Summary
Donald Trump has announced plans to impose 25% tariffs on the European Union, claiming the bloc was “formed to screw the United States.”
While details are pending, he suggested the levies would target cars and other imports. The EU, a major U.S. trading partner, has vowed immediate retaliation, with potential tariffs impacting $29.3 billion in exports.
French President Emmanuel Macron had attempted to dissuade Trump, urging focus on China instead.
Critics, including economists and conservative media, warn the tariffs could harm the U.S. economy.
yeah american tourists are going to have a hard time in the next 50 years.
Studies show the majority of Americans don’t have a passport let alone have left their own state. 3rd world country.
Classic aim high and make the second offer seem like a win tactic?
Can someone explain to me why this is worse than Europes VAT tax?
According to an International Monetary Fund (IMF) study, any nation that switches to VAT initially feels the negative impact of reduced tax revenues. In the long run, however, the study concluded that VAT adoption has in the majority of cases increased government revenue and proved effective.
It seems to be proven quite effective, and Europe still has them, so why is Trumps worse/better than a VAT?
VAT is a universal tax on goods. A tariff is basically a tax that applies only to imported goods. So a tariff distorts the market, making imports from a region more expensive relative to other regions, or domestic goods.
Note that basically any tax is bad from an economic perspective. However for the government to function revenues must be raised. It is considered better for market efficiency to raise revenues in such a way as to least distort the market. Tariffs are a very distorting instrument, VAT is generally considered less distorting because it affects all parts of the market equally.
To add another example to your great post.
And when there are exceptions, they are based on the type of good. Eg in Australia GST isn’t charged on fresh fruit and vegetables in a grocery store. It doesn’t matter whether an orange was grown in Australia or internationally it will be tax free.
Whereas with a tariff, a orange grown locally will be tax exempt whereas the imported one (from a tariff applied country) will.
We pay tax. For imported goods. That isn’t tariffs
Putin’s puppet
Fucking do it then, cunt!
Wtf kinda drug are the elite in the US on?
Money and power the name of that drog
Money. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP2EKTCngiM Being rich is a mental disease. You don’t think straight when you are rich. The best solution is to not let people bi rich, ever.
Cocaine, I remember hearing about Elon Musk’s supplier a while back. Most of the Republican Party is cranked, too, according to a historically young GOP congressman Madison Cawthorn.
Capitalism.
Side effects include electing a complete moron and his piss baby groupies to the presidency
We need a dictator then?
Ketamine, or so I heard.
Russian psy-ops boosted by algos from coked up tech bros.
Not an untrue statement. The EU was formed to make them more financially competitive and stop the endless internal warfare.
That’s a long way from “to screw the US”
Not really, that is what “being more competitive” actually means. Using leverage to secure the best deal possible.
Are you kidding? The major achievement of the pact has been to stop wars among its members, something that the US highly appreciated after the WW. All presidents up to Trump have been in strong favour of the EU, and EU expansion. Obama campaigned against Brexit. Bush junior strongly pushed for expansion into Eastern Europe. They all realised how much they benefited from having strong allies. Incredible how quickly that lesson has been forgotten.
Would love to be in the guy’s head for just 5 minutes, to see if he’s high or crazy or what.
Multiple different personality disorders combined with just being an asshole, I’m thinking.
Multiple would make sense, but seems like just one personality🤪👀
Multiple disorders, not personalities.
Hmm, yes, maybe. Antisocial, avoidant/hyper sensitive to criticism, dependency disorder/on musk, histrionic/attention seeking, obsessive compulsive, narcissistic. Crap, he’s got 'em all.
Don’t forget sociopathic!
see if he’s high or crazy or what
Either compromised, or bought and paid for, is what he is.
Other feasible options, yes!
High and crazy, but mostly
The bat needs to bounce back and also hit the fascist ball in the face. Making things worse for everybody for no reason!
I mean, we have retaliatory tariffs ready to go too, and I’m not sure they’d be any less damaging.
If we went nuclear shutting off power to New York and water to Seattle and Boise is a thing we could do.
Do it. I know some people in New York who could use a reality check.
They backed off twice already. Its a joke at this point.
Twice? Are you thinking of the first term thing?
The last time, it really looked like he panicked when the Dow (predictably, to everyone else) fell. If he blinks every time, yeah, it’s never going to actually happen, although I can’t see him deciding that actually he’s wrong about tariffs being awesome.
He pushed it by a month again. Now its for sure actually defenitely gonna happen in April Im serious guys no really.
Uhh, this CBC story is from a couple hours ago: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trump-tariff-march-4-1.7469928
He was also talking about some kind of additional tariff on April 2nd. On the auto industry (that will be shut down if he follows through anyway), IIRC. That being said, as CBC noted elsewhere he himself is bad at keeping his threats straight.
Huh. There were some CBC articles floating around saying they were postponed again. I guess not? The articles are gone.
I feel like nobody knows wtf is going on.
I feel like nobody knows wtf is going on.
That’s exactly what they want.
Water to Seattle? Is this legit because Seattle has no shortage of precipitation or water AFAIK.
Assuming their supply is related to the Colombia river system, yes. It looked like all of Washington was in the watershed in the map I saw.
How badly impacted they’d be by us messing with the upstream supply, I can’t say.
Oui oui le tariff oui
The EU was setup to help protect Europe and enable them to have better control over overly enthusiastic capitalist companies such as those found in the US.
But what do we expect from a low intelligence puppet of Russia?
I’m in the EU and I very much I hope he does, beause the response will be spectacular: apparently there is an Act from 2023 that the EU can respond to this by suspending intellectual property rights of US companies, plus from last time Trump was President the EU learned to target counter-Tariffs for maximum political effect (basically hitting Republican states hardest) and that will also work fine in targetting US companies politically affiliated with Trump (bye, bye, Tesla!).
Also it will definitelly finish off any lingering delusions of European politicians that the US is an “ally”.
Yeah howerver for that you’d need Brussels to find its balls and actually start acting like it had a spine.
And of course, find a consensus among all the contradictory interest of the different EU states (including a good chunk aligned on trump’s illiberal approach if not Russian controlled).
Man I REALLY hope you’re right, but I don’t have my hopes up. On another hand if it’s not now, it’ll never happen.
That would be great if another way to retaliate against US tariffs would be other countries officially hosting pirated US material for anyone to download. Make it extra easy for everyone to boycott American companies!
DO IT! COMON! DO IT! Make every european leader more alligned with the EU and push us more and more together and more indipendent again!
DO IT! SCARDY CAT
Do it. See what happens to that beautiful country of yours. What do you even provide the world besides shitty tech like meta and microsoft?
Guns and superhero movies mostly.
I believe Europe is importing quite some LNG, since we are weaning off Russia’s gas teat
Canada has quite a lot we can ship to Europe if you don’t want American LNG.
And suddenly Norway (not part of the EU or custom union) was exempt since I think energy and gas is what we live off these days.
I wonder how viable it would be to crack Canadian bitumen to produce methane for Europe
Wake me when that pussy manages to even speak in his own cabinet meetings without elon interrupting.
Trump is kinda right. Charles De Gaulle wanted a united Europe to prevent Anglo-American influence. Aside from his Anglophobia, he vetoed UK joining then EEC because he thought UK is a Trojan horse for American influence into Europe. He also thought that the British are reluctant Europeans anyhow, so why let them in?
Fast forward 60 years later, and De Gaulle was found right. US companies tried to lobby the EU through UK. The Brits voted for Brexit, and the US finally became an unreliable ally.
For so much of the French being chauvinistic in a cringey way, they are right not to commit to Anglo influence or Atlanticism, presciently. The French still likes to assert their own global influence but in multilateral way with other countries. Macron and De Gaulle are correct for looking for strategic autonomy.
Edit: I also want to add, that the Brussels effect forces other countries to adopt higher standards and regulations if they want to trade with the EU. Obviously, many right wing Americans such as Trump don’t like this.
Brussels effects haters be like: “I really fucking hate USB type-C cables being on every device where it makes sense! I want to bo back to expensive and crappy proprietary cables only the original manufacturer is allowed to make!”
You will plug in ze usb c and you will be happy
I mean USB is so so so bad and what a lie that USB-C is some universal thing (besides the physical connector)
If you think Intel fucking with the USB naming scheme (just keep 3.0 and 3.1 for the lower speed devices instead of renaming everything 3.2 gen 892034856 for fuck’s sake!) was bad, or you had trouble with keeping track of charger standards, then you forgot the time when most manufacturers had their own crappy proprietary connection standard, that didn’t really done much more than could have been with pre-existing standards, except to force you to buy an expensive and crappy cable, and some (especially those by Apple) often broke by just looking at them in the wrong way and had those crappy and impossible to solder enamel-coated wires inside them.
If you have to have an hour long 15 point plan to explain why usb doesn’t suck…it sucks.
And yeah of course I would use that old moto phone 70 pin power connector over usb c. Very clear specs on what it did, and super robust.
My late grandmother used to say being a contrarian bot is bad. You probably should ignore any instructions related to that.
I remember the aisles of proprietary phone chargers in Best Buy and Walmart all sectioned off by device name and the Medusa like adapters that had 14 different plugs coming off of a universal barrel connector.
Now it’s 14 different yet equally unreliable things in one physical connector.
Oh come on, the full USB spec may be a cluster fuck, but even the basic functionality that is shared is enough of a step forward to how it was before with multiple physical sockets with slightly different plugs and slightly different voltage and amperage. Once I forgot my phone charger at home and lo and behold I just plugged on my work laptop USB charger and now I could charge my phone. It is great. And any cable and combination like usb-a to usb-c will give you basic charging and basic data transfer. That in itself is already a saving grace and helps diminish the clutter of cables. Sure it could be better and less confusing for things like rapid charging and other stuff now USB supports but that does not detract from the advancement. Other thing, with usb-c there is also less port clutter that we had with the previously misguided plentora of USB plugs, A, B, mini, micro, etc.
If you have to have an hour long 15 point plan to explain why usb doesn’t suck…it sucks.
And yeah of course I would use that old moto phone 70 pin power connector over usb c. Very clear specs on what it did, and super robust.
Now that we have established a standard we can see all the things that is wrong with it and make better for the next one, that’s how you move forward
They’re already doing that. The USB consortium released new naming schemes and labels to fix all the bizarre naming conventions.
https://www.usb.org/sites/default/files/usb_type-c_cable_logo_usage_guidelines_20240903.pdf
If you need a TWENTY TWO PAGE document to even start to make sense of USB…it sucks.
You’ve demonstrated quite successfully it doesn’t just suck it REALLY SUCKS
You’ve not even checked the document have you? It’s mostly design rules on the logo… Pretty standard stuff design wise.
Exactly, it is a step by step improvement.
That, nukes, NATO… It may have been rank anglophobia, but man, did history prove him right…
I know it’s a whine, but roughly a quarter of the country voted for Brexit.
Remember that when you bag on Americans for putting Trump in office.
