOLD YOU ‘Green energy’ didn’t make economic sense!”
This will pay for that “Golden Dome” missile shield in no time.
Trump’s second favourite set of wheels (after Cadillac One) is a golf cart. Why his golf carts are assembled in the United States, their components come from China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Turkey, and Europe.
How long until He decides that golf cart parts won’t be tariffed?
But I thought China, Taiwan, India, Malaysia, Turkey, and Europe were to pay the tariffs, so where’s the problem? His disastrous putting apart.
So there was a tariff deal announced today between the UK and the USA. I’m not smart enough to figure out the details, but on surface it looked like the Brits got the better end of the deal. Can somebody here prove me right or wrong?
And I just read that we have a trade surplus with the UK, so likely this agreement won’t mean shit to our bottom line. But, again, I’m not smart enough to figure that out.
Per Reuters:
U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Thursday announced a limited bilateral trade deal that leaves in place Trump’s 10% tariffs on British exports, modestly expands agricultural access for both countries and lowers prohibitive U.S. duties on British car exports.
You’d probably need to dig into the import/export breakdowns by product between the two countries but my take would be that it’s largely just rolling back the Trade War on the top-line items.
It’s sort of like USMCA. You screw things up, get things back to where they were before you got involved, and claim victory.
The proposed deals with the UK and China are objectively WORSE than the situation pre-Trump.
While I’m expecting that the courts will take down the tariffs, I’d expect that Trump would eventually start lopping off tariffs if it looked like they’re preventing him from maintaining power.
Why would courts do that? There is no law by which they could.
The executive does not and should not have power to set tariffs in the constitution. It’s only the some 1970s law that says the president can do it in emergencies. Courts just need to rule that this clearly isn’t what’s going on, and boom, they’ve stripped Trump of his power to lay tariffs.
Now, whether that would actually do anything is another question.
That’s an opinion (you should be very wary of a piece that literally tries to make a point by citing a definition from a 1755 dictionary) but it’s abundantly clear Congress’s decision to just let the executive do this is now the law. And they could take it back from him whenever they wanted to.
I have no illusion that the Supreme Court could go the other direction.
But, legal arguments being legal arguments, the judges are probably not entirely uninfluenced by the stock market and inflation, themselves, and there does need to be some point at which deference becomes a little too stretched.
If you can drop habeas corpus because of the Clear and Apparent National Emergency that the President’s favored baseball team might lose, and we need to arrest the best guy on the opposing team in a hurry, then there’s basically no habeas corpus. National Emergencies do need to be actual emergencies.
I mean, obviously I agree.
WRT tariffs, the problem is that it’s Congress’s job to do something, but they won’t. They don’t seem to really care.
A Constitution isn’t really what’s written. A Constitution is a common agreement that what’s written matters.