By coinnews 
00:00 Speaker A
to the point that Greg is making, one of the key questions from the investors on Wall Street who I talked to, they just want to understand what the goal was of these tariffs in the first place, so that they can have a framework for thinking about the administration’s moves going forward. Where have you gotten clarity on the administration’s specific goals when it comes to trade deals with China?
00:34 Steve
Well, first of all, I have to say I get much more clarity over the years in reading Greg Ip in the Wall Street Journal than I do from reading the policy statements from the, uh, the White House. Um, but his, you know, his point on, you know, how we got there is, you know, absolutely critical. And, um, you know, the the message is not in, uh, the actions that President Trump has taken, but in this sort of strange philosophical view that he has addressed that, um, America has been ripped off for decades, and we’re going to put a price tag on the ripoff in the form of these 10%, uh, minimum or universal tariffs as he, uh, calls it, and that is the price that we’re going to charge the rest of the world, uh, for taking advantage of us. And, you know, that is is a really high price relative to the tariff rates that have been, um, that we’ve been running over the last 30 years, which if you look at, uh, the numbers put together by, uh, a group at Yale, the Yale Budget Lab, our effective tariff rate for the rest of the world has been a little less than 2% over the past 30 years. So we’re going to go from two to 10, that’s a five-fold increase, uh, that’s a huge tax on our companies and on our trading partners and not without significant impacts on the broader global economy. So there’s, you know, not a whole lot of strategic wisdom in in this approach, in my view.
04:05 Speaker A
Kevin, I want to bring you back.
04:07 Kevin
Can can I just, uh, like say how much I agree with what Steve just said? I can make a case for why we should have a 39% tariff on China. I cannot make a case for why we have a 10% tariff on Great Britain. I mean, in fact, if you look at the actual underlying rationale, the 10% tariff on China is the same as the 10% tariff on Great Britain as part of the circle reciprocal tariff action announced on April 2nd. What was the purpose of that action? Supposedly, we were going to punish countries that were running acceptably unacceptably large trade surpluses with us. China is a geopolitical adversary with a huge surplus with us. Britain is a stalwart ally, our best ally with a trade deficit, uh, with us. And they both get 10%. I mean, what message does this send to the world about how the United States picks its friends?