This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 17th, 2020. I'm Caleb Brown.

Amid a global pandemic, there are opportunities to both ease the movement of basic goods

that people need during this difficult time and spread goodwill elsewhere around the globe.

Cato's Simon Lester discusses the impact of the spreading coronavirus on international trade

and the good and bad of the administration response thus far.

In a moment when we have essentially a global pandemic of an infectious disease and people need

access to basic goods, particularly in countries where trade is not as robust as we might hope.

What are some changes that you recommend immediately that would

smooth the movement of goods to the people who need and want them?

Well one obvious place to look is that as part of the Trump administration's trade wars,

we've imposed tariffs on medical products, on imports of medical products.

And, you know, we in the trade policy world argued a lot about that, you know,

over the past couple of years, whether that made sense and us on the free trade side

tried to make the case for why these trade restrictions why these tariffs don't make sense but I think that

today in the face of this pandemic and with a great need for all kinds of

crucial medical products, masks, gloves, goggles, hospital beds, ventilators, it

makes a lot of sense to take the taxes off those products.

You know, clearly we're only harming ourselves by making these products more expensive.

What happened was we impose these tariffs on

imports from China and China said well fine we'll we'll send them somewhere else.

So I think that the first thing we can do is stop shooting ourselves in the foot and remove tariffs from on imports of medical products.

And the Trump administration has been reluctant to do that, but they have in the past few days taken out tariffs on a few of the most

...