'Blow your mind': Experts expose new 'major math error' in Trump trade formula
Experts from a conservative think tank are challenging "bad math" in President Donald Trump's complicated-looking formula explaining why he thinks tariffs are a good idea.
CNN's John Berman exclaimed, "This is going to blow your mind here!" when introducing two economists with The American Enterprise Institute who pointed out the "major math error" to the Trump administration.
Dr. Stan Veuger explained that the administration "picked the wrong number" based on the results of a research paper to fill in one of the Greek symbols used "to make their approach look a little more sophisticated." The result made each tariff "four times bigger" than they would have been had they used the right number.
"I don't think much of the approach makes sense, even conceptually," Veuger said. "But if we're going to take their approach seriously, if we're going to say, 'We're going to base our tariffs, our entire international trading system, on this formula,' they have to put in the right numbers and do the calculation correctly."
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Berman asked, "Have you taken this to them? Have they acknowledged that they have a bum number in here?"
"They have not disagreed with us on the substance," Veuger answered. "In fact, what we've seen is that senior members of the administration — Steve Miran, yesterday, who's the chairman of the council of economic advisers, Scott Bessent this morning, who is the treasury secretary — they have both said, 'We had nothing to do with this formula. That was other people in the administration.'
"Normally, if you're convinced of the accuracy, the wisdom of your policies, you do not point fingers at other people in the administration and say, 'They came up with this, we did not.'"
Dr. Kevin Corinth added, "It's important to point out that we're talking about corrected tariffs. These are not the correct tariffs; we're just saying if you apply their formula correctly, they should have been a fourth as high as what they're saying they should be. But we are not at all endorsing this approach...To say that we should only base these tariffs on the trade deficit is just bad economics."