Source: The Hill
by Phillip W Magness and Sara Albrecht
“When the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative unveiled its now-infamous ‘Liberation Day’ tariff formula in April 2025, economists quickly noticed that something was not right. At first glance, the formula looked impressive. It had Greek symbols, academic citations, and all the trappings of serious economic analysis. But once economists began examining it, the sophistication quickly fell away. Key terms, they noticed, effectively cancel one another out, leaving little more than a calculation driven by bilateral trade deficits. For one of us, an economist, that raised a simple question: How did this formula come to be? So he filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking the records behind it. … When the agency finally responded, it said it had found 31 pages of responsive records. It would release none of them — not one email, calculation or even redacted paragraph.” (08/20/26)