I honestly have no idea, maybe? Deficit isn’t really debt though, it just means you bought more than you sold. The US isn’t in debt to Cambodia any more than you’re in debt with McDonald’s. They just have a one way buy/sell relationship.
I think you’re kind of being unfairly downvoted because it’s definitely underappreciated how much tariffs are used in modern trade deals.
Putting selective import tariffs on certain goods (like say car manufacturing) might be a wise move if you want to encourage the US to develop a manufacturing base. It’s worth noting that the US, and most other countries have been doing this selectively for years.
This is reeeaally far from the tariffs that have actually been anounced though, which are the highest rate the US has had in around 100 years, and applied pretty indescriminately. There are some goods that the US just can’t produce itself (like certain rare earth minerals that aren’t in the USA) but even worse, because of the insane logic of applying them to countries as they have been done, it opens up this type of event:
Even option one is bad, because Apple might sell laptops internally, but the newly increased price makes them super uncompetitive with rival firms overseas, so it might still lead to a loss in overall jobs for US workers.
I’m not pretending this doesn’t suck - but US based international companies like Apple have a clear incentive to just forgoe the US as much as possible now. This kind of risk is why countries have traditionally been very conservative with changing tariffs.
I think you’re probably right that there might be an argument for countries to be less conservative than they have been, but the US government just cranked up the dial from 0 to 11 and we’re all about to find out what that might look like in real time.
In case anyones looking at this and asking question like “Why has Cambodia been dunked with 49% when they’re clearly not a competitor to the US” or “Why is Trump claiming that the European Union has a 40% tariff on the US when the actual mean tariff on US goods into the EU is less than 5%”, here’s your answer to how these figures have been calculated.
The “reason” behind this is that Trump seems to think trade deficits are really bad, which is bad news for the US because it’s had a trade deficit for the last 50 years. We’ll ignore the fact that based on per capita GDP it’s been the wealthiest country in the world for that time though.
Anyway, just to give everyone an idea of how completely, utterly unrelated to anything meaningful that figure is, let’s take Cambodia. The country is very poor compared to the US so can’t afford to buy anything that the US manufacters (Cambodians aren’t driving round in Teslas or IMessaging each other). Some US companies use it for clothing manufacture because labour is cheap in Cambodia (see the previous bit about Cambodia being much poorer than the US). This means that Cambodia imports close to nothing from the US compared to what it exports, giving it a close to 100% trade deficit, so we wind up with a 49% tariff on Cambodia.
I genuinely don’t understand the mindset that looks at the US’s explotation of cheap labour in Cambodia and interprets the US as the victim in that relationship, but hey-ho maybe I’m just not biggly-smart enough to understand the 4d chess moves at play here. . .
Reference (because unfortunately none of what I said was made up and that geniunely is the calculation): https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/trumps-idiotic-and-flawed-tariff-calculations-stun-economists
There’s technically no upper limit, why not make it 10000% and really see what happens!
Yeah, I think that’s one of the scariest things. Previous presidents have done a lot of terrible things, but there’s always been a basic rhetoric of morality- at oeast a pretence that official policy us “the right thing”.
The US’s latest bunch of clown have openly hateful and dishonest language, without any sense of shame. I don’t even think we’ve seen the beginning of the level of cruelty a country can achieve when it suddenly abandons any rule of law or accountability.
I’m not very knowledgable on Canadian politics, but agriculture is a sizable part of their GDP[1], seems like a fair enough view to value the jobs and industry it provides over having lower priced dairy?
More importantly, it seems like a choice that’s down to the voters of Canada, and if the USA doesn’t like it, they should negotiate to find something that worksfor both countries, rather than trying to use their economic heft into bullying the world.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/594293/gross-domestic-product-of-canada-by-industry-monthly/
I think this is how Trump phrases it. In reality almost all countries have tariffs of some kind to protect key industries. Trump’s demands/bullying/tarrif-mania normally amounts to him wanting specific tarrifs removed to benefit the US.
Ok, one last question, but can you expand on why you think taxation makes markets less effective? I’m not sure I understand why this should be a given?
I live in the UK, and VAT is applied to some but not all goods. It doesn’t seem to me clear at all that, say, cakes (not taxed) exist in a more competitive environment than say, biscuits (taxed)?
You say we do not need the rich to finance things, however, planned economics are less efficient than market economics because central management of such a complicated structure is very difficult.
I’d question this one a lot- I agree central planning is bad for a lot of things, but it’s great for infrastructure like roads, water supply, transport etc. I think this bears out in the evidence as well- the USA has suprisingly poor water supply, education and rail transport, despite by some measures being the wealthiest country in the world. Compare this to infrastructure standards on Europe or China.
We could probably argue all day and longer on this, but please at least consider wealthy high taxation countries in Europe as a counter example. At the very least, I think they show a successful alternative to low taxation economies.
I’m guessing you expected the downvotes to be fair, but I’d try and actually engage with what you said, since you clearly took the time to think it through and express it well.
What you’re suggesting (that the wealthy classes play an important role in wealth distribution, that’s hampered by tax) is pejoratively referred to as “trickle down economics”[0] and slightly less critically referred to as “supply side economics”[1].
You might want to reduce taxes on the wealthy for some other reason, but the idea that it helps the economy is very poorly evidenced, and there’s quote a lot of evidence to the contrary.
It also seems to miss the fact that a lot of poor countries (take Nigeria[2]) have very low taxation, and many very wealthy countries (take Sweden[3]) have very high taxation.
My two cents are that, sure the rich might spend some money on things that benefit everyone, but it’s probably a lot less than the amount of infrastructure development taxation can fund.
There’s obviously complexities, but the idea that “people will just move” doesn’t seem to happen in reality. I’d also say that, excluding perhaps billionaires, being moderately wealthy in a equitable society with good healthcare, transport, roads, etc, is a lot more desirable than being more wealthy in a society with less of those things. But I guess that’s just my take, I don’t have any evidence for it.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics
[2] https://taxsummaries.pwc.com/nigeria/individual/taxes-on-personal-income
Key thing to bear in mind is that we think of “chicken” as a single animal, but industrial farming has selectively bred chickens into very different camps.
Meat chickens grow very big very quickly, and are killed for meat long before adulthood. You’d need to pause production a long enough time for them to grow into adulthood, then they would eventually lay eggs, but at a much slower rate than egg chickens, and requiring a lot more food (because of how big they are)
Oh awesome! I saw their website just describes them as “source accessible” and that github didn’t detect a license type and (wrongly) took that to mean it was an “open core but not really open source” product.
Was about to point you to MatterMost but saw it’s not open source, doh! Anyone know if it was and switched? Or was it always closed source?
Edit: Turns out it was and still is open source, I just apparently suck at researching.
This is just an awesome list- thanks!
I agree, but I also sort of think that’s fair enough. The fact that most people “buying” ebooks don’t understand what their transaction implies suggests a major market failing.
I use Cosmic and really like it- have used i3, Awesome and Gnome in the past for a while too, I really likes them.
The most time I spent with a set up was Awesome + rofi, which I really enjoyed. I customised literally everything and spent hours tweaking stuff.
That was super fun, but in all honesty my workflow is more or less:
Honestly, all the tweaking is fun for me, but with my workflow I have like 0 requirements for anything fancy. Daily driving cosmic is going nicely for now, and seems to mostly get out of my way.
I’ve heard this said a lot, and I’m not necessarily doubting its true, but what’s the reason behind the richest country in the world not being able to build good public transport? Large countries like China yave good public transport, and the continent of Europe has great trains- is it just the USA’s size combined with its lack of public infrastructure in general?
I find this whole “it’s not milk if it’s not dairy” argument really hard to take in good faith.
I’m not an expert at all, but when I’ve heard people talk about these kind of decisions, it sounds like it’s normally meant to come down to consumer benefits.
Who’s gaining here (aside from dairy lobbies)? I don’t think there’s any reasonable argument that UK citizens are confused by the term “oat milk”, and buying it because they were tricked into thinking it was a dairy product.
Later on, George swipes when she shows a picture to get even, finds out she supports the wrong baseball team, and spends the rest of the episode trying to break up with her without revealing whybecause she’d find out that he swiped.
Go Grey Socks!
Seriously though, this probably won’t affect billionaires because companies like Nike can move most of their operations overseas and avoid paying tariffs during their manufacturing process, and then just pass the cost of to US consumers when they sell to that market.
Even worse, when Trump put tariffs on washing machines (which Biden kept in place) one effect was that US made washing machines (not paying tariffs) jacked up their prices for US consumers simply because there was less competition.
It truly is a sucky world for non-billinaires.