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Welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about things falling apart.

This week featuring an entire three sentences about putting it back together again.

I am your host, Beowong, and today we are gathered here to talk about tariffs.

Oh boy, it has been a massive two weeks of tariff news, the most important aspect of which has been finally getting a resolution

to what was going on with the Liberation Day turf tariffs that Trump tried to impose at the

beginning of his time in office. On July 31st, we finally actually found out to what those tariffs

were going to look like, and what those tariffs were going to look like is per CNN. Effectively what happened is that roughly if the U.S. runs a trade

deficit with you, you get a 15% tariff, and you get a 10% tariff if we run a trade surplus

with you. Now, there's a bunch of other individual rates.

We'll get to some of them in a second.

But it's worth emphasizing that this doesn't make any sense.

So, okay, before we get into the structural effects of this,

I want to sort of look at what the nominal

stated justification for imposing these tariffs are and how they're at odds with each other.

And this is a point where we'll turn to later.

Part of the justification for the tariffs is that, okay, they're trying to use tariffs to

replace the income tax.

That's nonsense.

It's gibberish. You literally cannot raise enough money through tariffs to replace the income tax. But, okay, that's

the thing that they want to do. The other nominal justification, and this is what's being used

...