White House used

Washington-President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the new very high taxes on imported goods would be “reciprocal”, which means that they were the recovery of the rates that other countries have slapped to US exports.

But reciprocal tariffs were not based on real levies imposed by other countries. Instead, they are based on a formula formed by the White House, and widely mocked by experts.

Douglas Holtz-Eeakin, a conservative economist American Action Forum and former director of the Congress Budget Office, described it “Professional negligence“In response to another conservative economist who called him”embarrassing. ”

The formula, which resulted in very different tariff qualified The percentage rate of tariffs coincided with the commercial surpluses of other countries with the US. Divided by their exports. Journalist James Surowiecki also noticed the correlation.

“They didn’t really calculate tariff rates + non -tariff barriers, as they say they did,” Surowiecki wrote. “On the other hand, for each country, they simply took our commercial deficit with that country and divided it by exports from the country to us.”

In other words, supposedly reciprocal tariffs, which are supposed to fight arbitrary foreign barriers for US assets, are based on an arbitrary formula.

In an X answer, the website previously known as Twitter, the White House spokesman, Kush Desai, called the “incorrect” analysis and pointed out a Most complete explanation of the formula Of the commercial representative of the United States, who affirmed that the “non -tariff policies” of other countries make more assets sell to the United States than we sell them.

“If commercial deficits are persistent due to the policies and foundations of rates and non -tariffs, then the rate consistent rate with the compensation of these policies and the foundations is reciprocal and fair,” said the USTR on its website, which included a seemingly more complicated mathematical equation and several academic quotes.

Ustr

Alan Cole, an economist from the Fiscal Foundation, said he suspected that he really did not understand the equation.

“Then they thought: ‘Our thing is more complicated and more intelligent than that. It has more elegant Greek lyrics. It cannot be a very, very simple division,'” Cole told News. “After canceling it, it is the same formula.”

Even so, Trump has long affirmed that commercial deficits are inherently evil, and it could be said that the formula reflects its zero sum vision on global trade, in which US consumers are being cheated if they spend more in products from abroad than people in foreign countries spending on goods made in the United States.

“Our country has been looted, looted, raped and looted by nearby and distant nations, both friends and enemies,” Trump said Wednesday.

Trump has talked about the use of tariffs as leverage against Canada, Mexico and China to stop the flow of fentanyl in the United States, and has said that the United States would be better if Americans did more of their own products. He also said that tariffs should be a more significant source of income for the United States government.

Cole said that the United States buys many consumer goods that are made more economically in other countries and that outgoing dollars are often reinvested in US companies and government debt, instead of simply accumulated by foreigners. He questioned the wisdom of trying to fly the global order by making it more expensive for Americans to buy clothes and electronics made in Indonesia, for example.

“The United States is this center for all types of investment, and people love our financial assets, and they have to give us goods in return, and that is how the world has been working for a long time, and that is why we have administered a commercial deficit,” he said. “Why should Americans be sewing shirts, for example, a large fraction of these rates are based on bilateral commercial imbalances with Southeast Asia, where they are good for textiles.”

Since rates are paid by US importers who can increase prices to recover all or part of the cost of tariffs, the announcement of this week’s “Liberation Day” announcement could be equivalent to the greatest increase in taxes in US consumers in decades. At the same time, economists have said that tariffs could increase prices inflation and slow economic growth, potentially even throwing it reverse and causing a recession.

“This has to be one of the biggest economic policy errors in the history of the United States.” wrote David Beckworth, economist at Mercatus Center, a group of experts.

The liberal economist winner of the Nobel Prize, Paul Krugman, described the crudeness of the “reciprocal” impressive “rates.

“When the destiny of the world economy is at stake wrote. “How can someone, whether businessmen or foreign governments, trust anything that comes out of an administration that behaves like this?”

Another explanation for tariffs is that Trump is simply using a power that Congress has delegated to the White House and no one can stop it.

“Tariffs are a tool enjoyed by the president because it is personal power,” representative Ryan Zinke (R-Mont.) Told News this week who served as Secretary of the Interior during the first Trump administration. “It’s personal, you don’t have to go through Congress. You can exercise personal power.”