Well, howdy there, Internet people, it's Bell again. So today, we're going to talk about Canada

simply calling Trump's Bluff and a question. Here's the message. Hello, Bell. I'm Canadian,

and I recently read an essay saying that we should simply call Trump's Bluff and drop all of our tariffs, not just our new ones,

but all of them. The essay said that we should drop them because Trump cares about trade imbalances,

and that if we dropped all of our tariffs, we would be able to say Canada is subsidizing the U.S.

and take his points. It also said that somehow we would come

out ahead economically. I'm wondering what you think of this, elbows up or down. So this is interesting.

It's interesting because it's both right and wrong at the same time. Let's start with the economics.

As hard as this might be to believe, from an economic standpoint, yes, it makes sense.

There's a reason free trade advocates have such a strong position in debates.

Without getting too deep into it, you've probably heard tariffs called trade barriers.

Generally speaking, less trade barriers means more trade. More trade means more money. If you dig

into it, you can find piles and piles of writings on this that get into the details. Now, that's taking economics totally out of

politics, but you can only do that in hypotheticals. Trade barriers often protect local industries.

Sometimes those local industries make up large voting blocks, which means good idea or not, I doubt you're going to

have this seriously proposed. Then you have the part in the essay about taking Trump's talking

points. Believing that matters in this case and that politicians in the U.S., especially Trump,

are somehow required or even expected

to maintain their rhetoric from week to week or even day to day was all the proof I needed

that both you and the author of the essay are both Canadian. Party loyalty in the U.S.

is so strong that people are ignoring direct harms their personally

suffering if it was their party who was at fault. Trump has no need to maintain consistency

...