This Needs Fixin'

Well, that was a thing.

A very, very stupid thing.

So, the new Trump tariff announcement happened.

Set aside the fact that tariffs are a tax paid by purchasers of imported goods, and not (as Trump and his enablers inexplicably seem to believe) a fee for importing goods that’s paid by the country they’re imported from.

Seriously, set that aside, ’cause it gets way stupider from here.

In short, what they’re doing is taking the U.S.’ trade deficit with various countries (though not, of course, Russia or Belarus) and running it through some grade-school math to calculate a tariff rate to place on goods imported from each country.

It’s a … novel? … approach.

There are links to the folks who figured this out in the brief commentary at However dumb you think the Trump taxes are, they’re dumber, from the Lawyers, Guns & Money blog.

This is not how any of this works.

At least, it wasn’t how anything worked in what we all used to think was the real world.

But here in fantasyland, apparently, that’s how things work now?

Oh, right: I promised you even more stupid than that.

The truly epic levels of stupid here are in where the Trumpians seem to have gotten the notion that this was a good idea.

I saw this on Bluesky via Mastodon yesterday, but The Verge has written it up so I’ll just link to their piece on it.

They probably got it from an LLM.

So, this is the world we live in now:

• senile maniac gets elected by one of the smallest margins in modern history, with less than 50% of the actual votes
• said maniac’s party also gets control of Congress, through manipulation of electoral district boundaries and a few quirks of history and demographics, after having received only 50.6% of the actual votes
• so, clearly, they have a historic mandate for drastic change; the fact that it’s historically small seems to have gone unnoticed
• this party’s primary funder is let loose on the federal government org chart to, as he says, “[feed it] into a wood chipper”
• and now the maniac’s affiliate lunatics asked a gussied-up auto-complete what to do about trade deficits, because for some reason they’re obsessed with them, probably because the don’t have any experience outside of simple business math, and also they believe LLMs are magic
• which results in the U.S. putting tariffs on “imports” from islands with no actual residents
• oh, and also on countries we’ve been friendly with for all of living memory
• in fact, let’s just put them on everyone except the countries we’ve been funding a war against

And also threatening [something?] if all the other countries do the obvious thing in response and put tariffs on imports from the U.S.; [something?] presumably being raising these new AI-enhanced tariffs, but who the hell knows with these people.

In case you were wondering why your 401(k) has tanked this morning and everything (yes, even eggs) costs more now.

So, with Musk’s coup disassembling our domestic institutions and an inexplicable cadre of actual fascists running our national police and Trump’s big-brained policy whizzes tearing up our foreign relations and someone with a ChatGPT account wrecking our economy, what’s left?

Maybe watch for changes in your local police department? And keep a wary eye on your nearest military base?

And plant a much bigger garden this year.

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