This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, September 4, 2008. I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. tariffs on shoes often favor the well healed.

Higher tariffs often apply to shoes purchased by those with the lowest income.

Those shoes are often produced by people with even lower incomes than that.

So why put tariffs on products that are, by and large,

not even made in the United States?

U.S. Representative Earl Blumenauer spoke at the Cato Institute,

Capitol Hill briefing July 25th, and he addressed many of those concerns.

This is a segment of his talk. In my district, I've over the years done a lot of work with a homegrown little

company that could that's grown into more than a billion dollar enterprise Columbia Sportsware.

They import source in Asia.

One of their products is a boot from China that's called Diamond Peak. If you had a men's Diamond Peak boot and a

woman's Diamond Peak boot in front of you, I defy you to be able to determine any difference at all.

But if you looked at the label for the tariff bill, you would find that the men's boot is more than 15% higher for the tariff for an identical.

You know, there have been efforts on the federal government regulators to look at this.

There was one study in 1960 now, we're going back to the Eisenhower administration

that conceded the quote, economic justification is questionable.

Well, they raise the prices of imports,

and oftentimes there's a distorting effect because of the differential in terms of

tariffs where they are it influences the location of production

of fish locate facilities. is the location of production facilities, not where they are going to be the most efficient

and inexpensive overall, but playing the tariff game.

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