Welcome to Money for the Rest of Us. This is a personal financial on money, how it works,

how to invest it and how to live without worrying about it.

I'm your host, David Stein, today is episode 427. It's titled, Did the Tariffs Work?

The Trade War, 5 years later. Last week, I went camping with my two sons,

Camden and Brett, and our daughter-in-law on Santa Cruz Island, which is part of the

Channel Islands. This is a 150-mile long island chain. It ranges between 12 and

70 miles off the coast of California. Santa Cruz Island is separated from the

mainland by the channel of Santa Barbara, and over those few days I would

occasionally look out into that channel as we were hiking or sea kayaking, and I

would see large cargo ships stacked with containers making their way to the

port of Los Angeles or the port of Long Beach. It got me wondering whether the

backlog at those ports that we saw during the pandemic, whether that has

subsided, and so when I got back I looked. And yeah, as of last November, the

Marine Exchange of Southern California, this is an industry working group. They

declared the ship backlog at those two ports had ended after 25 months. It

began in October 2020. There was heavy congestion as demand was much greater

than the capacity of the ports that was due to workers that were sick, but just

the sheer volume of goods ordered trying to go through those ports. Now, volume

is down at those two ports over the past year, partly because there's labor

negotiations and companies have started diverting some of that traffic to other

ports in the US. So even though the backlog is down, overall imports of goods

into the US continue to increase. In 2022, the US saw a record trade deficit. The

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