Hi, I'm Bill Crystal.

Welcome back to conversations.

I'm very pleased to be joined, I think for the fourth time,

by Scott Linsacom, Vice President for Economics and Trade at the Cato Institute, a weekly columnist now for the dispatch, which I really highly recommend Scott's weekly

analysis of economics in general, a lot of emphasis on trade, which is what we're going to talk

about today, trade and tariffs. We did three conversations back in the before times, I believe,

with Scott, and they're very much worth listening to still. A couple pandemic-related on supply.

You were good on the supply chain. You saw the problems with the supply chain stuff a little

before President Biden did, honestly, and that was that was, that was, that was prescient of you. And also, I think the original conversation we did, which was just really the case for it, not just, was the case for free trade. If only more people had paid attention to that. Maybe we wouldn't, but then we wouldn't have the excuse for this conversation, which is about the tariffs, and we're having it on, what are we on, August 7th, which is the day, actually, if I'm not mistaken, the tariffs come into effect, right? So very well timed. So I want to get into, and you were a lawyer who dealt with all this stuff in business, and I really am interested in getting beyond some of the general economic stuff. We've discussed that with others, Larry Summers, Jason Furman, to the sort of how it works in practice, what are producers do, what are consumers do, what are some of the less obvious effects of this new world we're entering, I guess. But I guess we should begin with a quick sort of scene setting of just, where are we? What is this new world?

I read the earnestly tried to read up on it last night and 10% for everyone, but then there's more

for some people, then there are carveouts for these kinds of goods, but it could be 100% on

this if Trump changes his mind about, I mean, it's kind of confusing, I would say.

It's confusing even for those of us who are paid to follow it, quite frankly.

We are at Cato right now trying to put together an entire website on trade complexity,

because, and we've, we're going to, it's going to have these massive files and all these

data visualizations, because it is really, really complicated.

I think the best place to start is at the beginning.

You know, in very late January,

President Trump announced a first,

kind of the opening salvo of tariffs on Canadian,

Mexican, and Chinese imports

on the grounds of a national emergency related to fentanyl.

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