These Tarrifs were the gas station boner pills of economics.

Last year I submitted a FOIA request to the US Trade Representative with a simple purpose: to figure out where the Trump admin's infamous "Liberation Day" reciprocal tariff formula came from. This formula, posted on the USTR's website, was the basis of the charts at the April 2025 tariff press conference. It was also mathematically incoherent. Its denominator terms canceled each other out, yielding an nonsensical result that simply spat out an economically meaningless percentage based on bilateral trade volume. The formula became a target of ridicule for good cause, but nobody could explain where it came from. Some speculated that Peter Navarro dreamt it up, likely because it just felt like a crazy and economically incompetent Navarro product. Others suggested that it looked like something hallucinated by ChatGPT. So I submitted the FOIA request in an attempt to find out. My simple request turned into a full year of unexplained delays, stonewalling, missed deadlines that they had previously communicated for delivery, and general non-responsiveness. The USTR, which officially published the formula, is subject to FOIA as a federal agency and does not enjoy the exemptions afforded directly to White House staff. Nonetheless they claimed legal review privileges since the formula's documentation apparently involved correspondence with unnamed White House officials. After a year of waiting, I finally got the answer this morning. The USTR located 31 pages of records pertaining to the "Liberation Day" tariff formula. But it was invoking an exemption from FOIA under a "presidential communications" privilege and therefore denying access to all 31 pages. That said, the email did provide a clue confirming one of my long-held suspicions about the origin of the formula. The specific party they claimed privilege to protect was not Peter Navarro - it was the White House Council of Economic Advisers. This in turn suggests what I have long suspected. The formula either came from or had substantial input from somebody at the CEA, as presumably documented in the 31 pages of excluded correspondence.

I find it curious that the modern medical community has cured exactly zero diseases in the last several decades.