This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 15th, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

How will the negotiations over a new North American free trade agreement be held up, altered, or simply destroyed by the Trump tariffs on steel and aluminum?

Cato's Simon Lester and Enumonock joined me yesterday for a live

discussion for an addition of Cato Connects. What specifically has the

president pledged to do? On the tariffs president the president steel at 25%, aluminum at 10%.

We're missing a lot of important details, though,

like which countries these apply to,

and which products they apply to

because some particular products could be excluded from it.

So what we know now is that Canada and Mexico have been excluded.

There are close security partners, we're negotiating NAFTA with them.

All the other countries are supposed to come to the United States and try to negotiate

an exemption for themselves and they have until March 23rd to kind of make their case.

There's a lot of uncertainty right now as to what President Trump and the the trade team at USTR

are going to be asking for there's some speculation out there but we really

don't know so the next nine days is kind of kind of be a mad dash to figure out who these terrorists actually

apply to.

And at that point we'll have a much better sense of what the impact will be.

It's easy to say tariffs are bad, but how bad exactly? And you can't really measure it until you know who exactly

they're going to apply to.

All right so Eno with respect to NAFTA, the president has pledged, you know, the tariffs are going to be in place a long time,

he's tied it to NAFTA, and it seems like the fact that Mexico and Canada are exempted

...