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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   33443 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 31, 2025

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Trump tariffs McDonald's:

BBC article for a more detailed overview.

Highlights or lowlights include:

  1. 32% tariffs on Taiwan, though I'm told that they thankfully exclude semiconductors.
  2. 46% on Vietnam and 49% on Cambodia, so gg to companies encouraged to diversify outside of China.
  3. 10% tariffs (the absolute floor, or Trump's idea of a sweetheart deal) on such interesting nations as Tuvalu (with that sweet sweet .tv license) and the Heard and McDonald islands, which are uninhabited.
  4. Some quite seriously speculating that the entire policy was AI generated. https://x.com/krishnanrohit/status/1907587352157106292 :

This might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.. 4o, o3 high, Gemini 2.5 pro, Claude 3.7, Grok all give the same answer to the question on how to impose tariffs easily.

  1. Others note the resemblance to the common ReLU function in ML, but the gist of it is a hamfisted approach that is setting tariffs off the equation trade deficits/imports, despite denial by the administration (or at least the Deputy White House Press Secretary), who presented an equation that literally says that but prettied up.

I'm not an economist, but I don't think it's a good idea to throw out tariffs with such clear absence of rigor. The only saving grace is that Trump is fickle, so if enough people yell at him from his in-group, he might pivot in a week. If not, bloody hell.

I like that Trump did a lot to stop wokism as a political force but at this point I have no idea what he's doing, lol. I don't know much about economics, but two things seem clear to me:

  1. Tariffs as a partial replacement for taxes might be cool, but keeping the existing US tax system in place and adding tariffs on top of that is basically just a massive tax increase on the average American.

  2. The only ways I can think of for the tariffs to help the US as a whole is to help US companies be competitive and to advance national security. However, I notice that Trump's administration is doing nothing to address housing shortages. And bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US isn't really going to help people if housing is still extremely expensive. As for national security, I'd much rather address it through diplomacy with China, not by falling into the Thucydides trap and mind-fucking yourself, out of a sense of fear of being overtaken as the world's superpower, that a war with China is inevitable, which could unfortunately prove to be a self-fulfilling assumption.

Speaking of helping the US as a whole... of course, I have no reason to believe that this is actually Trump's motivation. He could well just be aiming to help his own supporters. But even then, I don't really see how the tariffs do that. It plays well with some unions and will help consolidate union votes for Trump, but it also seems to have a pretty high chance of economically screwing over a bunch of people, including actual and potential Trump voters.

Edit: After thinking about it some more, I guess the answer that makes sense to me is that Trump is bluffing and trying to get other countries to drop their tariffs on US goods.

Tariffs and trade deficits are the one thing he's been banging on about consistently since the 1980s. Seems pretty inevitable that he was going to try something to do with them.

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