America launches the trade war with penguins, not Putin

Donald Trump’s obsession for prices has taken a dark turn, which could be comic gold if it was not about to cost the Americans so much hard money.

Namely: Trump places prices on countries around the world – including even the remote antarctic islands inhabited only by the Penguins – while exempting the Russian regime of Vladimir Putin.

During his so-called “Liberation Day” ceremony at Rose Garden, Trump unveiled a plan to impose new prices-that is to say taxes paid by American consumers-on imported products.

The new prices range from a base line of 10% to a maximum of 50% on goods imported from Lesotho and 49% on the goods of Cambodia. Americans will pay a new price of 34% on products from China and 20% on European Union goods, as well as a surprising rate of 17% deducted from imports from American Israel.

During his ceremony, Trump said that these new taxes were “reciprocal rates” – alleging that he simply responds to prices and other commercial barriers already imposed on American goods exported to foreign countries.

But the percentage of percentage of “price” that Trump presented (on a large table which he has embraced by the wind time in April) presents no direct relationship with the real rates that these countries take. Instead, economic scribes trying to remove the figures from the White House theorize that they represent the trade deficit of each country with the United States, divided by the value of exports from this country to the United States-a metric that the measurement that metrics Atlantic The contributor James Surowiecki called “extraordinary nonsense”.

Even more strange, Trump announced the imposition of a significant price on the uninhabited Australian territory heard and the McDonald Islands – an outpost far from penguins and other antarctic wild animals. Trump also has a tariff the territory of the island of the Indian Ocean of Diego Garcia, housing a military installation jointly led by the United States and the United Kingdom. At the same time, Trump does not take new prices from Russia, nor would have been in Cuba, Belarus or North Korea. (The White House told Notus that trade was already actually zero with Russia due to sanctions; but such logic did not prevent Trump from imposing a new price of 10% on Iran.)

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Michigan University economist Justin Wolfers believes that Trump’s prices will work as a new stable tax on American consumers, which costs average household around $ 5,000 per year. In an article on Bluesky, the Wolfers described the new diet in an unhappiness in: “Monstrously destructive, inconsistent and poorly informed prices based on manufacturing, imagined wrongs, discredited theories and ignorance of decades of evidence.” The “real tragedy”, added Wolfers, is that the prices “harm the Americans who work more than anyone”.

Trump called his new prices “a declaration of economic independence” and allegedly allegedly led to greater American prosperity. The markets, however, react with a shock during the instigation by Trump of a volatile world trade war, immediately losing thousands of billions of billions, the S&P 500 plunging more than 3% in the exchanges after working hours.

The general taxation of trade barriers by Trump marks the overthrow of an ideology of free trade pursued with an almost religious zeal by the Republican Party during the latest generation. The Fitch Ratings agency calculates that Trump increases the actual American rate rate from 2.5% to 22%.

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“This changes the game, not only for the American economy, but for the world economy,” said the US economic research chief of the Oli Sonola agency. “Many countries will probably be found in a recession. You can throw most of the forecasts at the door, if this rate rate remains in progress for a long time. ”

Although Broad, Trump’s tariff power is not absolute and limited by the legislative branch. In other words, the Congress managed by the GOP could end this madness at any time. If only he had a spine.