cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/64750194
President Donald Trump on Friday said he is “recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union” after complaining that trade negotiations have stalled.
The EU “has been very difficult to deal with,” Trump wrote. “Our discussions with them are going nowhere!”
The European Union, which was formed for the primary purpose of taking advantage of the United States on TRADE, has been very difficult to deal with. Their powerful Trade Barriers, Vat Taxes, ridiculous Corporate Penalties, Non-Monetary Trade Barriers, Monetary Manipulations, unfair and unjustified lawsuits against Americans Companies, and more, have led to a Trade Deficit with the U.S. of more than $250,000,000 a year, a number which is totally unacceptable. Our discussions with them are going nowhere! Therefore, I am recommending a straight 50% Tariff on the European Union, starting on June 1, 2025. There is no Tariff if the product is built or manufactured in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Please please please if this happens, institute reciprocal tariffs on services. Nobody would care if it becomes more expensive to advertise on Facebook, and we have a trade deficit in services.
(OK I guess lots of companies would care if their IT infrastructure gets more expensive, but 🤷)
Companies have the option to migrate to EU providers to avoid the taxes on their infrastructure. Yes I know it’s not that easy. Bite the bullet or pay the tax.
I honestly don’t understand why it’s not already the norm. We’ve got plenty of great providers in Europe.
Well I know for medium and large companies it may not be easy, depending on what cloud services they currently use. But for micro and small companies, that use cloud storage, and maybe some virtual machines in the cloud, there is no excuse. A Linux VM is a Linux VM no matter whether it is hosted on Aws or OVH cloud
I said it before, EU not implementing any tariffs so far to appease the Orange was a mistake and sign of weakness in Orange’s eyes. No wonder Orange swings random numbers around now.
I disagree. It was very smart to stay out of the spotlight and look at what happens with China. After all the EU got 10% tariffs fairly quickly without doing too much.
China is holding ground and it looks good for them, even Orange, after lowering many of tariffs, is taking about lowering remaining tariffs. While the opposite is happening to EU.
China holding ground ended up with Trump raising tariffs a few times as well. In this case he just talked about them. He did not sign anything. The stock market crashed and a shit ton of lobbiest try to bring Trump to not actually do it.
If he actually does it, then the EU can just copy China with the knowledge of that strategy working.
Yes, US is realizing, well the Orange is, that mindlessly and randomly applying tariffs will mostly hurt both parties. Where this lesson isn’t applied in EU case so far. Just talked about what tariffs did you mean? He applied 10% ones which are still there and he talked/applied (not sure, but the difference is in a day at best) reciprocal ones because EU was planning them in a month or so. Then he paused the latter for three months and applying them again after two months. Basically he is totally volatile and unreliable to serious negotiations, a totally opposite to stable :)
China really shows the way. Massive hike up and that puts Trump into his place.