4 ms·

Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years. And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a populat

Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years. And a 10% tariff on the Macdonald Islands, which has a population of zero (not including the penguins). Perhaps Trump thought he was taxing a fast food competitor? Fun fact: these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird.

re-thc 2y ago
> Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years. Should have set that to 99% then eh?
- vincnetas 2y ago
  Well, you know, you can go even higher, you don't have to stop at 100% :) Infinity is the limit here ;D
- wvh 2y ago
  Tax the 99% seems pretty accurate.
- sidewndr46 2y ago
  It's a tariff, it could be infinity percent
himinlomax 2y ago
10% on British Indian Ocean Territories, whose sole inhabitants are US soldiers at the Diego Garcia base.
- dathinab 2y ago
  It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story. Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
  - Ray20 2y ago
    Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.
    - brookst 2y ago
      If that’s the thinking, they forgot Antarctica, the Marianas trench, and the Moon. Someone could, theoretically, take advantage of the lack of tariffs. I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.
    - seszett 2y ago
      That doesn't seem likely, because they separately listed parts of France that are wholly in the EU (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana, separate tariffs there are as meaningless as having separate tariffs for Berlin and Munich) but they also did not list those that are NOT part of the EU (EDIT one list I found does list French Polynesia, but not New Caledonia[0]) even though they are the ones where a separate rate would make the "most" sense (if any of this makes sense anyway). There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed. It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-the-full-list-of-trumps-reciprocal-tariffs-announced-wednesday/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-...
    - wkat4242 2y ago
      If there are no people there is no government to trade with, no customs, no regulations. It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so. So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?
- kragen 2y ago
  Where is this list posted by the US Government? These countries aren't in Annex I of the Executive Order.
- ourmandave 2y ago
  It's like they pulled a list "All Countries the US Trades With" off wikipedia and used that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa... Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
  - jeltz 2y ago
    Very likely that is literally what they did.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  Strictly speaking it also includes some British military and contract staff from other countries (cleaning, landscaping etc, whatever they need).
- wkat4242 2y ago
  It has British in the name of course. Gotta tariff those leeches. /s
benterix 2y ago
Seems like a business opportunity to set up an import company on the Macdonald Islands and sell the goods to the poor folks in Norfolk Island.
rob74 2y ago
> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird. Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.
- ourmandave 2y ago
  , while Ukraine gets 10%. The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
  - matt-p 2y ago
    10% is the hard minimum, nobody has less than 10%, so ergo 10% is actually the most favourable rate. Even the UK gets 10% which is truly mad given we have balanced trade and tarrifs (if anything the US tariffed the UK more than they did them). ^So essentially MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports)
    - rob74 2y ago
      If you look at the full list (available e.g. here https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-2054514 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...), some countries (most prominently Russia) are not on it. Whether that means anything is debatable, but Mexico and Canada, who were explicitly "spared" from these tariffs (but have other tariffs "tailor-made" especially for them), are also not on the list.
      - matt-p 2y ago
        Russia is a interesting catch, but you can easily imagine why now is an inoptune time to piss them off. The others make sense since they have worse tarrifs (though different, yes)
      - 2y ago
rob74 2y ago
According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...): > Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were. In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year. Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?
- Symbiote 2y ago
  It could be a clerical error — intending to choose Haiti or Honduras, or maybe Hong Kong, and clicking or typing HM by mistake. Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.
  - JKCalhoun 2y ago
    That may be the stupidest explanation I have heard yet. It must be the correct one then. :-)
    - Symbiote 2y ago
      The Guardian are reporting essentially this, it's clerical errors of some kind: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revealed-how-trump-tariffs-slugged-norfolk-island-and-uninhabited-heard-and-mcdonald-islands https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
- matt-p 2y ago
  Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.
  - 2y ago
michaelhoney 2y ago
Probably because the tariff table was put together by an ignorant acolyte. They are not serious people.
xrd 2y ago
I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them." That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins. Doge should look into this inefficiency.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  But some of those places aren’t even countries. As already stated - weird. It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
  - blacklion 2y ago
    > It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out. Joke of the month.
  - 4ggr0 2y ago
    Thankfully this is the only thing which this administration hasn't thought out as well as it should have. Only barely four years left, yaaaay!
- matt-p 2y ago
  I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%. So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
- blacklion 2y ago
  For many countries patter look like ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import.
- jonasced 2y ago
  I'm not saying they make sense but according to the US Trade Representative this is the equation used to calculate the tariffs: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
asah 2y ago
This is to stop the practice of shipping things to a place, making a small change, then re-exporting from there to avoid tariffs.
- brookst 2y ago
  Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?
  - addicted 2y ago
    The problem is that the truth, that this was some haphazard nonsense thrown together at the last second using some ChatGPT prompts, is hard to believe, so people try to insert rationality where it doesn’t exist.
    - brookst 2y ago
      It probably already exists and I just can’t find it, but there’s some kind of law here about how some actions are so insane that they compel people to invent elaborate explanations to avoid the discomfort of recognizing insanity.
    - lostmsu 2y ago
      Funny thing is the assumption that having ChatGPT run a country is worse than elected politician is not as obvious as you might think.
- mateus1 2y ago
  That doesn’t hold water if you’re talking about uninhabited Antarctica territories.
viraptor 2y ago
If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.
rvba 2y ago
They knew what they were doing. They created a meme, a dead cat. Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.

re-thc 2y ago

> Not to mention 29% tariffs on Norfolk Island. Who hasn’t exported anything to the U.S. in years. Should have set that to 99% then eh?

vincnetas 2y ago
Well, you know, you can go even higher, you don't have to stop at 100% :) Infinity is the limit here ;D
wvh 2y ago
Tax the 99% seems pretty accurate.
sidewndr46 2y ago
It's a tariff, it could be infinity percent

himinlomax 2y ago

10% on British Indian Ocean Territories, whose sole inhabitants are US soldiers at the Diego Garcia base.

dathinab 2y ago
It's what you get if you let people which don't know what they are doing make decision about things they don't really understand without being open for consulting because they know better using only oversimplified statistics which often don't tell even half the story. Or at lest it looks a lot like this, honestly from its patterns it looks a lot like the decision making done at a previous employee where someone who was expert in one field got a lot of decision power and decided they now know better in every field and dear anyone says otherwise.
- Ray20 2y ago
  Isn't this just common sense? I mean, if there are no people/production/imports in a certain territory, it doesn't mean that all of this won't appear there literally tomorrow, especially when tariffs on goods from these territories are zero.
  - brookst 2y ago
    If that’s the thinking, they forgot Antarctica, the Marianas trench, and the Moon. Someone could, theoretically, take advantage of the lack of tariffs. I’m all for being charitable but at some point Occam’s razor says it’s just ChatGPT mistakenly including these places.
  - seszett 2y ago
    That doesn't seem likely, because they separately listed parts of France that are wholly in the EU (Martinique, Guadeloupe, Réunion and French Guiana, separate tariffs there are as meaningless as having separate tariffs for Berlin and Munich) but they also did not list those that are NOT part of the EU (EDIT one list I found does list French Polynesia, but not New Caledonia[0]) even though they are the ones where a separate rate would make the "most" sense (if any of this makes sense anyway). There is trade today between New Caledonia, or French Polynesia, and the US. They are probably going to be tariffed at the rate for France, which is probably going to be the one for the EU, but who knows, neither New Caledonia nor France itself are listed. It is really apparent that there is no understanding behind this half-assed list. [0]https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-the-full-list-of-trumps-reciprocal-tariffs-announced-wednesday/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/mollybohannon/2025/04/02/heres-...
  - wkat4242 2y ago
    If there are no people there is no government to trade with, no customs, no regulations. It takes a lot longer to set all of that up than it takes for Trump to just raise another tariff if that happens. So nobody would invest in that. It would only be a loophole for a week or so. So why bother doing this pre-emptively (even if that was the reason)?
kragen 2y ago
Where is this list posted by the US Government? These countries aren't in Annex I of the Executive Order.
ourmandave 2y ago
It's like they pulled a list "All Countries the US Trades With" off wikipedia and used that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_pa... Same clowns who made blanket cuts to every Federal dept and then had to walk a bunch of them back. There's no nuance or forethought, or realization of the long term damage they're doing.
- jeltz 2y ago
  Very likely that is literally what they did.
Symbiote 2y ago
Strictly speaking it also includes some British military and contract staff from other countries (cleaning, landscaping etc, whatever they need).
wkat4242 2y ago
It has British in the name of course. Gotta tariff those leeches. /s

benterix 2y ago

Seems like a business opportunity to set up an import company on the Macdonald Islands and sell the goods to the poor folks in Norfolk Island.

rob74 2y ago

> these are all internal territories of Australia. Why they get separate tariffs is weird. Probably because they had separate entries in a "list of countries" which they picked as a base for their list? I don't really think there was more thought put into that, especially not for the countries who "only" got the "baseline" tariff of 10%. Interestingly though, Russia seems to have been completely left out, while Ukraine gets 10%.

ourmandave 2y ago
, while Ukraine gets 10%. The Orange Emperor has a huge hard on to make Ukraine suffer ever since it led to his first impeachment. Zelenski didn't kiss the ring so down they go.
- matt-p 2y ago
  10% is the hard minimum, nobody has less than 10%, so ergo 10% is actually the most favourable rate. Even the UK gets 10% which is truly mad given we have balanced trade and tarrifs (if anything the US tariffed the UK more than they did them). ^So essentially MAX(10%,(imports-exports)/imports)
  - rob74 2y ago
    If you look at the full list (available e.g. here https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-2054514 https://www.newsweek.com/trump-reciprocal-tariff-chart-20545...), some countries (most prominently Russia) are not on it. Whether that means anything is debatable, but Mexico and Canada, who were explicitly "spared" from these tariffs (but have other tariffs "tailor-made" especially for them), are also not on the list.
    - matt-p 2y ago
      Russia is a interesting catch, but you can easily imagine why now is an inoptune time to piss them off. The others make sense since they have worse tarrifs (though different, yes)
    - 2y ago

rob74 2y ago

According to the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump-tariffs-antarctica-uninhabited-heard-mcdonald-islands https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/03/donald-trump...): > Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were. In the five years prior, imports from Heard Island and McDonald Islands ranged from US$15,000 (A$24,000) to US$325,000 (A$518,000) per year. Maybe someone has accidentally uncovered some kind of tax evasion scheme here?

Symbiote 2y ago
It could be a clerical error — intending to choose Haiti or Honduras, or maybe Hong Kong, and clicking or typing HM by mistake. Or maybe OCR is used somewhere and has made the error.
- JKCalhoun 2y ago
  That may be the stupidest explanation I have heard yet. It must be the correct one then. :-)
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    The Guardian are reporting essentially this, it's clerical errors of some kind: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revealed-how-trump-tariffs-slugged-norfolk-island-and-uninhabited-heard-and-mcdonald-islands https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/apr/04/revea...
matt-p 2y ago
Bizarre, tax/tariff evasion or "Mistake" does seem like the most likely explanation - yet US$1.4m is too little to bother evading tax on really. I mean that could be a refit on a boat or something -- $1.4Mn is literally nothing.
- 2y ago

michaelhoney 2y ago

Probably because the tariff table was put together by an ignorant acolyte. They are not serious people.

xrd 2y ago

I saw a post on X which said it was "vibe tariffing" and I think the person was speculating that the tariffs were probably generated using an LLM and saying "make me a tariff chart with ALL the countries and each one about 25% but randomize them." That's the only plausible explanation I can see. A human with any brains wouldn't put tariffs on islands only populated by penguins. Doge should look into this inefficiency.

lostlogin 2y ago
But some of those places aren’t even countries. As already stated - weird. It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out.
- blacklion 2y ago
  > It’s almost like it wasn’t well thought out. Joke of the month.
- 4ggr0 2y ago
  Thankfully this is the only thing which this administration hasn't thought out as well as it should have. Only barely four years left, yaaaay!
matt-p 2y ago
I think it's basically reciprocal adjusted for trade deficit, with a floor of 10%. So obviously you'll end up with 10% on all sorts of places where you actually have a trade surplus and no tarrifs on your goods, or, yes, islands inhabited only by penguins.
blacklion 2y ago
For many countries patter look like ($USA-import - $USA-export)/$USA-import.
jonasced 2y ago
I'm not saying they make sense but according to the US Trade Representative this is the equation used to calculate the tariffs: https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations

asah 2y ago

This is to stop the practice of shipping things to a place, making a small change, then re-exporting from there to avoid tariffs.

brookst 2y ago
Is that commonly done on uninhabited islands? Wouldn’t the shipping cost offset any gains? Where do you even make these small changes if there’s nobody there? And what does the export paperwork look like?
- addicted 2y ago
  The problem is that the truth, that this was some haphazard nonsense thrown together at the last second using some ChatGPT prompts, is hard to believe, so people try to insert rationality where it doesn’t exist.
  - brookst 2y ago
    It probably already exists and I just can’t find it, but there’s some kind of law here about how some actions are so insane that they compel people to invent elaborate explanations to avoid the discomfort of recognizing insanity.
  - lostmsu 2y ago
    Funny thing is the assumption that having ChatGPT run a country is worse than elected politician is not as obvious as you might think.
mateus1 2y ago
That doesn’t hold water if you’re talking about uninhabited Antarctica territories.

viraptor 2y ago

If this made any sense to begin with, then not excluding any region at all would make sense. Why leave some area which would become a theoretical middleman in trade just for purpose of tariff evasion? At least they'd be covered from the simple workarounds.

rvba 2y ago

They knew what they were doing. They created a meme, a dead cat. Then you waste time discussing the unimportant, "funny" topic, while the big picture is ignored.