Not The Onion

15846 readers

2002 users here now

Welcome

We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!

The Rules

Posts must be:

Links to news stories from...
...credible sources, with...
...their original headlines, that...
...would make people who see the headline think, “That has got to be a story from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source.”

Please also avoid duplicates.

Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.

And that’s basically it!

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

392

US defends tariffs on remote island of penguins and seals (www.bbc.com)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

42 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 week ago (7 children)

tl;dr: They're claiming that it was to "prevent countries with tariffs from shipping through there to avoid tariffs."

The United States alleged the islands exported more goods to the United States than they imported, an allegation that appeared to be calculated from incorrect trade data. An analysis of U.S. import data and shipping records by The Guardian indicated some shipments were incorrectly labeled as coming from the remote islands instead of their correct countries of origin. According to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was "machinery and electrical" imports.[39]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heard_Island_and_McDonald_Islands

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

... Why were we allowing items into the country that were shipped through an uninhabited island to begin with? Like, that should be the red flag... They should treat it like losing your parking garage ticket, you pay the top rate.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago (2 children)

**... some shipments were incorrectly labeled as coming from the remote islands instead of their correct countries of origin. **

I even put it in bold.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah...I saw that. Hence my comment. Why would they allow that in? Even if it was labeled as that, they could do like I said in my comment and slap the highest tariff available on it - if that were the actual goal, and not an obvious lie to cover up their ineptitude.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

I agree, it's insane that customs ever accepted a fictional port on uninhabited islands as a point of origin in the first place. That's the loophole they should close. It does appear that that's a thing that did actually happen though, so it's not a complete fabrication. I'd say customs should have been authorized to confiscate any such good until a non-fictional provinence was proven.

load more comments (3 replies)