When he announced the imposition of trade tariffs on nearly every country in the world, Donald Trump claimed that he was doing so out of economic necessity, and many of his top aides on the issue echoed those remarks, suggesting that mathematical formulas had been used to calculate the level of tariffs on each nation the United States does business with.
Now, however, it appears those formulas were badly flawed on a very basic level, and top administration officials are trying to distance themselves from them.
The “bad math” was examined in greater detail this morning on CNN, with host John Berman exclaiming, “This is going to blow your mind here!”
Berman then introduced two economists from the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Dr. Stan Veuger and Dr. Kevin Corinth.
Veuger told Berman the administration “picked the wrong number” in conjunction with a Greek symbol “to make their approach look a little more sophisticated.” The end result: Tariffs “four times bigger” than if the correct number had been used.
“I don’t think much of the approach makes sense, even conceptually,” Veuger said. “But if we’re going to take their approach seriously, if we’re going to say, ‘We’re going to base our tariffs, our entire international trading system, on this formula,’ they have to put in the right numbers and do the calculation correctly.”
“Have you taken this to them? Have they acknowledged that they have a bum number in here?” Berman asked.
“They have not disagreed with us on the substance,” Veuger replied. “In fact, what we’ve seen is that senior members of the administration — Steve Miran, yesterday, who’s the chairman of the council of economic advisers, Scott Bessent this morning, who is the treasury secretary — they have both said, ‘We had nothing to do with this formula. That was other people in the administration.’
“Normally, if you’re convinced of the accuracy, the wisdom of your policies, you do not point fingers at other people in the administration and say, ‘They came up with this, we did not.'”
“It’s important to point out that we’re talking about corrected tariffs. These are not the correct tariffs; we’re just saying if you apply their formula correctly, they should have been a fourth as high as what they’re saying they should be. But we are not at all endorsing this approach…To say that we should only base these tariffs on the trade deficit is just bad economics,” Corinth noted in agreement with Veuger.
We have idiots running this country. Is it any wonder everything is so screwed up?
