This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, June 25th, 2018. I'm Keynab Brown.

A new round of trading barriers are going up. China is again pledging to retaliate against a broader range of tariffs promised by the

Trump administration.

Where does this trade war end?

And when will consumers begin to feel the pinch in the form of higher prices and where?

Cato's Simon Lester and Colin Grabo discussed the worsening trading relationship.

When we look back on pieces of legislation like the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which is trotted out every single time by free traders anytime we want to point out the negative effects of tariffs but those

were thousands of line items of individual items to which on which tariffs would

apply this seems like a fairly narrow range of products. Is that right?

So far, it's a much narrow range of products.

Yeah, in the days of Smoot Holly, you had Congress just

make adjustments and raise them or lower them and Smoot Holly was a instance where they

raised all of them at once.

What we're dealing with today is a little bit different.

You have Congress delegating a certain

trade authority to the president and under two specific pieces of legislation the president has the authority to raise

tariffs for specific reasons and that's what we're dealing with here sort of

targeted tariffs you know it's not every tariff across the board, but it is sort of an escalating amount of tariffs.

Some of the numbers being thrown around by the president in tweets and elsewhere are getting

pretty high. So we're not at all, you know,

we're not at the place where we're putting tariffs on all imports,

but it's a rising number, so it is a reason to be concerned.

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