Trump's Tariff Math Is 'All Wrong'

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The math isn't mathing…
The data on which President Donald Trump based his tariff policy may not have been calculated correctly.

According to University of Chicago Booth School of Business economist Brent Neiman — who co-wrote the academic work that the commander-in-chief used to legitimatize his newly implemented taxes on goods from outside the country — the right-wing administration interpreted the numbers all wrong.
Keep reading to see what he had to say…
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During a ceremony in the Rose Garden at the White House on Wednesday, April 2, Donald Trump held up a poster that highlighted how the tariffs would be "charged" to America as well as the "discounted" tariffs the U.S. would implement in response.
"Taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years," the Republican leader declared during the gathering. "But it is not going to happen anymore."

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Despite Donald Trump looking like he had all of the concrete data, one of the men who crunched the numbers, Brent Neiman, was startled by how the president used the research.
"They got it all wrong. My immediate thought was 'Gosh, how could those numbers be so high?'" the economist wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times on Monday, April 7.

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According to Brent Neiman, the numbers Donald Trump cited are not tariffs against America but rather a calculation of the trade deficits between the U.S. and other countries.
"I think they grabbed the wrong number from our research. The one that I would use from my own research and plug into their equation is actually four times larger than the number they used and as a result, the deficits they calculated are four times larger than I think they should have got," he explained. "The last thing I wanted was my work to be described as leading to these policies, which I think are really bad for Americans."

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Northwestern University economist Martin Eichenbaum also backed up Brent Neiman's claim that the research was misinterpreted by Donald Trump and his administration.
"We trade both in goods and services, and apparently they only use goods and that makes a huge difference, because we export a lot of services, like finance, entertainment, health, universities, right?" he said, according to ABC7 Chicago.