• @[email protected]
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    012 days ago

    For context, Cuba, North Korea, and Belarus are also not tariffed because they are sanctioned instead.

    • @[email protected]
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      012 days ago

      I wondered the same thing. Why would you add tariffs if it’s illegal to even trade with them?

    • @[email protected]
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      12 days ago

      Russia exports next to nothing to the US, but it does import things like electronics for obvious reasons.

      Tarrifs on Russia will be pointless, really. Russia has been trading with Europe for the most part for obvious reasons until it fell out of favour. So this seems like manufactured outrage.

      • RobotsLeftHand
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        12 days ago

        Trump followed a consistent, rigid math: Whatever the trade deficit, then that’s the tariff applied… except for Russia. Russia is #23 on our list of trade partners. Following the math they should have a hefty tariff applied, but they don’t. It’s the only exception.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 days ago

          Lmao, what? Why even?

          Well, even then, these islands are not significant geopolitical actors. And tarrifs will certinly not hurt the Russian economy, and I doubt they are going to help the US in terms of geopolitics.

          • @[email protected]
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            012 days ago

            Lmao, what? Why even?

            Because Trump is a moron surrounded by a team of idiots.

            Well, even then, these islands are not significant geopolitical actors.

            And yet they have tarrifs.

            And tarrifs will certinly not hurt the Russian economy, and I doubt they are going to help the US in terms of geopolitics.

            The same can be said if many of the other tariffs Trump has imposed. Which is why Russia’s exception is notable.

              • @[email protected]
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                012 days ago

                Yes exactly. Yet the islands were included but Russia wasn’t. So the situation isn’t that Russia has no trade and tariffs are useless against it, but that Russia was specifically singled out so they wouldn’t receive tariffs.

                Just take the loss, jfc.

      • @[email protected]
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        012 days ago

        That’s what I was thinking. Plenty of reason for outrage. This will just be a distraction.

    • Fair Fairy
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      011 days ago

      Do people not realize there is no US Russia trade so tariffs would be moot.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 days ago

        no US Russia trade

        U.S. total goods trade with Russia were an estimated $3.5 billion in 2024. U.S. goods exports to Russia in 2024 were $526.1 million, down 12.3 percent ($73.5 million) from 2023. U.S. goods imports from Russia totaled $3.0 billion in 2024, down 34.2 percent ($1.6 billion) from 2023. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Russia was $2.5 billion in 2024, a 37.5 percent decrease ($1.5 billion) over 2023.

        https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia-and-eurasia/russia

        But what’s a few billion between friends?

  • HubertManne
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    012 days ago

    I was noticing this as well. The place that should have the highest tarrifs.

  • franpoli
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    012 days ago

    Russia remains a key supplier of resources critical to U.S. industry (titanium, palladium, uranium). While technically replaceable, developing alternative sources would take years. This makes the current moment less than ideal for imposing higher tariffs on Russia, particularly when the priority is to reindustrialize the U.S.

    • @[email protected]
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      011 days ago

      I find it funny than instead of at least imposing 10% tariff by default on Russia and selectively exempt critical resources. Russian wasn’t listed at all.

      Even an unoccupied island got 10% tariff by default.

    • Match!!
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      012 days ago

      now explain why Russia is uniquely in this position or i user note you as a russian agent

      • franpoli
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        012 days ago

        Well, as much as I’d love a dramatic spy backstory, I’m afraid I’m neither an FSB nor an FBI agent. Just a regular person thinking out loud. I don’t have a definitive answer, just some suppositions. I share them so we can all explore the topic with arguments and counterarguments; no secret dossiers required! Open to hearing different perspectives.

  • Stern
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    12 days ago

    You can view this one of two ways, possibly both:

    1. Krasnov
    2. Trump apparently was doing these tariffs based on trade deficits (Which is stupid on its own, if your dentist doesn’t buy the widgets you sell, that’s not a tariff.), if Russia wasn’t running one, then there you go.

    To rebuke 2 I present the following- https://ustr.gov/countries-regions/europe-middle-east/russia-and-eurasia/russia

    U.S. total goods trade with Russia were an estimated $3.5 billion in 2024. U.S. goods exports to Russia in 2024 were $526.1 million, down 12.3 percent ($73.5 million) from 2023. U.S. goods imports from Russia totaled $3.0 billion in 2024, down 34.2 percent ($1.6 billion) from 2023. The U.S. goods trade deficit with Russia was $2.5 billion in 2024, a 37.5 percent decrease ($1.5 billion) over 2023.

    Based on that math, with the CNN article I linked for the formula (the country’s trade deficit divided by its exports to the United States times 1/2) we get - (2,500,000,000 / 3,000,000,000) * 1/2 = 0.416666…

    So Russia should have a 42% tariff based on their purported 83% tariff on us.

    • @[email protected]
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      011 days ago

      Trump seems to think the trade deficit is some sort of debt that we’ll have to pay off in the future.

      The overall goal of bringing manufacturing back to the US isn’t necessarily a bad one, but this is probably the worst way to go about doing it. One article I read pointed out that it would take many years of consistent tariffs to generate that kind of interest and investment - but anyone with half a brain knows these tariffs could be gone tomorrow, so there’s little inclination to actually try to build factories in the US based on this move. No reasonable investor would want to bet their company on Trump acting consistently.

      • @[email protected]
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        011 days ago

        …pointed out that it would take many years of consistent tariffs to generate that kind of interest and investment…

        That’s the scary thing. Citrus-Hitler assumes he’s gonna have himself and his policies in place for “many years of consistent tariffs.”

  • spirinolas
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    12 days ago

    Uh? Of course he isn’t. Why would Putin tell him to put tariffs on himself? That makes no sense.

    • @[email protected]
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      012 days ago

      The US has been sanctioning Russia for the better part of the last decade. We aren’t tariffing them because we aren’t trading with them.

      We also aren’t tariffing Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea, for the same reasons.

        • @[email protected]
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          012 days ago

          I was under the impression that we (in Canada) get our vodka mostly from Finland, but it’s been a while since I worked as an alcohol purveyor… I’m ashamed of the things I did during those years, but I’m in recovery now, thank you for your concern

        • @[email protected]
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          012 days ago

          https://www.statista.com/statistics/1306859/us-imports-by-commodity-from-russia/

          It does look like we import about $3B/year. Mostly fertilizers, which make up 1/3 of total imports, and some raw metals and a bit of heavy machinery. But that’s minuscule beside our trade balances with the top of his tariff list - China, the EU, Vietnam, Taiwan, Japan, and India. We do $20B/year with tiny little South Korea, as a point of comparison. We bring in $6B/year from South Africa.

          To my knowledge, we don’t import Russian vodka in any significant quantity. Anything “Russian” branded is typically imported from one of the neighboring states - Ukraine, Belarus, Poland, Romania. Red Army Vodka, for instance, is from a Polish company.

          • @[email protected]
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            012 days ago

            He slapped a 50% tarrif on Lesotho, so it’s clearly not about size or impact.

            And the UK got a 10% tariff applied even though the US doesn’t have a goods trade deficit with them.

      • @[email protected]
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        012 days ago

        Maybe, but apparently we’re tariffing multiple uninhabited islands. It would seem that active trade is not a perquisite for tariffs these days. can’t be having people move out there and not getting tariffed in the future.

        I hope he puts tariffs on Mars next. Maybe after he falls out with musk.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 days ago

        it’s funny that this is being downvoted. lemmy is basically reddit. rooting for the good guys, but also dogshit stupid

        • @[email protected]
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          011 days ago

          Systems that have voting mechanisms result in hive minds. It’s an inevitable result.

          1st someone is much more likely to vote something up or down depending on how positive / negative it is. So it snowballs sort of like compounding interest

          2nd the simplest most common denominator takes bubble to the top. Precisely because more people can understand and therefore vote.

          It’s why you’ll always see some screenshot of Twitter much higher than a long in depth article. Even though the article has infinitely more value.

        • Brumefey
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          012 days ago

          Downvoted because it’s wrong : We aren’t tariffing them because we aren’t trading with them.

          So are some inhabited islands which are hit by tariffs. Maybe the dogshit stupid is the one not seeing the ties between trump and putin.

      • @[email protected]
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        012 days ago

        But tarrif on seals in the Antarctica region? Doesn’t seem like logic is driving any of this.

  • @[email protected]
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    012 days ago

    I try to keep a sense of perspective, every president I disagree with seems to be the worst president ever at the time.

    I really want to say Bush’s useless Trillion dollar wars are worse than this.

    But it’s close and we have 3.5 more years of this.

    • @[email protected]
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      012 days ago

      I really want to say Bush’s useless Trillion dollar wars are worse than this.

      I would say Bush’s bailout of the O&G sector in '01 and the Financial Sector in '08 laid the seeds for worse social and ecological conditions over the subsequent two decades. Similarly, NAFTA and the subsequent midwestern de-industrialization was nightmarish for US industry and Mexican agriculture.

      These blunders set us up to need international trade. What’s crazy about Trump’s tariffs is that he’s not addressing the underlying infrastructure problems or the crushing post-Great Recession debt traps. He’s just squeezing at the point of the supply chain in order to punish American industry and labor for adapting to the sabotaged economic landscape of the neoliberal era.

      It is the economic equivalent of kicking a guy in the kidneys after he’s already been laid out on the ground.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 days ago

        I was fine with like 80% of Obama and like 60% of Clinton’s actual policies while enjoying the economy that I don’t credit him for. But then W Bush was like a 10% and Trump 1 maybe 15% (Warp Speed, passing the vast majority of Covid stimulus, ironically all the stuff he’s against now) and I’m batting zero so far on Trump 2 but I assume at some point he’ll do something I agree with.

      • @[email protected]
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        12 days ago

        As much as I despise Obama for vastly expanding our extrajudicial drone strike policy… All things put into perspective, yeah he was pretty decent.

      • @[email protected]
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        012 days ago

        Obama was pretty decent no?

        How Obama Destroyed Black Wealth

        Neil Barofsky, the bailout inspector general, later testified that protecting the banks was the actual goal. The administration’s aim was to “foam the runway” for the banks, as Barofsky witnessed Tim Geithner tell Elizabeth Warren. HAMP failed, in other words, because it was not designed to help homeowners.

        As a result, in many cases HAMP actively enabled foreclosure. Its re-default rate — the fraction of people who got a modification and later defaulted out of the program — was 22 percent as of 2013. Only about $15 billion of the original $75 billion appropriation was spent by mid-2016.

        Out of an initial promised 4 million mortgage modifications — itself a drastic underestimate — by the end of 2016 only 2.7 million had even been started. Out of that number, only 1.7 million made it to permanent modification, and of those, 558,000 eventually washed out of the program.

        Former Wells Fargo employees later testified that the bank deliberately tricked middle-class black families (who they called “mud people”) into subprime “ghetto loans.” Overall, a Center for Responsible Lending study found that from 2004 to 2008, 6.2 percent of white borrowers with a credit score of 660 and up got subprime mortgages, while 19.3 percent of such Latino borrowers and 21.4 percent of black borrowers did.

        The effects of the foreclosure disaster are starkly apparent in Survey of Consumer Finances data. To start, the homeownership national rate shows a marked decline over almost the whole Obama presidency, reaching the lowest rate since 1965 (before slightly rebounding).

  • Oliver
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    011 days ago

    Well, why should Agent Krasnov put tariffs on the hand that feeds him, good old Vlad? 🤷🏼‍♂️