President Trump ramped up his trade battles with countries around the world today

after he announced a plan for new reciprocal tariffs that could take effect this spring.

The tariffs would match the tax rates that other countries charge on American-made imports for allies and adversaries alike.

And the president insisted the tariffs would collect so much money they would help reduce the

debt. They say this is going to be the thing that makes our country really prosperous again.

And this is going to be what pays down to $36 trillion in debt and all the other things. And this is

going to be, this is an amazing day. I think there's going to be a very

big day in a very positive way for our country. Once again, there are many concerns about the

president's goals, questions about when the tariffs might take effect and the reaction to them.

Mark Zandi is chief economist at Moody's Analytics and joins us now. Mark, thanks for being with us.

Let's just begin with your reaction to today's announcement from President Trump,

the scope of what he's announcing and also the way in which the president is proposing a new regime of reciprocal tariffs here.

Yeah, I am worried about this.

It feels like the president's moving to broad-based tariffs, if not so-called universal tariffs, tariffs on every country and every product, something closer to that. And I think that's a problem. It means higher inflation for U.S. consumers. It's a tax on American consumers.

I mean, just to give you a sense of the magnitude of that, just the tariffs on Chinese import

imports in the U.S. the 10% tariff that President Trump just imposed, if sustained, that will

reduce the real purchasing power of the typical American family by between $200 and $250 a year.

So just do the arithmetic.

I'm not.

The impacts will be very serious.

And then it's going to cost jobs because it's unimaginable that the rest of the world is just going to stand still.

They're going to respond.

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