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blibble 3 days ago

I'm not sure the US wants to bring attention to its massive trade surplus in services

if I was the EU I would have responded to the threats of goods tariffs with a threat of service tariffs that will start off slow and increase every month that tariffs remain in effect

initially 0% tax on Office 365/AWS/facebook+google ad sales, then after a year it's 20%, and so-on

delusional 3 days ago | parent [-]

That's exactly what they did. They didn't want to escalate the conflict, so they didn't end up using it. It's what they refer to as their "trade bazooka", and it's still around ready to be used.

blibble 3 days ago | parent [-]

it's not exactly what they did, because a "bazooka" is easy defeated by the same ratchet mechanism

the other side will never push enough at once to make bazooka style retaliation the correct strategy

sealeck 3 days ago | parent [-]

> because a "bazooka" is easy defeated by the same ratchet mechanism

That's an argument for capitulation in general: it's not an argument specifically against extending the field of scope to include services.