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April 4, 2025 - The David Knight Show
19:43
Trump’s Tariff Rates Per Country—Are TOTAL NONSENSE
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The simple math behind Trump's tariffs, well actually it's simple-minded by simple tons.
We're completely ignorant of what's going on and we'll tell you what's even more amazing than the numbers and how they calculate these numbers, are apparently where these numbers came from.
And let me just say that we are, here we are five years later almost to the day, you know, we're only two weeks away I guess, From when he shut us down five years ago with a bunch of nonsense from two smart people Fauci and Birx who got some information from the Imperial College of London.
Wow, I'm impressed.
Aren't you impressed with a name like that?
Well, you shouldn't be.
Because these people have already at that point had a 20-year history of coming up with one failed prediction after the other.
You know, just like the climate cult.
So let's talk about these numbers.
And I'll tell you, I'll give you my proof of where this idiocy is coming from.
So, the MAGA Mythical Tariffs, their version of MMT.
A financial journalist, James Surowiecki, noted that the tariff rate for other nations that Trump showed off is not related to tariff American manufacturers pay, but it's a calculation that used the trade deficit.
The trade deficit.
According to the world population view, the U.S. trade deficit with Japan is about $62.6 billion.
And the total amount of exports from the U.S. to Japan is $135.8 billion.
If you divide the trade deficit by the total exports, what you wind up with is.46.
And what was it that they want to charge Japan?
They say Japan has got 46% tariffs on American-made products.
This is, and they did it with one after the other.
Similarly, U.S. trade deficit with Thailand is about 41.5 billion, and the total amount of exports is 57.7 billion.
Dividing the trade deficit by the total exports gives you a result of 0.719, 72%.
Okay, so that's gonna be our tariff.
Let me tell you folks, In no universe, in no economic model, does trade deficit divided by total exports to that country, does that ever equal a tariff rate?
This is just lunatic stuff!
They're like, where did this come up with?
And he came up with that.
Other people have noticed that independently as well.
But this is from the UK Independent, quoting I guess they pronounce this guy's name.
He claimed the tariff rate supposedly charged by other countries in the U.S.
and touted by Trump during his speech were, quote, just made up numbers.
So I said, this is the MAGA version of MMT.
It's the MAGA mythical tariffs.
These are not the tariffs that other people charge.
As I said, you look at the different trade organizations that have put it out there, and yeah, there was a slight imbalance.
You know, America would be like 2.2% tariffs on average, and other countries would be like 2.7% or something like that.
But it wasn't the orders of magnitude that they're talking about.
That's why I say, when I looked at those numbers, I was like, wow, they're charging us that much in these other places?
Well, no, they aren't.
Those are just made-up numbers.
He said, South Korea, which we have a trade agreement with, is not charging 50% tariff on U.S. exports, nor is the EU charging a 39% tariff.
What extraordinary nonsense this is!
And yes it is extraordinary nonsense.
He noted, That in any country where U.S. trade or imports is less than 10 percent, or even if there is a surplus, they still charge them 10 percent.
See, we have a trade surplus with the U.K. We have a trade surplus with Australia.
We're going to charge them 10 percent.
Now, what happens if the people that we have a trade surplus with put protective duties on American products?
Hmm. Yeah, we sell less, don't we?
What idiocy this is!
Absolute idiocy!
And I got on yesterday onto social media, and I just went off on how stupid these MAGA people are, this cult of MAGA.
And I had a friend text me, he goes, oh, you're trying to win friends, I see, on Twitter.
And it's like, no, these people are never going to listen.
They're too stupid!
And the people in the Trump administration are too stupid.
I talked about how, I said, this looks like this was thrown together at the last minute.
I said, there's no organization to this.
You try to find different countries and, you know, to find it, and there's no organization to it whatsoever.
And you have to go through page after page of this nonsense.
So I said, what is this about?
It's not organized by the highest tariffs or the lowest.
It's not organized by name of the country.
It's not even organized by region of the world.
It's just thrown out there.
And they were talking, you know, all week about how they're going to release this stuff at three o'clock in the afternoon.
They moved it to four o'clock.
You've had the Trump administration spinning and dancing and flipping and flopping all through this stuff because they can't make up their mind because they don't know what they're doing at all.
This is way beyond the argument About free trade versus tariffs.
That's not even the issue.
The issue is the lame brain and competence of Trump and this cult that has formed around this lunatic idiot.
He bankrupted six casinos.
He had five different declarations of bankruptcy.
One of them covered more than one casino.
But he bankrupted six casinos.
He's gonna bankrupt America as well.
You know, it's always...
Las Vegas, the city built on bad math, right?
You have to not understand the math involved in the way these guys have set up the averages in order to go there and think that you're going to win.
And the longer you play, the more certain that you will lose all your money, unless you're Donald Trump.
In which case, the House loses!
Only in the case of Trump does the house lose.
Goes out of business.
Oh, Trump's a businessman.
Yeah, one of the worst ever.
A businessman who couldn't run a casino.
It's like having a license to print money.
It's amazing.
If you figure out a way to get around their rigged game, like the blackjack card counters did.
You know, there's a bunch of math whizzes.
And movies are made about it.
I forget what the name of that movie was.
But you know, they work out some of these smart kids and they figure out how to do card counting.
And they could beat the house.
So what's the house do?
They ban them.
They not only rig the rules, but if you figure out a way to beat them using their rules, they kick you out.
And Trump went bankrupt in an environment like that.
I mean, this is a whole new level of stupid, folks.
The only thing dumber than that are the people who follow him.
Dumber than bricks!
I said that to my friend.
He goes, yeah, you're just turning the tables over.
It's like, that's right.
I'm turning the tables over.
I'm done.
Get out the scourge of whips and let's turn the tables over, folks, because this is stupid.
It's beyond stupid.
For example, you know, as I said, UK has a trade deficit with us of about $10 billion.
We sell them ten billion dollars more than they buy from us.
So what are we gonna do with that?
We're gonna put a 10% tariff on them.
That makes a lot of sense, doesn't it?
That's gonna make America great, isn't it?
That's gonna help American manufacturing, isn't it?
No, actually it isn't.
Actually it isn't.
So it gets even worse.
You know, you think that that was bad.
You think those numbers, those stupid numbers, were bad.
The fact that these numbers that he had were trade deficit Well then, how did he get the...
I guess you have to round it off to zero, right?
Anyway, trade deficit divided by total exports doesn't make any sense at all.
This is a story from Cointelegraph.
Did ChatGPT come up with Trump's tariff rate formula?
Chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, all return the same formula for reciprocal tariff calculations, said several ex-users.
There's a crazy theory on social media that US President Trump newly announced reciprocal tariff plan which hits all countries with minimum of 10% tariff.
Could have been designed by an AI chatbot.
I was able to duplicate this in ChatGPT.
Said one NFT collector who goes by the name of DC Investor.
He said, also told me that this idea had not been formalized anywhere before.
It's original to chat at the chatbots, and so this is a combination of stupid and lazy staffers, ignorant staffers, using chat GPT to come up with a formula for tariffs.
When the NFT collector is smarter than your staff, you have a serious problem.
Well, you know, the NFT collectors might be pretty smart.
They're just ripping people off.
Actually, he's a collector.
That's right.
He's a collector.
He's not a seller, okay?
So he's the rippee, I guess, instead of the ripper-off.
You're right, Travis.
When he can spot through it, that's a real issue.
In any other scenario, he's the sucker.
He's the mark.
But not here.
The only thing about this is that, just like this nonsense five years ago, We're all gonna suffer the consequences for Trump's stupidity.
Stupidity! So he said, the chat program told me this idea had never been formalized anywhere before and it was something that it came up with.
Yeah, it did.
They said, of course this could just be simply coincidental.
Well, who else would come up with that kind of a formula?
Trade deficit divided by total exports equals the tariff rate that they're charging.
In what universe does that make any sense?
This is a This is AI hallucination.
Folks, we've had the first global trade policy created by AI.
A first.
A global first.
Where are the headlines trumpeting that?
AI creates the first global trade policy and creates a global war.
We always were worried that AI was going to fire the nukes.
Instead, what it did was it fired the tariffs at everybody.
It just went crazy firing tariffs at everyone.
So, another one.
DC Investors Observations came in response to a crypto trader, Jordan Fish.
So it wasn't the DC Investor who found it, okay.
But this guy goes by the name of Kobe.
He also asked, chat GPT, said, what would be an easy way to calculate the tariffs that should be imposed on other countries so that the U.S. is on even playing fields when it comes to trade deficit?
Set a minimum of 10%.
Oh, well, there you go.
And so there you can see the response.
A straightforward, it says, if naive method.
GPT admits that it's naive.
We need to set the tariff rate for each trading partner equal to the percentage share of the trade deficit relative to that country in total.
And then it gives the formula that I just gave you.
Tariff rate equals trade deficit divided by total imports of that country.
And it gives some calculation examples in case you can't figure out how to apply that simpleton formula.
Says this method however ignores the intricate dynamics of international trade such as elasticities, retaliatory measures, supply chain nuances, but it provides a blunt proportional rule to quote level the playing field.
One might implement it in Python like so and it gives them the code to set this up.
There you go.
Yeah, they spent months trying to figure out how they're going to You know, do this.
And you got some staffer who says, oh, I got some code.
I have here in Python.
I can do this very quickly.
Runs the thing out.
Okay, what time we gonna have this thing out?
Three o'clock, let's don't, we'll have it at four o'clock.
Let's run that code, put it out.
Print some charts for us as well.
The Journal of Public Economics editor got the same results using ChatGPT.
Now this is a fourth person.
A third person has done this.
The other person looked at it and said, wait a minute, you realize what they're doing?
He reverse engineered it and said they're just taking the trade deficit and dividing it by total exports to that country.
So the Journal of Public Economics editor says, confirmed, chat GPT, exactly what the dumbest kid in the class would do, without edits.
And yet, they're very smart people.
You know, we go back to the Imperial College of London, as I've said many times, you go back to their nonsense.
Remember the Laffer curve?
The far curve, I think it was.
I haven't talked about this in a while.
Anyway, that's the bell-shaped curve.
That was a curve that Fauci kept saying, we've got to flatten the curve.
Well, that was the curve.
Went back to like 1840s.
Bell-shaped curve for their They're epidemics that they would have, far as law.
And so, in their model, they didn't use a bell-shaped curve.
How are you gonna flatten a curve?
It was never a curve in their model.
In their model, each person was going to infect, I think it's two and a half other people, forever, forever, no ending, until every single person on Earth had it and died.
That was their model.
So it was based on a stupid model.
And then it got even worse.
As the University of Edinburgh's computer department pointed out, they said, when we run their model, every time we run it, even with the same input, we get different numbers.
It's like a random number generator.
The Imperial College of London.
That guy's name is Neil or an I.L. Ferguson or whatever.
He's got a long history of nonsense like this.
But, you know, then that was shopped to Trump, and he fell for it.
So who was it that gave him this?
What were the two smart people that did this?
Well, one of them was ChatGPT.
I don't know who the human partner was.
ChatGPT even wrote the little Python program to be able to divide one number by the other.
Do I need to have a Python program to do that?
I don't know.
Anyway, so one person, Arthur Krishnan Robit, said, this might be the first large-scale application of AI technology to geopolitics.
Yeah, and it is a total disaster.
Flexport is a supply chain logistics platform, and the founder and CEO of that supply chain logistics platform, Ryan Peterson, said his firm had reverse-engineered the formula the Trump administration used to generate the reciprocal tariffs.
He said, it's quite simple.
They took the trade deficit the U.S. has with each country and divided it by our imports from that country.
The Yale Review, that's where James Surowiecki was, said, they just took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by their export sauce.
And so here we have, after that application, almost exactly five years after Trump did the globalist lockdown, and again, it's not just something that he came up with, that was a globalist plot.
This, however, is something he came up with perhaps independently, or perhaps he is acting as an agent of the globalist chaos people again.
You think that might be the case?
Try to create a global trade war that may create a global war, but will crash the global economy nevertheless.
That seems to be what he's after.
That seems to be why Trump has been selected and put in place.
Time and again.
And that is as an agent of chaos and destruction.
I find it hard to believe that the incompetence is that great.
I do believe that the evil is that great.
And so, these guys wiped out the pension funds, the stock market crashed, and there's about two and a half trillion dollars that was lost yesterday because of this chat GPT program.
This is way worse.
Way worse.
Than the signal gate.
We should call this the chat gate.
Tariff gate.
Whatever you want to call it.
This is way worse!
And pretty much crickets from everybody.
Cointelegraph picked it up.
Independent picked it up.
I didn't see anybody else talking about this.
Good evening.
Tonight's tale is a story of paranoia and a most unexpected perpetrator, the common cow.
Or, more specifically, what comes out the other end.
Yes, the air is thick with intrigue, as it seems that in our modern age of propaganda, even a humble bovine's backside can be branded a national security threat.
The menace is invisible, silent, yet deadly.
Carefully contrived to panic the masses into accepting the government stepping in.
Jack Boots and all, with their solutions.
Because who better to stop a gaseous threat than a bunch of political windbags?
But one must wonder, is this truly about saving the planet, or are we simply being led to pasture?
Is it merely a MacGuffin?
The David Knight Show serves as a breath of fresh air for those who still believe that truth can stand up to scrutiny.
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