One can be conservative and still disagree with some aspects of President Trump’s administration on tariff implementation.  Indeed, within the administration there was disagreement over the level of tariffs and whether they are just a negotiation tactic.  Apparently, contradicting some aides, particularly Peter Navarro, President Trump (who is very flexible) said he is open to negotiations.

One can even be liberal and agree, at least in principle, that free trade should be fair trade.  Even the UAW head, Shawn Fain, supports Trump’s auto tariffs.  Perhaps even more eye-opening is that Nancy Pelosi, in 1996, opposed Most Favored Nation trade status for China.  She was a regular congresswoman at the time, but could have been auditioning to be trade representative for Trump.

Back in the late 80s, Trump employed the same economic nationalism arguments as he does today, employing “the most beautiful word in the dictionary,” as a counter to trade deficits.  Nancy also presented a nationalistic, even antagonistic, demeanor compared to Trump’s fair approach.  She shrilly exposed our growing trade deficit and the resultant economic hardships for Americans.

While Nancy, and other liberals, agree in principle with fair trade, the ubiquitous AI chatbots agree on some of the Trump administration’s implementation.  Some zealous detractors maintain that the tariff pricing was founded upon a “deficit divided by exports” formula — that is, divide a country’s trade deficit by their total exports to the U.S., then halve that number to arrive at a “discounted reciprocal tariff.”  The White House denies that, and has published their actual tariff calculations here.

Apparently, asking AI agents for assistance in calculating trade levels that “even the playing field” yields results that resemble the “deficit divided by exports” formula.  Great — we are using efficient AI, just as Elon Musk is at DOGE.  What’s wrong with that? AI agents, after all, don’t waffle as much as economists. Even their hallucinations are greatly subsiding, and they are much smarter than “econo-missed” twits.

Interestingly, ChatCPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok provided remarkably consistent answers when prompted for a “way to solve trade deficits.”  The results are even more compelling when one considers that the respective leaders of ChatGPT (Altman) and Grok (Musk) are feuding.

Their AI visions and training paradigms are different.  The training that produces the AI chatbots’ large language models is different.  Grok is designed for real-time data access and insights. Musk, as is his wont, seeks to understand the universe, with Grok guiding the way. Apparently, it is also proficient at calculating formulas to achieve fairer trade.  It would be negligent to not use that resource.

ChatGPT is more a general-purpose text generator, but is also getting proficient with image and video creation.  Despite a different paradigm, it arrives at similar answers on tariff levels that will help to resolve trade imbalance, as do Gemini and Claude.

The rare agreement between Trump, Nancy, and the chatbots, suggests that our government needs more AI-enabled efficiency and insights, so it can do with fewer blabbering “econo-missed” types.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.