Donald Trump.

You have to shake hands with him first and hope he lets go . Don't forget to count your fingers afterwards

Just remind him not to forget what I said to him last time we met.

 

Hi @shiney if it was the same as you told me,neither of us will never forget

 

If that data is to be believed, and I have no reason to doubt it other than my normal cynicism, what's the quid pro quo? It's ridiculously one sided so there must be mitigating tariffs or other charges or that deal must have been signed while sleeping!

 

Can't comment on the figures but that can't be official with spelling and grammatical mistakes: "Vaccums" & "TV's" !

 

OK, let's take everything provided by government at face value and not question it. What could go wrong?

 

Sorry Redstar but I don’t think you will convince any of us that Trump is good.

 

"Keep your friends close and your enemies closer"

 

"Alex Salmond" and "no speaking" in the same sentence sounds like an ideal situation to me......

 

I can safely say that I have the same opinion of our leaders that I do of yours @redstar

 

I'm not getting into the rights and wrongs of the priciple of tariffs and who applies what but the NAFTA agreement was exactly what it says in its title. Free Trade.

As it stood, since the early 1990's, the tariffs were not actually free but were harmonised (similar both ways) and the official figures showed that - if people bothered to read the details. So there was no anomaly between tariffs between the signatories to the agreement - U.S., Canada and Mexico.

The figures above are supposedly official figures but don't tally with any official documents. If anyone really wants to wade through some of the documents then here are links to some of them:-

This link comes from Homeland Security, US Customs and Border Protection and is the 5th Amendment of the January 2018 Agreement. All amendments to the original agreement are basically similar.

North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) | U.S. Customs and Border Protection

It's only the equivalent of about ten pages but has links to most of the different sections.

This link gets down to the nitty gritty details of each commodity with links to the 99 Chapters of each commodity tariff.

Harmonized Tariff Schedule PDFs

Each link goes into detail and, as an example, this is the steel chapter (which comes under part of Base Metals) and is only 48 pages long.

https://hts.usitc.gov/view/Chapter 72?release=2018HTSARevision5_1

All these are the update versions on January 17th - before Trump made the decision to change things.

I'm used to having to find the correct figures for things in this country and it's the same in many countries. Most of what is published is abbreviated and cherry picked and almost certain to be incorrect (I try to avoid calling things 'fake news' but all sides of arguments use incorrectly extracted figures).