Ben Thompson: American Disruption (emphasis mine):

[T]he most important components for executing a fundamental shift in trade are those that go into building actual factories, or equipment for those factories. In the vast sea of stupidity that are these tariffs this is perhaps the stupidest detail of all: the U.S. is tariffing raw materials and components for factory equipment, like CNC machines.

I find Ben has a tendency to steel man a lot of Trump behavior, and his Monday post this week got a bit into that territory, but this whole tariff thing seems to have broken that streak and now he's just calling them stupid. I agree.

On the day these massive tariffs were to go into effect, Trump "paused" most of them for 90 days and raised tariffs on Chinese imports to 125%. One, anyone who compliments Trump on this decision is a fool. "He almost killed the economy and created insane inflation, but then he said he would only partially do that for now," is not something worth complimenting.

Two, the administration has no integrity and you can't trust anything it tells you about its fiscal policy. This is from Sunday, 3 days ago:

The higher rates are set to be collected beginning Wednesday, ushering in a new era of economic uncertainty with no clear end in sight. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said unfair trade practices are not “the kind of thing you can negotiate away in days or weeks.” The United States, he said, must see “what the countries offer and whether it’s believable.”

And:

“There doesn’t have to be a recession. Who knows how the market is going to react in a day, in a week?” Bessent said. “What we are looking at is building the long-term economic fundamentals for prosperity.”

Three days later they declared these tariffs actually weren't part of their "long-term economic fundamentals" as Trump called most of them mostly off. Or at least for now…check in again in 90 days…or maybe a random Thursday next month…who knows what the mad king will decide tomorrow!

I'm not privy to everything going on out there, but what I've seen indicates chaos at quite a few companies as they try to figure out what to do. Set aside the fact the tariffs that might or might not be coming don't change pricing enough for most businesses to move their operations full into the US, even if they were what do you do today? Without consistent policy, you don't know what to do, and massive shifts from day to day make it impossible to plan. It's not worth migrating your whole operation over based on policy that might change again next week.

Three, if we take the most positive view on why people voted for Trump, they wanted him to lower inflation and to reduce spending. Tariffs are a fundamentally inflationary tool and do nothing to lower costs, especially in the short run. Also, for all the bluster Elon Musk and DOGE have shown, they haven't done much of anything to reduce spending (federal spending is up compared to last year) even though they've done great damage to important work that saves lives. As John Green puts so eloquently, they're clipping tiny things here and there without dealing with the big things we actually spend money on and could move the needle. We shouldn't talk about DOGE as if it's making the government save money, we should talk about what it's actually doing: killing cost-effective things that were making the world better without reducing spending at all. As I'm writing this post, the US House of Representatives is about to vote to likely pass the Senate's budget, which is an increase in spending and a reduction in revenue. So inflation is like to jump, federal spending is on the rise, and the Republican budget is going to massively increase the federal deficit. At least it's easier to toss around slurs at trans people on social media without consequence, I guess…