Among the reciprocal tariff levels Trump announced:
China: 34%
European Union: 20%
South Korea: 25%
India: 26%
Vietnam: 46%
Taiwan: 32%
Japan: 24%
Thailand: 36%
Switzerland: 31%
Indonesia: 32%
Malaysia: 24%
Cambodia: 49%
United Kingdom: 10%
Rest of the world: 10%
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 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
Edit: After making fun of Trump for not understanding the enconomy, I went and conflated per capita GDP with GDP. Doh! Now corrected.
Uh, we have absolutely not been the wealthiest country by per capita GDP that whole time. We have been the wealthiest country by GDP
Yeah, you’re right. Sorry! Although US have definitely been one of the highest GDP per capita for that time (but like you pointed out, not the top which is what I original said)
Why does he think tariffs are equal to trade deficits?
Run headfirst into a brick wall a dozen times and then maybe you will start to understand
Putting on my best swiss cheese brain, maybe they are treating it ‘like a business’ and trying to do debt to income ratio? So our deficit is the debt then they look at tariffs on the imported goods as the income.
Do you know if this holds for other countries too?
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.
Absolutely, but if one has no idea what they are talking about, they might massive brain worms about the US debt and it being caused by our budget deficit. Then they look at all these other countries and learn about the ‘deficit’ we have with them and that’s the same word, same thing, ezpz. Now you simple get a solid 50% debt to income ratio by dividing the two and cutting it in half, check mate economists.
That’s a really good explanation, there’s no realistic way to make your money back from McDonald’s
Thanks for the explanation! It is unbelievable that these are the folks with nuclear codes.
Thank you for the reference, I scrolled to the bottom to check if you were copypasta-ing us before going back and reading it. We just all live in Crazytown now I guess.