A Quick Followup on Tariffs
Several of the places we hit with “reciprocal” tariffs don’t have tariffs on US goods or even do not trade with the United States whatsoever.
It was bizarre this administration was hitting sparsely populated (or even uninhabited) territories with different rates than the parent country.
What did the poor penguins of McDonald Island ever do to the United States?
Well, we have an answer now, and it’s going to be dumber than you think.
Norfolk Island is an Australian territory 450 miles Northwest of New Zealand. Roughly 2,000 people live there and their total exports to the United States are zero. Not zero this year, but zero in total since the island became autonomous in 1856.
Norfolk does not trade with the United States and never has.
So why did the completely illogical Trump tariff formula hit Norfolk with a 29% tax on their non-existent US exports?
Paperwork errors.
The largest example is a US government record saying Norfolk Island shipped $413,000 worth of boots to the US in 2023. This was news to the owner of Frank’s shoes, the islands largest shoe store which is in a small building:
There was indeed a shipment of boots to the US worth $413,000 in 2023 - from The Bahamas.
The company put the wrong corporate address on their bill of lading.
The retaliatory tariffs on Norfolk are due to a clerical error.
I’m currently taking a data analytics certification. This sort of error is quite common and one anyone running any sort of analysis should easily catch.
But this is the most incompetent and laziest administration in history.
It’s quite clear no one actually looked at the underlying information behind our new tariffs. I suspect they fed the numbers into an LLM AI system and just ran without the results without doing so much as ten minutes of verification.
And that’s exactly the sort of diligence they have in every single thing they are doing to the United States right now.
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