Chapters
00:00 - What are the current tariff levels?
02:21 - Examples of tariff carve-outs
14:20 - Political dynamics of tariffs
19:01 - Tariff impacts on consumers
33:32 - Tariffs as a foreign policy tool
34:00 - Can tariffs lead to freer trade?
36:24 - How tariffs affect foreign exporters
37:21 - Global trade agreements excluding the U.S.
38:27 - Trump's Brazil tariff threats
40:34 - Consumer goods and tariff costs
52:30 - Tariffs and price increase
57:06 - Treasury revenue from tariffs
59:58 - Tax cuts vs. tariff hikes
01:01:14 - Tariffs as a regressive tax
01:05:19 - Are tariffs less harmful than feared?
01:16:03 - Manufacturing and tariff challenges
01:19:45 - Economic growth and tariff effects
Touches on the uncertainty part:
The reality is that, if you are in business, importing, exporting, whatever, you know, if you're involved with this stuff and you don't know the exact tariff rate that applies today, tomorrow. You don't know what Trump's going to do next week with some new trade deal that he announces on Truth Social. Planning your business is really hard. Do you front load and try to get all your product in before the tariffs change? Do you wait because you think Trump's going to taco out? Trump always chickens out, so the tariffs are going to go away. Do you think there are going to be deals that make things better?
About back when Congress controlled tariffs:
It was really kind of one of the original smoke-filled room cronyism policy industries and created a lot of our modern lobbying system today. So Congress realized following Smoot-Hawley and two world wars that had trade angles to them, not caused by trade, but had rival trading blocks and stuff, Congress realized can't really be trusted with all this tariff power. And there's a foreign policy interest in a generally more open and non-discriminatory trading system where countries weren't getting into rival trading blocks and cutting each other off because that creates foreign policy and problems, maybe even worse. So, Congress delegated to the president two big powers.
Speculation about what this could all sum up to:
So that's another thing that we have to consider in all of this is it's not just about the United States and the other country. It's about the other country and all the other countries. Because what you've seen over the last few years, because Biden wasn't a big free trader, he wasn't doing anything on trade agreements. What you've seen over the last few years is governments just doing free trade deals with each other and leaving the United States out of it. And I think that that's going to be the kind of end game for all of this is the United States is going to have a pretty high unilateral tariff wall in place and other governments and countries and their people are going to be trading more freely with each other and just leaving us out of it.