This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 29th, 2007. I'm Caleb Brown.

U.S. Senator Barack Obama thinks Americans should be willing to pay higher prices for

t-shirts and other textile goods to preserve the long declining

U.S. textile industry.

Dan Griswold, the director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies, says

the practical implications of a t-shirt tariff are what you would

expect from protectionism, higher prices at the expense of the poor, both in this country

and abroad.

It was quite a telling moment. It was the stadium full of

union activists and he was asked. Here we have American families, many of them on

tight budgets, going out and buying t-shirts to close their kids

clothes their kids and would they be asked to pay more for those shirts to support jobs

and Senator Obama said yes they'd be happy to pay a little bit more to save their job.

Well of course this was a sleight of hand because there are a hundred and fourteen million

U.S. households every one of them buying shirts every year.

I figure about forty shirts per year. There are less than half a

million workers in the whole textile and apparel industry overall. That's one third of

one percent of U.S. workers.

So here he was offering to protect a small share of workers

at the expense of American workers across the spectrum.

I figure a $5 per shirt tax would translate

into about $200 a year extra and of course that would be a very regressive tax

...