houseofleft

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:

• A comany like Apple might assemble laptops in the US, but import parts like chips from, say, China.
• They now have around a 40% tariff on all chips, which is really going to drive up cost, and leaves them with two options.
• Option one, they bring all manufacturing into the US, which would take a long time to build up the infrastructure, and still really ramp up the price because wages in the US are so much higher than they are in China
• Option two, they outsource everything to say Mexico or Canada who don't pay the tariffs on Chinese chips, and just pay the wholesale import tariffs are needed to bring things from Mexico/Canada to the US. They also get to skip out all the reciprocal tariffs that other countries are placing on the US in retaliation for the recently announces ones when they import out to, say, Europe.

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.

• Take the US trade deficit with a given country (eg. China is $292bn)
• Take the total good imported by US (for China that's $439bn)
• Divide the first figure by the second! Why? Who knows! It's a number! Less talk more first grade arithmetic (if you're still following that gives us 67%)
• That gives us a random number which we'll pretend is that country's tariff of US goods even though it's completely unrelated in every way. We'll divide it by two to get the new tariff rate for imports from that country. Why? Honestly if you're still expecting there to be an answer to that question I'm wondering if you've been following. (that gives us 34%, well actually it gives us 33.5% but I'm not sure the Trump administration understands the idea of fractions so we'll just round it up from there)

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.

There's technically no upper limit, why not make it 10000% and really see what happens!

I definitely get where you're coming from, but I think population reduction comes naturally from things like abortion rights, good family planning provisions, and a lack of poverty. Countries with those things are seeing a decline in population without making having children into a moral issue.

Extra point is that, although the population is up, the amount of meat eaten is waaay up. Just looking at that one issue, we can solve over fishing pretty easily without requiring any change to the current population numbers.

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.

Anyone know of projects getting good traction on codeberg? I reeeeaaally want it to be a success, but github seems to have a bit or a grip on the open source software community which makes anything else have an annoying hurdle for open source projects.

Labor have banned new north sea oil projects[1], combined with inland fracking being a non-starter this means no new oil projects in the UK.

If you're looking for good labour climate policy, clean power 2030 is probably their flagship, they also announced a new national forest the other day, plus upped our international climate commitments at COP. Far from perfect, but easily a step up from the conservatives.

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gd1q9ejqdo

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/

Just in case anyone jumps to conclusions and just reads the headline. This isn't a response to the latest wave of protest crackdowns. JSO were always a group with one specific demand (it's in their name) and that demand is now UK government policy.

We'll never know how much a role JSO played in this, and they aren't the most popular outside of environmental circles, but as a UK resident, I'm pretty stoked we have people fighting this hard to protect the climate. Hopefully we'll see some of the same faces in newer groups and movements soon.

So what does Trump's US do/say about the very obviously increasing natural disasters that are making homes uninsurable, especially in Florida or California.

It's all well and good to say "we don't want to acknowledge this exists" (well, actually wait, it's clearly not well and good!?) but the fact is that climate change will wreck many American homes, and having an official policy that it doesn't exist makes it hard to do anything about it.

Honestly, I don't even know why I'm trying to reason around the actions of a deranged facist state government.

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.