During the pandemic, Team Trump tried to craft a formula that told them what they wanted to hear. With tariffs, they did it again. Both were failures.
https://bsky.app/profile/hategop.bsky.social/post/3llzbsvwzps2b
The Trump White House keeps trying (and failing) to make mathematical formulas work.
During the pandemic, Team Trump tried to craft a formula that told them what they wanted to hear. With tariffs, they did it again. Both were failures.
https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/trump-white-house-keeps-trying-make-mathematical-formulas-work-rcna199733
Roughly five years later, the Republican president is back in the Oval Office; he and his team are again mismanaging a crisis; and the whole operation is again trying and failing to concoct mathematical formulas. As my MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown summarized:
When President Donald Trump presented his sweeping global tariffs from the Rose Garden on Wednesday, even the most basic questions were left up in the air. At the top of the list: How did the White House derive the wildly disparate rates listed on the graphic Trump so proudly displayed? As global markets roiled in the aftermath of the announcement, the White House gave an answer about its calculations that was patently ridiculous.
Economic journalist James Surowiecki helped get the ball rolling on this, concluding that to arrive at Trump’s tariff rates, the White House simply “took our trade deficit with that country and divided it by the country’s exports to us” — a method Surowiecki described as “extraordinary nonsense.”.......
CNBC’s Steve Liesman told viewers, “Nobody ever heard of this formula. Nobody’s ever used this formula. So, I’m sorry, but the conclusion seems to be the president kind of made this up as he went along.” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the conservative American Action Forum, told the Washington Post, “They’ve got an indefensible foundation to an indefensible policy.”
Ian Dunt, a British journalist, added in reference to the White House’s methodology, “It’s hard to state just how nonsensical that actually is. You might as well divide the numbers of apples in your kitchen by the number of bagels and use it to calculate your mortgage rate. To criticize it on political or economic grounds is too generous. It operates below the level of rational thought.”
The Post’s report, quoting two White House sources, said Trump “personally selected” the formula, which “bears some striking similarities to a methodology published by Peter Navarro, Trump’s hard-charging economic adviser.”
That same article quoted a White House official with knowledge of Trump’s thinking, who said, in reference to the president, “He’s at the peak of just not giving a f--- anymore. Bad news stories? Doesn’t give a f---. He’s going to do what he’s going to do.”
It’s the worst possible combination of conditions: We’re left with a bad policy, based on a bad formula, embraced by indifferent officials who don’t know what they’re doing, but who are in positions of enormous power.
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