This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, January 18th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

This week a revised North American Trade Agreement passed the Senate and the President achieved something

of a starter trade agreement with China. But whatever the terms of those agreements, Cato's

Simon Lester and Enomenic argue there's not much in them to constrain the administration

from engaging in future pointless tariff wars.

The good news about the phase one U.S US China trade deal is that it it prevents further tariff

escalation. We were scheduled to have more tariffs going into effect and this deal seems to

prevent that.

The bad news is it keeps just about all the previous tariffs in place.

There's a slight reduction in sum.

So basically, you know, we've just, we've created a status quo of these trade war tariffs and that's a big problem.

But that's where we are right now. Beyond the tariffs, the trade deal does some interesting and strange things.

Potentially, it gets rid of some Chinese trade barriers in agriculture and other areas.

There's some complicated rules.

We're going to have to see how it's implemented and see how it works.

That is a good part of the deal if it works.

A bad part is that there's an aspect of this deal that's really not

about trade opening at all. It's about managed trade and guaranteed purchases of U.S US products by China.

You know, China is committed to buying $200 billion of US products over two years beyond a 2017 baseline. And's just that's not that's not a trade

liberalization deal in any sense so it sets a really bad precedent it's

completely like unclear whether China can actually purchase that amount, whether the US has that amount to sell,

...