Economist Justin Wolfer thinks we need to preface today's show about long-awaited tariff arguments at the Supreme Court with a warning.

You see, Justin is not a lawyer.

Like, really, not.

I try to talk to lawyers as little as possible. I started law school once. I was terrible at it.

I've met lawyers at dinner parties. I don't really like them. And I've gone over to law school,

and all they do is argue with each other. And yet today you were pressed into service because...

Why you?

Just for the listeners, Mary called me and said,

could you listen to this?

And I told her I'm the worst lawyer in North America.

But he agreed to do it anyway, friends.

I listened to the arguments and became even more glad I'm not a lawyer.

Justin says that because as an economist, he's very clear-eyed about what a tariff is.

I teach tariffs. I know what a tariff is. I wrote a textbook.

At this point, Justin is feeling around on the shelf behind him.

The textbook's right here. The tariff is defined as a tax on imports.

He is sounding agitated here because one of the central arguments President Trump's attorney

seemed to be making yesterday is that a tariff is in fact not a tax.

Taxes you see are levied by Congress, not the president. The government's lawyer

said, well, we don't need a delegation of the power to tax because this is a regulatory

tariff, not a revenue tariff. They were saying the revenue gathering here is incidental.

By the way, the president's boasting how much revenue he's raising. By the way, much of the case he made for this was about revenue. And I listened to this argument and I took it totally seriously for about 10 minutes. And then I remembered, I have never heard of the word regulatory tariff. It doesn't exist. Watching these arguments, it seemed to me, things didn't go great for the government.

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