I'm John Batchel with my colleagues, Marcus Witcher and David Hubert.

Marcus, I come to you right away on this matter.

Did Americans understand when they went to the marketplace,

and I believe this would have been early days of Walmart, maybe not,

that the protectionism led to higher

prices. Did they talk about it? Did it become a thing to understand the protectionism was not

where we're going? Yes. So when Ronald Reagan came into office in 1981, he promised the American

people that he would get inflation under control.

Now, a large amount of the credit for that, of course, goes to Paul Volker and his monetary policy, right?

The tightening of the money supply.

But Reagan was always extraordinarily supportive of Volker.

And Reagan and the American people, I believe in the early 1980s, agreed and understood that tariffs are simply a tax on consumers, right?

They raise prices.

Much of the tariff cost is passed on to consumers by businesses.

And, of course, Reagan at his core, was opposed to these types of protectionist measures, right?

His economic agenda was to try and, quote, unquote, get government off the backs of the people through deregulation, tax cuts, right?

And freer trade.

A lot of the sort of foreign investment that Dave's talking about, we do see a rise in foreign investment in the 1980s and the 1990s, and I think a lot of that has to do with the deregulation

and the lower corporate tax rates that Reagan and future administrations, including the Clinton

administration, right, embraced. People often forget that the 1980s till about 2001 is actually

a pretty solid time of low taxes, deregulation, in which Democrats

and Republicans generally agree, right, that we should allow market processes to function,

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