Tariffs are a hot topic this election cycle for both President Biden and former President Trump. But why are tariffs so popular despite their economic downsides? In this episode, we unpack tariffs’ role in the political playbook, their impact on manufacturing jobs and consumers, and the Biden administration's review of Trump-era tariffs.
Erica York, Senior Economist and Research Director at the Tax Foundation, joins Kyle Hulehan to break down the basics of tariffs, explore historical tariff failures, and discuss the potential long-term effects of maintaining or increasing tariffs.
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Tariffs are a hot topic this election cycle for both President Biden and former President Trump. But why are tariffs so popular despite their economic downsides? In this episode, we unpack tariffs’ role in the political playbook, their impact on manufacturing jobs and consumers, and the Biden administration's review of Trump-era tariffs.
Erica York, Senior Economist and Research Director at the Tax Foundation, joins Kyle Hulehan to break down the basics of tariffs, explore historical tariff failures, and discuss the potential long-term effects of maintaining or increasing tariffs.
Links:
Follow us!
https://twitter.com/TaxFoundation
https://twitter.com/deductionpod
Support the show
Tariffs are a hot topic in this election cycle for both president Biden and former president Trump. But why are tariffs so popular despite their economic downsides? In this episode, we unpack tariff's role in the political playbook, their impact on manufacturing, jobs and consumers, And the Biden administration's review of the Trump era tariffs. Hello, and welcome to the Deduction, a Tax Foundation podcast. I'm your host, Kyle Houlihan, and today we are joined by Erika York, Senior Economist and Research Director here at TF. Erika, how are you doing today?
Erica York:Hey, doing pretty well, Kyle. Thanks.
Kyle Hulehan:Yeah. you know, there's no need to dilly dally here. we can get down to it. we're talking tariffs today, which have been in the news a bit recently, so let's just start with the absolute basics. What is a tariff? What are they for? Why do countries use them?
Erica York:Yeah, a tariff is a type of tax. It's a tax that is applied to imports or goods that people in one country purchase from businesses in a foreign country. And so a tariff is levied when that import is brought into the home country, say someone in the U.S. Buys something from China, When that comes through customs, the person in the U. S. who is buying that good from China pays the tariff to the U.S. Government. so countries have used tariffs for a number of reasons. Historically in the United States, for example, tariffs were one of the first sources of revenue that the U.S. Government imposed. And that's just because of the ease of administration. If you think of the number of ports when the U.S. Government first started, there were a few ports. It was easy to collect tax revenue that way. There was really no mechanism to collect revenue as a major source of revenue in any other way, like an income tax or something. So tariffs are a source of revenue for governments. Typically now, though, they're less important as a source of revenue because countries rely on bigger things like income taxes. And so now the reason we see tariffs, Coming back into use is for protection because tariffs apply a tax to foreign goods. They make foreign goods relatively more expensive compared to a domestically produced substitute. And so the idea is, oh, we're going to place a tax on foreign goods so that our consumers in our home country. Buy domestic stuff instead. Of course, what this means for consumers is that stuff costs more or you have less access to stuff. And so that's the way that governments use tariffs as a so called tool to manage trade and to distort consumer choices towards domestically produced alternatives.
Kyle Hulehan:Okay, gotcha. It is interesting that it's the, original sort of source there. That's historically interesting and not something I necessarily realized at first. But it makes sense. And now, switching to our more modern circumstances here, the Biden administration recently looked into the tariffs that Trump placed on China. And what did they find out about the effects of those tariffs, especially on, manufacturing jobs and prices for consumers?
Erica York:These are the section 301 tariffs that the Trump administration originally imposed on billions of dollars worth of stuff that we buy from China. That's like consumer goods, it's also intermediate goods and capital goods. Those are things that, U.S. Businesses buy to use in their own production processes. So inputs or machinery and equipment that they use in their own business. And those tariffs had been in place for four years. And at that point, the Biden administration was in office and was statutorily required to Initiate a review of those tariffs and so that review has now culminated and they found what economists have been saying would happen when you impose tariffs and that's that they increased costs, especially for U.S. Businesses. That makes it harder to do Business in the U.S. Harder to produce stuff when it costs more to produce stuff, and it also increases prices for consumers. So the Biden administration review, looked at all of this economic evidence. That's come from academics. That's come from the Federal Reserve. That has even come from, you know, U.S. Government studies of the tariffs and is essentially found that on net the tariffs had a negative impact on the U.S. Economy, particularly within the manufacturing sector. They had a net negative impact because of increasing input costs for U.S. Businesses. They did protect some sectors. So think of like the steel sector when foreign steel becomes more expensive, domestic steel production can increase, but that means that all the users of domestic steel, like auto manufacturers, parts and equipment manufacturers, they face higher prices. There are more of those steel consumers than there are steel producers, so the net impact is higher. Has been found to be negative. they also found, and I think this is pretty interesting, that nearly 100 percent of the cost of the tariffs has passed through to the U.S. Economy. So there's some thinking, you know, when you impose a tariff, you're Some portion of that burden might be borne by the foreign seller if they lower their prices to try to remain competitive, even after the tariff. That really didn't happen. For the most part, those foreign prices stayed the same, and the tariff passed fully through to U.S. Consumers. So the result of this investigation found the tariffs had a net negative impact. They also found that they weren't successful in achieving their primary policy goal, which was to address IP theft practices that China engages in, stealing intellectual property, requiring forced technology transfer from U.S. companies that operate in China. And the report had this line that was essentially, China hasn't really stopped these practices and in some cases has become even more aggressive on the cyber theft front. So tariffs had a bad impact on the economy. They didn't fix China's practices and yet the recommendation of the report was we should maintain all of the tariffs that were in place and we should increase some of them. So yeah,
Kyle Hulehan:That doesn't make a lot of sense to me. and if you're listening to this and you're confused, you're on the right track. you know, like the one thing that's on my mind with this, and I think it's on everybody's mind right now is how expensive everything feels. So when you tell me. You know that 100 percent is passed on to us consumers and business owners, you know, whether it's at the grocery store or whether you're buying steel for your company or you're trying to get a new car, everything costs more. And, I think, we can say that's attributed to these tariffs. They're increasing the cost of everything and that gets passed down to us consumers. And I get that in theory tariffs are supposed to protect industries. But these trade policies are affecting our wallets.
Erica York:yeah. Economically it's it should be a no brainer. These policies don't work. they increase costs for consumers and they do protect these industries that receive, you know, a shelter from foreign competition, but that's just like the first order of fact, if you only look at those who are protected and you ignore all these costs over here, you reach the conclusions that the politicians reach, which is hey, it's really good to protect these sectors because I can score political points. I get to say, hey, you know, look at this factory that didn't close or, you know, like what, whatever it may be, but then you're just ignoring these dispersed costs that fall on the American taxpayer, the American worker. Overall, and those costs add up to significantly more than the small benefits of the protected industry, but they're harder to see. And so it creates this situation where economically, it's really clear that this policy doesn't work, but politically, it's easy to spin it as a winning message. And I think that's why we're seeing both candidates, Biden and Trump, run on this message of, yeah, we're going to increase tariffs because we're going to protect the American worker, even though in economic reality, it's not protecting the American worker overall. It's protecting politically connected constituency, whether it's, you know, steel workers in Pennsylvania and Ohio or whatever it may be at the expense of the rest of us.
Kyle Hulehan:Yeah. And I think the really big thing here is like what you're talking about, those downstream effects, who it's affecting as consumers. It has a broader impact than maybe, a specific industry. I want to ask you about, you know, as a result of these section 301 tariffs on China, the Biden administration wants to propose higher tariffs on things like electric vehicles and solar panels. what's the goal here of raising those tariffs? will those help us industries grow or compete better? what's the point of that?
Erica York:The Biden administration is proposing 100 percent tariffs on Chinese EVs, doubling tariffs on EV battery components, solar panel tariffs, some other critical minerals that go into clean tech. they're trying to spend this as a, like a strategic use of tariffs because they're targeting a relatively narrow segment of goods. Overall, it amounts to about 18 billion worth of imports from China that will face these higher tariffs when they come online, some are scheduled for this year. As well as the next couple of years to try to give companies time to react. The idea is that, Oh, us industry needs some protection so it can get off the ground so we can ramp up production so we can get workers and factories in place. It's also paired with the billions and billions of subsidies we've seen in these industrial policy, legislation that has been enacted, the Inflation Reduction Act with its clean energy, tax credits, and the CHIPS Act with its semiconductor tax credits. So the idea is we're subsidizing production and consumption and we're also slapping tariffs on imports to shut out foreign competition. Will it work? my guess is no. We will see the subsidies stimulate activity in these sectors. We will see the tariffs continue to shut out imports of these goods from China. That doesn't change the underlying fundamentals. And if we look back on history, what you typically see when you shelter an industry from competitive forces is that it doesn't use those rents, those extra profits it gets from that protection to funnel into innovation and R and D and capital expenditures and actually get off the ground and become competitive uses it to drag its feet to enjoy those higher profits by rewarding its CEO and shareholders with, extra compensation. And we've seen this play out in industry after industry. So if we don't change these like bigger picture policy issues. whether it's worker shortages, permitting regulatory barriers that increase the cost of doing business in the U.S. If all that stays the same, we're just slapping these temporary band aids on top of that situation. We're not fundamentally changing, the underlying economics of what will improve U.S. Investment. So I think it's a very wasteful endeavor. it's going to cost us consumers a lot by raising prices here. It's going to probably cost overall productivity growth because we're distorting where investment is going and it's going after, you know, government subsidies. There's a lot of rent seeking and corruption and political connections that go on with this, so I don't think we're going to have a really winning strategy coming out of this mix of industrial policy and protection.
Kyle Hulehan:I think what's interesting about this is these, you know, more tariffs, these added tariffs are being sold as strategic, but there's not much that's strategic about it. They're just keeping everything in place and adding some stuff on top of it. And that to me is pretty confusing and strange and, yeah,
Erica York:Yeah, the narrative that it's strategic because they're targeting 18 billion worth of goods, like ignores that they're also keeping 100 percent of all of the existing tariffs, which have been called unstrategic. there's Videos and quotes from Biden when he was on the campaign trail, saying that, you know, my predecessor Trump didn't understand like economics 101 of these tariffs, they're paid by the American consumer. And yet now we have President Biden saying, yeah, we're going to keep 100 percent of those tariffs that he's formally said were. Not a good idea and we're paid by the American consumer So I think it boils down again to this like the economics are very clear here. We know how this plays out We've seen it play out time and time again, but the politics it's a political strategy and that's what it comes down to
Kyle Hulehan:that's what we're going to dive into here a little bit more in this question. These tariffs, they're a hot topic in this election cycle. They're much more newsy than maybe we expected. Why do you think that despite the economic downsides that are very clear in the data, they remain this popular policy choice in both Biden and Trump's election strategy?
Erica York:I think it's twofold. So one, there are clear beneficiaries of tariffs. if you're an industry that's facing stiff competition abroad and your choices, I'm going to have to find a new innovative way to do my business. I'm going to have to upgrade my facilities, redo my production processes, invest in R and D, make my product fit what foreign consumers want so I can be competitive out there. Or. I can get tariff protection from the U.S. Government and not have to do all that. I can keep doing business the same way and now still earn my profit. it's very clear that there's an easier path there, and that's what protection grants. So protection allows a politician to say, you're my constituent, I'm going to protect you, and I'm going to get your votes in the next election, just to take a like very cynical view of it. And then there's like the general public channel. if you ask someone on the street, Hey, should we tax the way a politician phrases it, should we tax foreign producers to help our domestic producers here at home? It's Oh yeah, absolutely. That sounds great. Because to someone who hasn't thought through the second and third-order effects and who just takes the politician at their word We're taxing China yeah, absolutely. That sounds great So there's this educational disconnect and this political messaging around tariffs where I think people who are for free markets who are for free trade We have a lot of work to do and explaining like no, here's actually what happens. So there's this, concept in economics, it's called the Lerner, Symmetry Theorem. And it is this, fundamental theorem in international economics that a tax on imports is equivalent to a tax on exports. So if you went and asked that same person, Hey, should we place a 10 percent tax on U.S. Soybean exports or U.S. Auto exports? That person would say, no, why would we want to tax our exporters? That would hurt them. That would make it harder for them to sell in the international market. And then you say, well, that's exactly what an import tax is. They're, they are equivalent because of currency, appreciation and, all these channels that we could get into if we wanted to talk like in the weeds, they are equivalent. So I think making it clear to taxpayers, Hey, this is a tax paid by you, the consumer, it makes it harder for us businesses to sell their products. I think that needs to be made more clear in order for people to realize, Oh, Hey, this policy doesn't actually make sense the way that these presidential candidates are talking about it. It's not actually how it works.
Kyle Hulehan:And see, this is why we bring someone like Erica on the show, because you're going to find out about Lerner symmetry theorem, like this is what you're going to get. And I think this is incredibly interesting. And fascinating stuff. And it goes to show us that it is, you know, attacks on us. And in theory it's not, but like effectively it becomes attacks on us. and I think that's really interesting the way that you broke that down for us. I mean, this is a little bit cynical on my part, but I think to some degree, like a lot of it feels like PR, like it's good PR. It's good press. And, you know, we unfortunately, you know, in my opinion, don't have candidates right now speaking to nuance of situations nuance. economically and in various political situations. and that to me is incredibly frustrating. and you know, I think it's more good headlines than data driven, in my opinion. that it's just, it's very frustrating.
Erica York:I 100 percent agree. It is. We've got, you know, one candidate saying China pays the tariffs. We've got the other candidate saying, well, my tariffs are strategic. And it's no, you're both wrong. but that's where we are today.
Kyle Hulehan:Yeah, and I think right now is also a good opportunity to, you know, take a look back. I think history always paints a good picture for us. You know, they say history repeats itself and to some degree it kind of does, you know. So when we look back, there are some clear examples of tariffs not working out. As planned, like with the Bush steel tariffs, the smooth Holly tariffs, the tariff of abominations, which we've actually mentioned before. you know, what went wrong with these? And what lessons can we learn from them?
Erica York:I would point to a book called Clashing Over Commerce by Douglas Irwin. It's like this 800 plus page book that looks at U.S. trade policy partway through it. But you see this almost exact same debate playing out century after century. So if if we go back to the Tariff of Abominations, this is the Tariff Act of 1828. It's a similar debate. You have manufacturing, Centered economies and the North who want protection from imports from Great Britain. You have Southern agriculture exporting, you know, their commodities to Great Britain. They still want access to those international markets and the debate is essentially Are we going to protect manufacturing at the expense of consumers who will have to face higher prices for the goods if they buy them from these domestic manufacturers instead of foreign manufacturers? And are we also going to essentially redistribute income from agriculture producers who will have a harder time exporting on the foreign market because of this tariff? To those protected, manufacturers. So it's the same debate. Are we going to impose a tariff, which is a tax on U.S. consumers in some businesses that essentially redistributes income away from consumers and downstream industries to the protected industries? And the debate plays out, they end up getting a really high tariff. it's a high tariff on intermediate inputs. like we saw with the China tariff. It's also a high tariff on final goods, and it's essentially so bad they nickname it the tariff of abominations, and it leads to the nullification crisis where South Carolina's we're not gonna enforce this. This is so bad for us. And they end up working out a compromise. But it was one of the. biggest constitutional crises that, that the new nation had encountered because of this debate about the tariff and who are we going to redistribute income from and to, and is the purpose of the tariff to raise revenue or is the purpose to protect? it was one of those debates. Similar debate then plays out in the late 1920s through early 1930s when we ended up with the Holly smooth tariff and, This one I think is, there's a chart in Irwin's book that shows like how many pages these tariff bills were growing to because of how intricate and detailed they were getting down to we're going to place a tariff on bottle caps that are not painted that have a wax seal versus bottle caps that are painted and don't have a wax seal. And essentially what that's telling you is that, constituents from every district were in there lobbying their congressman to hey, we want protection for this, but not for this. And so the tariff schedule, you know, gets past like 3000 specific products and each one gets its own special rate. And it just becomes this like opportunity for rent seeking and for politicians to grant favors to their preferred constituency and this huge mess that happens when you open up protectionism. And again, in each case, it backfires. It costs U.S. consumers in the case of Holly Smoot invited foreign retaliation. Led to a significant decrease in global trade. Also was occurring alongside the Great Depression and financial crisis. the banking crisis in the U.S. And what we see each time with these tariffs is that they don't play out how politicians say they will. They end up costing U.S. consumers. They end up costing U.S. businesses. They do grant protection to some industries, but those industries use that protection, again, just to reward. their favor seeking activity rather than to become competitive and so I It's kind of discouraging to see us like having this same debate again when we've had the experience in the 1700s and 1800s And 1900s and it's like we've got so many historical examples that tell us exactly what's gonna happen when a tariff goes into place, but we seem to think oh no, this time it's going to be really strategic and we're going to do it right. And nobody's going to have to pay anything more and everybody's going to win. It's no, that's just not the case.
Kyle Hulehan:really throughout history is it's a tale as old as time, and it's not a good one. It's not a good story. And we see it again and again. And these are some pretty dramatic examples. and I think, there's this kind of silly analogy that, that my dad uses a lot that I think is apt here with tariffs is, it's like trying to fix, a crooked table by sawing off a leg, like you can balance it for a second, but then it just, it's always going to be unstable forever. And it's always going to wobble. And like, it's these, After effects that you're talking about the second and third order effects, which is really just the downstream effects of it I believe and you know you enact tariffs and you eventually are getting to a place where you're hurting the american people by raising prices.
Erica York:Yeah, that's exactly right. It's, You know, there's this joke, there's this meme that goes around Twitter and it's whatever the problem is, Oh, we just need higher tariffs. And every time it's Oh, nope, we need to put a tariff here and it just needs to be higher. It didn't fix it. Oh, well then the tariff just needs to be higher. And like, we see this playing out, like even with the trade war tariffs, there were tariffs placed on steel and aluminum. and that led to a reduction in steel and aluminum imports, but then derivative steel and aluminum imports went up. That's things like nails or, instead of the raw material, these processed goods that use the raw material. So we started importing those since they weren't subject to the tariff. And then it was, oh, we need to expand the tariff to cover that. And now you see aluminum can manufacturers say, well, now we need a tariff on this. And it just cascades and mushrooms because like you said, like the table's always wobbly. This isn't actually a solution to anything. it's just a granting a favor to one industry. And then when another industry says, Oh, Hey, they got protection. I want that too. It just mushrooms.
Kyle Hulehan:Yeah, and to kind of you know plug the T. F. angle here. This is why we always talk about simplicity. Simplicity matters when something is more simple. It's a lot easier to, enact and enforce. And when something gets this complicated, it gets very messy, and so given all of the issues that tariff cause, let's try and be a little, maybe we'll be positive and uplifting here in this moment because, you know, we've been a little bit dire so far. What options does the U.S. have to tackle this problem, like unfair trade practices or these intellectual property theft, you know, how might we have alternatives that work better?
Erica York:Yeah, so, so the U.S. has essentially taken a go it alone approach with a really blunt instrument of tariffs. We have an alternative in the World Trade Organization, the WTO, the rules based system that the U.S. was actually instrumental in setting up, and we should use that. We should use that dispute settlement process. Sure, there are reforms that need made at the WTO. The The U.S. could be instrumental in reforming that system and making use of it rather than just setting it to the side and ignoring it and taking this go it alone approach. Outside of the WTO, we could also partner with like minded nations to address these practices. you know, regional trade agreements, those sorts of things can address these, rules that are being broken or establish rules for, WTO doesn't have the right things in place to address them. And then looking at like the bigger picture of if we want U.S. Manufacturing to be competitive, if we want to encourage domestic investment, Rather than trying to set up these walls and just shut out foreign competition, we should take a different type of internal look and say, what do we need to do to actually make the U.S. competitive? What do we need to do to foster more innovation? It's not building up walls. It's like looking at our tax system. Right now we have worse tax treatment for research and development expenses than China does. We have, when you take into account state and local average corporate tax rates, a higher corporate tax rate than China does. And we're considering making it higher and we're putting on a corporate alternative minimum tax that further increases the tax burden on business investment. We're doing all these things that move in the opposite direction of where we say we want to be heading when it comes to the tax code. Outside of the tax system there's also tons of opportunity for regulatory reform, things that could address worker shortages, educational gaps. All sorts of stuff we could do that would boost U.S. Competitiveness without the downsides of increasing taxes on, U.S. consumers. so I think it's just a really backwards approach, this protectionism and barriers to trade, rather than, hey, what can we do to boost competitiveness, to boost incentives to invest?
Kyle Hulehan:It's funny you mentioned while you were talking, you know, it's like building up walls and I love poetry and there's all this bad, like memed poetry online that's you know, it's very cliche of oh, you need to build bridges instead of putting up walls. But sometimes the cliches are true. And in the case of tariffs, we want to be building bridges instead of putting up walls. it seems like that's the better approach here, because. when you're putting up these walls there, there can be the long term, detrimental effects for consumers and the broader economy.
Erica York:Absolutely. So I'm going to point to another book and it's actually called the wall and the bridge. Fear and opportunity and disruptions wake, I think is the full title. It's by Glenn Hubbard. And it's on this, what do you do when there is disruption from international trade or say from like technological advancement or, AI, when there's disruption, you have two options. You can build up a wall and say, no, we're not going to let the disruption occur. We're going to freeze everything in place. How it is today. Keep our same industries, our same way of doing things. And that's a loss. That represents a loss of, future opportunity, future potential, standards of living. that's what we do with tariffs and protectionism. The alternative is a bridge. We can find out a way to bridge to that future, make it easier for businesses and workers to adapt to these new ways of doing things, whether that's, trade or technology, whatever it is. It's definitely a more optimistic view to say what can we do to be more competitive, to make sure workers can compete, to make sure our businesses do have access to foreign markets than it is to say, nope, we're just gonna shut it all down, keep it all out, keep doing things the way we do things. So I definitely opt for the optimistic bridge approach as opposed to the backwards looking wall approach.
Kyle Hulehan:definitely. so looking ahead, what could be the long term effects if we keep or increase tariffs? And, how my future administrations handled policies differently and what should they consider, pro growth trade strategy?
Erica York:The two options, major options on offer, we've got. Trump administration coming in and significantly, ratcheting up tariffs and the trade war, not just with China, but potentially with the entire world with his proposal for a universal baseline tariff. so I think that's a very negative path. And then we've got the Biden administration, another Biden administration. And what we're seeing there is. Keeping the current trade war tariffs, significantly increasing them with, China. And then I don't think it's a very positive view on trade with the rest of the world either, because we haven't seen any new free trade agreements. the president doesn't even, have trade promotion authority right now. Hasn't requested that from Congress. And there's, this like new dismal Biden administration too. So. Both directions are bad. It's hard to say, which one is worse when you look at all the combinations of other policies being discussed, like on the tax front. We've got Biden and his budget proposing, a higher corporate tax rate, higher taxes on work, on saving, on investment. That's all negative for the U.S. Economy too. So again, not to be a pessimist, but, both, Both directions, at least on the trade front, are pretty negative. Now, you know, we've seen some, and we saw this back in, in 2018, 2019 to some economists predict oh, if we increase tariffs, there's going to be a massive recession and you know, the world is going to come crashing down. I'm, I don't think that I think these are negative policies. I think they will have a bad effect on how much we produce, how much, how productive workers are, how innovative we are. But I don't think, I don't think they're like recession causing. Now, if we did have a Trump administration that overnight imposed, you know, a 60 percent tariff on everything from China, a 10 percent or higher tariff on everything from the rest of the world. And, you know, 100, 200 percent auto tariffs on all auto imports, that's different, that, that would be a really huge negative shock and have really bad ramifications for business supply chains, that sort of stuff. If something like that happened overnight. I think that's less likely because I don't think, there will probably be like attempts to creatively. Spin executive trade authority to try to do that, but I think it's on pretty shaky ground whether the president can just overnight impose like insane tariffs like that. So what we're looking at are two negative outcomes that will have a bad impact on the prices we face as consumers, job opportunities, output, growth. And it potentially sets us on a path of, you know, more protectionism and encourages other countries to do that too. So, so there are these like outside of just the economics, these bigger geopolitical questions of what does a more fragmented world look like? I think that's also negative. so, so yeah, I guess we can end on that depressing note.
Kyle Hulehan:Yeah, if you're still listening, this has been a very uplifting podcast, like the most uplifting podcast we've ever had. But the reality is here is that these policies are not good. You know, it's sort of this catch 22 of damned if you do, damned if you don't, either way we go is not great in terms of this policy. You may want to decide who you're voting for, what you're doing. on something else than this because neither one is a good route for us to take. it's very frustrating to see this and to watch this play out. But, you know, maybe this is a, almost a, an optimistic pessimism of like, I don't know if they'll be able to get it done. How competent are they? That's sort of my take sometimes. It's I don't know, like we haven't seen a lot of great things get done, over the past four years. So what else is gonna happen? that's kind of my thought. But again, you know, the world is not ending. Everything will be okay. Tariffs are not going to destroy the rest of your life. It will be okay. But, you know, as we wrap up here, Erica, maybe you can take us out on a little bit of a better note and let listeners know what else you're working on that has nothing to do with tariffs and what anything else you could plug.
Erica York:I'm going to do 30 seconds on an optimistic note on tariffs with a bit of a historical anecdote. So the reason that the president gets to set and have so much authority over tariffs is because in the aftermath of the Holly Smoot tariff, Congress said, oh, actually this was really bad. We're going to give this authority to the president because he will exercise more policy restraint. And so we won't have all of these shenanigans going on with tariffs. Well, now we're seeing shenanigans with the president and tariffs. So maybe Congress will say, Hey, this worked for about a century, but it's not working anymore. So we're going to revoke this authority and take back the tariff setting responsibility here in Congress. And we're going to have a more level head. So, so maybe that'll happen. yeah. Otherwise, what we're working on right now, we recently released a paper and some really cool data tools on expirations of the 2017 tax cuts. So we've got a map that shows what tax increases are scheduled to occur if those expirations happen in 2026, we've also got a tax calculator that people can plug their information in to see an illustration of how their tax burden would change if these tax cuts expired, we've got a paper walking through some options, and we're also working on a blog post series now explaining different trade offs of the reforms that were made in 2017 and how Congress next year might think about extending those. And so I'd encourage people to check those tools out.
Kyle Hulehan:Listeners, please check out those items. And Erica, thank you for being on the show today.
Erica York:Thanks Kyle.
Kyle Hulehan:This has been another episode of the deduction to learn more about the tax foundation and the deduction. Visit us at taxfoundation. org slash podcast. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at tax foundation. If you've been enjoying our show and want to help us grow, please leave a five star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. It helps others find the show. And if you didn't enjoy the deduction, well, keep it to yourself. Another way you can support our work is by donating to the Tax Foundation on our website. Thank you all for listening, and we'll see you next time.