Trump didn’t even apply his own AI-incel formula correctly
By 
The attempts to sanewash the Trump taxes Paul mentions below notwithstanding, “no matter how dumb you think this is it’s dumber” remains undefeated as a Trump explanation heuristic:
The formula for the tariffs, originally credited to the Council of Economic Advisers and published by the Office of the United States Trade Representative, does not make economic sense. The trade deficit with a given country is not determined only by tariffs and non-tariff trade barriers, but also by international capital flows, supply chains, comparative advantage, geography, etc.
But even if one were to take the Trump Administration’s tariff formula seriously, it makes an error that inflates the tariffs assumed to be levied by foreign countries four-fold. As a result, the “reciprocal” tariffs imposed by President Trump are highly inflated as well.
Though in effect the formula for the tariff placed on the United States by another country is equal to the trade deficit divided by imports, the formula published by the Office of the US Trade Representative has two additional terms in the denominator that just so happen to cancel out: (1) the elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices, ε, and (2) the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs, φ.
he idea is that as tariffs rise, the change in the trade deficit will depend on the responsiveness of import demand to tariffs, which depends on how import demand responds to import prices and how import prices respond to tariffs. The Trump Administration assumes an elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices of four, and an elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs of 0.25, the product of which is one and is the reason they cancel out in the Administration’s formula.
However, the elasticity of import prices with respect to tariffs should be about one (actually 0.945), not 0.25 as the Trump Administration states. Their mistake is that they base the elasticity on the response of retail prices to tariffs, as opposed to import prices as they should have done. The article they cite by Alberto Cavallo and his coauthors makes this distinction clear. The authors state that “tariffs [are] passed through almost fully to US import prices,” while finding “more mixed evidence regarding retail price increases.” It is inconsistent to multiply the elasticity of import demand with respect to import prices by the elasticity of retail prices with respect to tariffs.
Correcting the Trump Administration’s error would reduce the tariffs assumed to be applied by each country to the United States to about a fourth of their stated level, and as a result, cut the tariffs announced by President Trump on Wednesday by the same fraction, subject to the 10 percent tariff floor. As shown in Table 1, the tariff rate would not exceed 14 percent for any country. For all but a few countries, the tariff would be exactly 10 percent, the floor imposed by the Trump Administration.
Whoopsie! Well, it’s not this is a mistake that could cause a market correction comparable to a once-in-a-century pandemic or anything.
While we’re here, “Trump taxes destroy economy” should be the easiest thing in the world to message, but this doesn’t mean every Democrat is up to the challenge. This is how you do it:
Many possible variants, but “Trump destroy economy” needs to be the central message. In other words, not this kind of bullshit:
the dow is in free fall and lucille bluth's banana meme is becoming reality but let's put out a video saying that Trump could have a point here https://t.co/paLEy4JSaB pic.twitter.com/64VVCtr5uh— Tahra Jirari (@tahrajirari) April 4, 2025
I, personally, have become extremely dubious about the political merits of Biden’s protectionism-lite for obvious reasons, and I’ve always been dubious about it on the policy merits. But even if you disagree about the latter, it’s got nothing to do with “coming up with a completely arbitrary, across the board tariff for purely vindictive reasons and then screw up and multiply it by 4.” “Mr. Trump has a point about beautiful tariffs BUT” throat-clearing is just as bad as “I agree with RFK Jr. about making America healthy again BUT.” “Implying that you only disagree on the details when discussing Republican policy and/or personnel that is an unmitigated disaster is awful politics. If you want to win you want to drive down Trump’s popularity, not play Both Sides Do It journalist. Cut out the latter completely.
…another example of how to do it from the woman who will hopefully have Schumer’s job sooner rather than later:
Trump's tariffs are running the economy into the ground. Congress can reverse them—but instead, Republicans are full steam ahead on their disastrous plan to give more tax breaks to billionaires. The Republican Party platform is pro-billionaire and pro-recession.— Senator Patty Murray (@murray.senate.gov) April 5, 2025 at 12:11 PM