The Political Economy Of Tariffs

Economic Update with Richard D. Wolff

Democracy at Work

Coops, Economics, Economy, Workercooperative, Capitalism, Politics, News, Government

4.8 • 1.9K Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this week’s Economic Update, Professor Richard Wolff devotes the entire program to an analysis of tariffs. We discuss why tariffs are not a worker's issue, why capitalism's continuous swings between free trade and protectionist periods and phases make little impact on workers, and why competing capitalists seek to get workers to support their positions on tariffs.

We end our show with an interview David Van Deusen, a socialist and leader of Vermont AFL-CIO.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	And the Welcome friends to another edition of Economic Update, a weekly program devoted to the economic
0:26.0	dimensions of our lives and those of our children.
0:29.6	I'm your host, Richard Wolf.
0:31.9	Want to remind you, please send in suggestions and
0:35.7	proposals of information or topics you'd like us to cover to Charlie Fabian who's
0:42.0	handling those for us. You can reach him at Charlie.
0:46.7	info 438.gmail.com.
0:52.1	Today's program is devoted to email.
0:53.0	Today's program is devoted to an issue that has come up so often over the years
0:59.0	that periodically it's time to stop, take a little while, and go through it, so it stops
1:08.2	being abused as is so often the case. I'm talking about tariffs and how they impact your job and
1:21.2	everybody else's.
1:24.0	The claim is made by the government of the United States, for example,
1:30.0	President Biden, and by the way, same argument is made by ex-President Trump.
1:36.2	The argument goes like this, tariffs, and I'll explain in a minute what those are, tariffs protect jobs.
1:50.0	A tariff is good for your job. It protects it.
1:56.7	And therefore it's good for us as a country
2:00.3	to impose tariffs because they protect jobs.
2:09.6	Let me explain then what that means. First, a tariff is a tax.
2:17.0	Don't be mystified by the name.
2:20.0	It's just a special tax, and so it came to acquire a special name.
2:26.6	Here's how it works.
	...

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