Fox Business host befuddled by Trump's tariff calculations: “Those numbers ... they don't mean anything”
Dagen McDowell: “They could actually factor in all of the relevant information, per country: non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, and tariffs. They didn't do it that way.”
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From the April 3, 2025, edition of Fox Business' The Big Money Show
DAGEN MCDOWELL (CO-HOST): But yesterday, what was at least – nobody was prepared for that. And that was by design by the White House that it was not messaged it to the press, it wasn't messaged to anybody about what to expect at that event in the Rose Garden, yesterday. And that the charts that were released, what looked like – at least watching it on TV – what looked like tariffs that are charged to the United States by other nations, were not tariffs. The way that that was calculated, they created a formula that divided a country, let's say China, a country's trade surplus with the United States, just on goods, by its total exports, based on data for last year from the Census Bureau. And then from what we are going to tariff them, we cut that number in half, by two, so that was supposed to be some expression of how we were wronged on trade by these other nations. But those numbers, that were on that ––
TAYLOR RIGGS (CO-HOST): That grid.
MCDOWELL: They don't mean anything. They're just meant to express how we're getting screwed. Essentially. Are we?
RIGGS: The calculation was a Greek alphabet, to Dagen's point. Literally, no, no, literally like the Greek –
CHARLES PAYNE (FOX BUSINESS HOST): There is a formula to it.
RIGGS: I minus N divided by –
MCDOWELL: She means literally. This is the formula.
RIGGS: Literally, Greek alphabet.
PAYNE: By the way that's the lenient part. The lenient part, the lenient part is that we didn't do 100%. And let me tell you why they're doing this, right? Because I've got a list here of all the non-trade barriers that we talk about, but there's more than this, right? And there is a debate, if you consider value-added tax a non-trade barrier, the Trump administration does, some economists don't. But this is a huge list and what they are saying is, hey this list goes way beyond just this list. And in their minds the only way to maybe figure it out, maybe this would be the metric they used. This is the metric that they chose to say hey, we know you're cheating, we know that this has never been fair or free trade and we are trying to level the playing field. And we are going to use our own metric to design and that is what they came up with. And so, that is what we have. And that's what everyone's got to work on.
MCDOWELL: They came up with it because they were in a hurry to cobble something together. I think that even from the outside looking in that was pretty clear.
PAYNE: I don't necessarily agree with that. I mean listen, the architect of this [Council of Economic Advisers chair Stephen Miran] wrote a piece in November of last year, by the way he was inspired by the year earlier than that, so this is not something they pulled out their whatever. This is something they have been putting serious consideration into for months.
MCDOWELL: They could've done the calculation based on all the factors that you were just talking about, they chose not to.
PAYNE: Right, because they're saying it is more than these factors.
MCDOWELL: No, they could have taken non – there's a calculation you can do that isn't just trade deficit divided by total exports. They could actually factor in all of the relevant information, per country: non-tariff barriers, currency manipulation, and tariffs. They didn't do it that way.
JACKIE DEANGELIS (HOST): There were different ways to skin the cat, obviously.