This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 4th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

President Obama's record on trade is not good and history doesn't look well upon the combination of protectionism and recession.

Dan Griswold is director of the Cato Institute's Center for Trade Policy Studies.

He's author of the new Cato book Mad About Trade, available at Cato.org.

Give me a charitable assessment of what you think President Obama is trying to do with protectionism?

I think President Obama just wants the trade issue to go away.

Key constituencies like organized labor, the Greens, the Left generally, hate trade liberalization because it's an important aspect of free markets and free market economics.

Organized labors come out strongly against trade. That's why he imposed the

tire tariff. That's why he's dragging his feet on trade agreements with Colombia and South Korea.

He talks free trade and global fora,

but his actions at home have shown that he doesn't want trade liberalization.

President Obama fancies himself a champion of the poor.

His record in Chicago, I think to some degree bears that out.

But as a politician, it is easy to support a policy whose effects are largely

going to be unseen and as a politician your hands are going to be relatively clean when that policy actually harms people you want to help.

Yes, once again there's a disconnect between what he says and what he does.

The dirty secret of the US tariffiff Code is that it's heavily biased

against the poor. 25 billion dollars that we collect from tariffs each year is the

most regressive tax in the arsenal of the federal government.

We impose our highest trade barriers on products that are disproportionately consumed by poor people

here in the United States and by the way made and grown by poor people abroad.

Food, clothing, shoes. And as I pointed out in a recent

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