This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, March 6, 2018. I'm Caleb Brown.

The President has long threatened tariffs as a solution to protecting American jobs.

It still remains unlikely that raising prices for American industry and consumers

and also inviting retaliation from our trading partners

is really going to help the average American.

Cato's Dan Eikinson discusses the plan.

What authority does the president have to alter the trading arrangement for the United States?

Well, as you know, under the Constitution, Article 1, Section 8,

it is Congress that has authority over foreign commerce.

Over the years, it has delegated some of that authority to the President to impose trade

restrictions when certain conditions are met. In this case, President Trump

seems to be invoking section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which is a national security provision, which permits

the President to respond to perceived national security threats with tariffs and quotas

or other trade restrictions.

And, you know, in the background when Congress was handing this authority over to the president,

some of that made a lot of sense.

Certainly the national security exemption is all of that

we're certainly the national security exemption is all about cold war

considerations and was about you know responding to maybe Russian advances or

maybe something that we would want to

fortify our own domestic production to address.

But you know, what we really did from 1930 to the 1990s, we reduced our

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