Welcome to The Lost Debate, a show for Politically Ecclectics. I'm Robbie Gupta and the famed investor, Mark Andreessen, said a few months ago that the Trump administration would be an economic coiled spring that would be unleashed. And we're starting to see what that means. Speaking in the Rose Garden of the White House, President Trump yesterday announced what he calls reciprocal tariffs on almost all of America's trading partners.

All U.S. imports will be subject to at least a 10% tariff effective April 5th.

There will be even higher rates on certain countries.

What the White House considers bad actors, which includes somehow Japan, which is getting a 24%

duty, the European Union, which faces a 20% levy, which is

effective April 9th. China will be hit with a 34% tariff, which adds to previous duties,

which include a 20% tariff imposed over fentanyl. This means that the base tariff on China

will be at least 54% when you add it all up.

There was a huge debate about what this all means and where this came from. The Wall Street Journal

had an interesting piece, as did Bloomberg. We'll link to the in the show notes to the Wall Street Journal

piece here, which tried to reverse engineer the math here, and I'll just read from this piece. It said the White House's

new tariffs were pegged to amounts. It said other countries imposed on the U.S. In many cases,

those amounts appear to match a basic formula, the size of a country's goods trade imbalance with

the U.S. divided by how much America imports from that nation.

The chart President Trump read from in the Rose Garden listed tariffs charged to the U.S.

as, quote, including currency manipulation and trade barriers, end quote.

The numbers don't necessarily match what foreign countries charge against imports from the U.S.

For example, Chinese tariffs against the U.S. were about 23% overall

last month, according to the Peterson Institute for International Economics. But dividing the U.S.'s

24 goods trades deficit with China of some $295 billion by the amount U.S. imported from China

results in the 67% tariff value presented by the White House.

The White House referred the journal to an online explanation by the Office of the Trade Representative.

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