This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 21st,

2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The President's call for buy American provisions embedded into government

infrastructure plans are counterproductive in a

ways and will end up costing Americans far more than it should.

Cato's Colin Gravo explains.

We're recording this a couple of days after Joe Biden gave his State of the Union address and what was notable from the trade front there?

Well, what I found notable about Biden's speech was his talk about buying American

producing things in the United States. I think he specifically said we need to make more cars and

semiconductors in America and then he also said that we should rely, we should not

rely on foreign supply chains. We should do it here in the United States instead of abroad, I think was one theme of his speech.

And specifically on the Buy American provisions, he's talking specifically about government purchases right at least

it's not the speech that that's my understanding of what he's referring to. These are requirements that when the government purchases certain products, for example, when it is funding infrastructure projects, that the materials used in that infrastructure project,

the steel and iron, for example,

or even under new legislation,

the drywall even has to be sourced from Americans.

So I think that's, I suspect that that's what President Biden was referring to,

and it's very much in keeping with his enthusiasm for Buy American provisions.

And if you if you like global supply chains, if you like them to exist, to provide goods and services to people around the world, the notion that the U.S. should

become less dependent, less interdependent on global supply chains, that's at least a little troubling. It is. I think that a lot of people

they think of Americans using foreign supply chains and talk of dependency, I think dependency inherently has a negative

...