A Modest Proposal: Applying Trump's Tariff Logic for better personal living.

Taking the new Trump regime seriously.

“Liberation day” liberated my thinking on how I live my life. Trump’s insight into using tariffs to make America wealthy again made me realize I should be applying it to my life to make me and my family wealthy too!

The Trump Tariff Formula: A Recipe for Fair and Happy Living

Today is Friday. Friday night has long been pizza night for my family. And, having been recently liberated, I now realize our local pizza parlor has been cheating my family for years. Years, I tell you!

Let me explain and explain how I - and even you ! - can apply our newly liberated thinking to improve our lives.

In the liberation view, any trade deficit reflects cheating by the trading partner with whom you trade. This approach is needed because just looking at the tariffs those countries charge us misses all the nontrade barriers. Nontrade barriers are all the regulations, other costs and fees and simply cultural/political things that restrict our ability to sell goods in the foreign trading partner’s country. Those are hard to measure and so you need some broader measure like the trade deficit, clearly.

Now, the liberation team has developed an ingenious formula to operationalize this insight. You can find it here at the Office of the United States Trade Representative’s website: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

Here’s the formula, though, and I’ll explain:

\(\Delta \tau_i = \frac{x_i-m_i}{\varepsilon * \phi * m_i}\)

where x is exports, m is imports, epsilon (ε) and phi (φ) - the two Greek symbols (GREEK?!…damn it…those are imports again…bastards) - are elasticities and passthrough parameters, respectively. Take a look at the website for explanation, estimates and links to scientific papers.

Anyway, let me remind you, please that this formula is (a) a formula and (b) includes Greek letters. Therefore this is science. Since we all learned to “Trust the Science”, I suggest we continue without further question.

Back to My Pizza Problem

With liberation science in hand, I can now get to a fair arrangement with my local pizza place and, as I understand it, get on the road to big beautiful wealth for me and my family.

First, my pizza place doesn’t buy anything from me and my family at all. Nothing. Unbelievable. Anyway, that means my exports to them, x, is zero. Those cheaters!

Next, they do steal my my money and only give me pizzas each week, that’s m, my family’s pizza imports. It’s really hard to believe they’ve been getting away with this for so many years.

Now, apply our scientific formula. I export nothing to the pizza place so x = 0. Therefore, x - m = - m .

Now, divide that by pizzas, m, and I get -m/eps*phi*m = -1/eps*phi which equals the tariffs I will be imposing on them so that I raise the price I pay for my Friday pizzas from now on. Hence, teaching those bastards a lesson!

WARNING: This is Very Powerful Stuff

I end today’s column with a warning rather than a conclusion. This is science and liberation. Very powerful stuff. It apparently leads to great wealth. So, apply cautiously.

The other benefit, which is less immediately clear, is that, if the tariffs I charge myself to buy pizzas is high enough, it’ll eventually become so expensive that it is better to make the pizzas at home. Can you say “jobs, baby, jobs”?

Of course, applying this liberation formula for success to all the deficits those cheating retailers, restaurants, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Hulu and others are imposing on me will mean that soon my family will get to live in a Luddite Paradise of Autarky where we make our own clothes, food, movies, TV shows and so on. Man, we are gonna be rich!

I hope my 14-year old son can act.

Thanks for reading.