More complex than I realized!-----The President has announced that his newest effort - and if he can pull it off, it's going to be the biggest deal in the history of commerce - is to create truly fair trade by designing tariffs to be reciprocal.

That's not as easy as you might think. - John F. Di Leo 

• Let's say we have a 2% tariff on a product, and if you want to sell it here, you can, and there's a program called UL which is optional and a lot of customers would like if you get UL approval for it, but it's not mandatory.
• And let's say this other country charges 6% duty on the product but also has a 23% VAT and mandates that your product MUST be registered and approved by a government testing and certification program which will take a year to accomplish and cost a hundred grand or so.

When we usually think of tariffs, we'd just look at the beginning of those two paragraphs, and say "see, we have a low tariff and they have a higher one, we should demand that we equalize them."

• But that wouldn't REALLY be enough to equalize things, now, would it?...