Hi, I'm Molly John Fast and this is Fast Politics, where we discussed the top political headlines with some of today's best minds. And you're going to be shocked to hear this Home Depot says it's raising prices. You know why because of the tariffs. We have a great show for you today, talking Points memos, own Josh Marshall stops by to talk about Trump's unpopular agenda. Then we'll talk to the Cato Institute's Scott Linscombe about tariffs and how
they are completely undermining our entire economy. But first we have the most important stories that aren't getting the attention they deserve. Mai, we're giddy with how terrible everything is.
Let's go that's kind of accurate. Actually today this is really something. So I think of how much trauma of my childhood was, how much I was policed and home monitored as a kid because I was a bad kid. But now, this is how the Republicans in Texas are behaving towards democh product representatives. Is they want them to get basically like whole passes to move around, and they want them to have police escorts so they can't leave
the state. Because they really want to do this, stupid Jerrymander that's going to really fuck them over.
Yes, Okay, So here's the thing. Republicans in Texas are stealing five seats in Congress. And they're doing this because Donald Trump asked them to and because Governor Abbot thinks that he can run for president. I mean, that's really what this is. Okay. Governor Abbot is a Republican. He knows the only way to inherit Maga is with the blessing of Donald Trump. He thinks that somehow he will become the inheritor of Maga, and so he is giving Donald Trump five seats in Congress. Now, let me explain
to you why this is insane. Okay, mid decade redistricting is almost unprecedented. Right, we have a census. The census tells you what the numbers are, gives you the number of congressional seats. There's redistricting around this. What happened here was literally Donald Trump was like, I cannot lose the House because then there'll be some accountability. I cannot have any accountability because I'm having too good a time right now, airgo,
you have to make sure I keep the House. Democrats did the only thing that they could possibly do because they do not control state legislature, and they left right that Texas has a thing where you can deny a quorum if you leave this date. Now the special session is over, it's August nineteenth. They came back. They're going to fight it in another way. Do I think it's the right move. No. I think they should have just
stayed out of the state until November. I think that would have prevented this, and it would have made time for Republicans to realize that a lot of them are going to get jerry mandered out of their seats if this if we open the door to this, but I think it's too late. So now Republicans are going to go along with stealing these five seats. One Democrat, Representative Collier of District ninety five and Fort Worth, has refused to sign these permission slips, and so she is going
to sit in the chamber. I understand that all of this seems stupid to Trumpers, to people who are cynical, but the reality is the only way we're going to say survive this period is if people do brave shit like this. Okay, if they say no, I'm not going to do that if they say no. And so as much as you may not like Representative Collier, this is
extremely important to do things like this. You know, this is like a terrible moment in American life where things are really fucking scary and she just says, I'll just sit here. I don't know. I guess I'll wait till Wednesday. So good for her, and we should support people who are being brave, because most people are being fucking cowards.
Yeah. When I think of though, there's this weird gray area where you're like, what the fuck is going on with something? So a few weeks ago, Dan Bongino, no friend of ours, kind of let it rip that like he was pretty disturbed by what he saw on the Epstein files, and it seems he might be on the way out at the FBI.
Wait you think Bongino is not going to last at the FBI.
I have to tell you one of the things, like when we're always deciphering between the bullshit artists and the true believers, there is this like weird thing that he has like a little bit of both in him, Like you know, he'll grift you for protein shake, but he'll also really seems seems like his anger towards things fuels him. And I will tell you I bought that he was a little shook by the Epstein files. It seems a lot of the reporting has set up.
Or he just makes a lot more money doing the podcast.
Well, I mean that can be.
I mean, I would love to ascribe meaning to Dan Bongino's temper tantrums, but I just what there is math. There is a thing called math. He has more power and makes more money doing the podcast than sitting in an office. So but either way, who are we to cast aspersions at Dan Bongino? He may very I'll be on his way out. We are thrilled to welcome Andrew Bailey as co Deputy Director of the FBI. Bondie told state run media Fox News Digital he has served as
Distinguished date Attorney General and also another Trump Lackie. Congratulations to all who celebrate, it's going.
To be great.
Speaking of unsympathetic characters, at least the phonic just the goal to show her space in public. She's thinking about trying her Hannah as running for governor, which is really going to go great considering at this appearance, I've heard a lot of booze before, sometimes even when I've been on stage, but nothing like.
This Marry Christmas.
In fact, I think I was once booed for, say a joke about who she's going to run against for governor.
At least Dephonic. I think I was there for that, Yes you were. It was drowned out by relentless booze when she's spoken a Memorial Day event on Monday. Now she's not in New York, she's not in Brooklyn, she's in Plattsburgh. When she gets booed. All right, I want to say two things about this. One least Devonic thinks she's going to be governor next year of New York State.
But Lee Stevonic may also get Jerry Mander out of her seat because since Texas stole five congressional seats, there's a very likely scenario where New York I mean, Cuomo did set it up so they couldn't have partisan redistricting and put a GOP judge on that panel. But there is a world where if Hochel is worth anything, which I'm not convince she is, but if she is, she will redistrict those five seats, and my man Aleis Stevonic
will neither be governor nor a member of Congress. I for one, would love to see it the same.
So this is really exactly that. You know, often we're saying we.
Particularly other shouted trader and go home, and some attendees yelled a Nazi. You don't want to be called the nazi anyway. Continue.
Yes, So a lot of the time we're discussing things for twenty twenty five that came true. But this is the type of thing that wasn't quite in there to my memory at least. But I was like, this is definitely gonna happen. Citizenship reviews now ask immigrants to show positive contributions to the.
US, positive contributions right. Like, By the way, I'm so angry about this because I've just you know, I have so many friends who live in DC who have been telling me about these horror stories about what has happened under federalized DC, which is basically, there are a lot of fat guys wearing vests that say police, and they are chasing around anyone who's brown and who looks like they're Hispanic, and they are chasing them down the streets and beating them up and sending them in unmarked cars
to go to detention facilities to maybe get deported to their own country and maybe get deported to Sudan where they will die. This is so the idea that a good moral character, like good moral character starts at home. Man, we are not showing good and moral character. We are in a country now where there is a militarized group that has billions of dollars, that has no accountability, that does not show its badge, that will not tell you their name, that are plucking people off the street because
of the way they look. Like a year ago, this would have been unprecedented. So if you're listening to this like this is not okay, like none of this is okay, we are in unprecedented moment in American life. And by the way, good moral character begins at home. Josh Marshall is the editor of Talking Points Memo. Josh Marshall, thank you for coming on too fast politics.
I always love it here.
I was really mean, but it's because it's my birthday, and also because Ice has arrested my friend's brother and he is now waiting. He just disappeared and now they're trying to figure out if he's going to be deported to his native country or is he going to be deported to Sudan?
Wow, that's heavy, so.
He can die there? That is people in DC, because DC has become federalized. And that means now that all of the really scary people who Donald Trump has made his militia are targeting anyone who looks like they are not white.
You know, the thing with the Sudan thing. I've watched that closely. But my impression at least is that, you know, they're deporting tons and tons of people, and my impression at least is that it's a pretty small subset that is being deported to Sudan. But I haven't had a sense of, you know, what the basis of that subset is, right, Like, is it who do they pick? I assume it's something to do with obviously they're from countries where there may be some legal impediment or something like that.
But I don't have a But that sounds horrific.
I mean, it sounds horrific to be deported to any country that you've never been to before.
Yeah, But I also think and I want to talk about this for a minute because I think it's so important. Like we've seen these photos of these ice skies chasing you know, the uber drivers, you know, the food delivery guys, the deporting, the lady who worked at the nail salon. You know, people been here twenty thirty, forty years. People have been here as long as we have. Right, what's the goal here? Because Americans have had the opportunities to do these jobs and they have not wanted to.
Yeah, and it's not like when certainly when I was much younger, and probably when you were two. You know, there have been times where you know, and certainly during you know, briefly during the Great Recession, where you have unemployment approaches double digits. Right, we've basically been in a full employment economy as economists define it for a number of years, you know, under five percent. So kind of by definition, there's nobody else who wants to do this
job because everybody's got a job. Now, we know, obviously some people don't have a job, but when you talk about this gets into the technical economics of it, there are not other people who want this job who are not doing it.
And when you talk about the goal, I think people.
For understandable reasons, don't like analogies or kind of blanched analogies go back to the Third Reich and the imposition of Hitler's dictatorship. One of the things that happened during it, A political scientist have a name for this, I can't remember it exactly, is that it was fairly disorganized in a lot of ways, and Hitler had a system where he kind of relied on people to you know, be self starters and kind of do stuff on their own, people in the state in governmental positions to sort of
compete with each other to achieve his aims. And there is at least something like that going on with Trump in the sense that when you say, you know, what is the point here, well, well, clearly one of the points here is that Stephen Miller like literally went over to Ice, went over to DHS and said, I want three thousand people a day taken into custody and put
into the system for deportation. Now, there's clearly a lot of people in Ice who want to be nasty people, and there's a lot of polalization of Ice, but that clearly created a situation where you've got to go where the numbers are, and the numbers are people who are living law abiding lives and just kind of where you think they are, because they're basically long standing residents in the United States, and they show up for their immigration hearings,
and they show up for their job. And that's why you have this thing of just you know, kind of regular people kind of doing their jobs and I shows up and grabs them. And you know, the woman who worked at your nail slan, she's not there with like an ak right now. She's going to fight them off right when they come. These are by definition, fairly pliant people. So that's part of it. But you know, you have this mix of people who want to deport a lot
of people for sort of ideological and racial reasons. Also have a lot of people who want to punish people. They want to see those pictures of terrified families and everything. So you have all these kind of things going together. But you know, one of the things about the Trump system is that you usually have that kind of you know, chaos and disorganization, and some of that is that these aren't terribly competent or often very smart people.
Are you saying they're not sending their.
Best, They are not sending their well, they are sending their best, they don't their best are not that good.
I think, yes, it's the way to put it.
But another dimension of sort of trump Ism is they don't like bureaucracy. They don't like people like, oh, you've been here for thirty years, you know how to make this system run. Get the fuck out of here. But what that means is you have this system where it's all kind of at the whim of the top guy.
So all these things kind of flow together and create this system with a lot of sort of predatory behavior and malicious behavior and not only hurting people because you kind of can't not hurt people if you're trying to arrest three thousand people a day. But because hurting people, as our Fred Sewer says it, you know, is the point. Cruelty is the point.
Let's talk about Donald Trump's triumphant meeting with all of the heads of Europe. You know, you're in great shape when all of the heads of Europe, every single one comes to Washington. They don't have anything else to do to try to get Trump not to be putin's stoode.
Yeah. Well it's sort of like you know, you know, you know the shape you're in by who shows up at your intervention.
Yes, yeah, right, you know you know, you caught your first year college roommate is there and you're like, wow, thread here real.
Yeah, no, I mean, you know, it's so funny because it's like, I'm old enough to remember when Georgia Maloney was the biggest outlier. Right, She's part of this neo fascist Yeah, so one of the bad guys, right, one of the bad guys coming to Washington to beg Donald Trump not to get rolled by Vladimir Putin.
Yeah, you're too You're too far gone here, dude, it's too much. It's more than I can accept.
Yeah.
I like the White House. There's a podcast I listen to that is very access see and the woman on it was like, wow, the White House didn't have huge plans for the Alaska summit. Oh okay, they didn't. They just oh okay, they just went to Alaska because they just want to hang out with Putin.
Yeah, the whole thing is pretty you know. On the other hand, there was this weird thing of like, you know, they did it in Alaska where you can basically be sure that if you're not on the plane on the you know, the traveling White House press love Alaska.
But it's not a big media State, right.
I mean, it's certainly not on the Air Force base where we have our sort of strategic bombers or whatever.
And they did it on what in the you know, on the east.
Coast in the US is going to be you know, kind of late Friday after the hottest August day of the year kind of thing. So there's all kinds of kind of weird like it that is kind of how you'd kill a story. So I don't know quite what that was about. But you know, Donald Trump doesn't do things. He doesn't do things like lo fi, Like you're not going to hear like thirty years from like oh yeah, he used to go over to soup kitchen and like serve stuff.
But no, he didn't tell me.
You'd never get it.
He did that every Thursday evening, but he never you know, step out.
Yeah, yeah, you're never going to find out he was serving homeless people in soup kitchen. But I want you to talk about this for a second, because I'm very suspicious about this Alaska summit.
I think as you should be.
Yeah, yeah, and I think that this was completely about trying to kill the Epstein story and not about anything else, right, Like this whole idea is like, and I'm going to win a Nobel Peace Prize, and so I'm going to have all of these countries, these leaders from countries that are warring, and they're going to come in. And the timing of this is just when the Magabas is fighting
about Ebstein. But that's probably just a coincidence. I mean, if you think about Trump, right, he's sitting there and he's going like it's August, which is the deadest time. So the House is out, the Senate is out, I can't try to do anything insane legislative way. I can send the National Guard into Washington, DC, which is painful and horrible and fun, but then there's nothing else to distract. So you could see where this would just work.
It's definitely possible.
I mean, I I have lost it's so easy to lose track of the forward pace of time and when happened or when another thing happened.
But it was certainly my impression. It wasn't like we knew in June.
Oh yeah, there's the there's the August summit, right, they just announced that on a pretty short notice. The thing is with him is, as we know, these publicity events, it's always hard to know, like why did he do this, you know, kind of publicity event.
It's sort of like, why is a crack addict smoking crack this time?
Because they're yeah, yeah, yeah, that.
Is really the primary reason. And he's addicted to publicity. He's addicted to chaotic and kinetic moments where he is the center of attention and his actions have everybody is reacting to his actions. So some of it is just that. But yeah, I mean they're trying to and to a certain extent, it seems like they've maybe kind of achieved it with at least moment, at least for now at the epscene stuff. It's not you know, there's not she hasn't been moved from one prison to another recently, or.
I mean she's she already got to the better prison.
But yes, yeah, well she I mean I assume there's you could be transferred to like Tahiti, you know, I mean, you can the sky's the limit.
But yeah, it's hard to tell.
But again, it's sort of like, why is this crack addict smoking crack because he's addicted to crack?
Yeah, I think that's right. I just think like all of this timing is kind of suspicious. So Trump said that there's some security guarantees. I mean, this is all ridiculous because we know what Putin's going to do. Putin's going to run right through this. And I mean, has he even stopped bombing Ukraine? He's still bombing Ukraine.
No, I don't, there's no there's no stop in. I mean, everything has continued, and this is I think, what is I mean the irony of I was I think I posted maybe on Blue Sky about you know, the sort of the latest addition of how much gold shlock he has in the in the in the you know, in
the Oval office. But it was actually a picture of his meeting with Zelenski, and I was looking at it and thinking, like, I hate to say it, but like this went better than the last meeting with Zelenski at least, I mean, you know, they're kind of buds now sort of maybe, you know, or at least at least to the
extent he's not humiliating him. And the reason that that happened is that Trump clearly did get irritated that when Trump made clear that at least stopping the fighting, if not bringing a treaty or a truce or something was his goal. He felt he needed that, he wanted it that Pudin responded by upping the ante. It's not like he'd been holding back but doing more. You know, the real action is over there in the east where you're
trying to take territory. But they also do things with They just throw a lot of missiles at Kiev or something like that, and so he's upping the anti kind of humiliating Trump, and that whole thing.
Just remains, you know.
I was thinking last night that I think Iowa was one of the first people back in twenty sixteen to write an article basically saying there's something weird going on with this guy and Russia. I think it was in July twenty sixteen, and I didn't really have a sense of I didn't say and because I didn't know what it was. Most of the big stuff we didn't know then. But they're just all these connections. They're just weird, weird, weird, weird.
You don't have like, oh, how many you know, how many connections did Eisenhower have da Khrushchev or you know, it was. It was so strange, and we've learned a lot since then. It's still what the hold he has over Trump is still laffling, not clear to me and baffling at many levels. But I don't know if you or maybe your listeners saw there was a hot mic moment where Trump said in in the meetings yesterday, I think it was Emmanuel Macron, but it's one of the
European leaders. You're like, hey, I think he really wants to make a deal with me. It like sounds crazy, but I really feel it. And it was just like, dude, what is your problem? I mean, like, it's like the guy who buys a lap dance and things like the stripper's in love with them.
It's like, what's going on with it?
For all the things we know and all of the corrupt things, I think one day we will find out we're going on there is a supplicant, submissive thing he has with this guy that all the other stuff may be true.
It still would completely explain that.
It does not make a ton of sense.
Right, It really doesn't.
There are a lot of things that sort of give you an idea why it might be kind of like that, but none of them quite get you to the just you know, sometimes someone's got a hold on someone that goes beyond any literal thing.
It's just the other person kind.
Of goes weak in the knees and you know, they roll over on their back and need to be belly rubbed or something.
Yes, with a fascist dictator, that's totally normal.
Yeah.
The thing I was so struck by was like, as the child of an alcoholic, that you sometimes do all this stuff to try to keep your alcoholic from like completely killing themselves and the rest of you. And this feels very much like that. You know, obviously it's not an alcoholic because he doesn't drink, but like, we have all of Europe coming to America, coming to Washington, DC to make sure that Trump doesn't do something which puts
the entire continent in jeopardy. This is our president. Yeah, I mean, like these people can protect their constituents from him, but who protects us?
No one?
Yeah, yeah, no, that is true. It's funny. I was just writing a post about a kind of a related issue that moves us in a slightly different direction, but the basically the importance of the state governments. Yeah, because Trump, because he has the executive branch and Congress, and because the courts, the Supreme Court has chosen to interpret the law and the Constitution in such a way that Trump is, within the federal government basically an absolute monarch.
You can do anything if anybody.
You know, he's like Anthony in that, you know, sending people to the cornfield right in the federal government. But we have this quirk of the American political system, which is the states which have their separate sovereignty that are subordinate to the federal government but separate from it. And for us who live in blue states, that is a powerful bundle of sovereign power that I think we are really we need the state leaders to understand that we're going to.
Be fucked if the state leaders don't stand up for us. I mean we are, We're already so fucked. But like Kathy, yeah, yes, Kathy Hokle, if you're listening, like this is it man, I mean, you know, Gavin Newsome, that's it, because he is so ambitious that he will, you know, run over his granny for a chance to run for president. And thank god, lucky for the people of California, because what's happening in DC wouldn't be able to you know, they wouldn't be able to do it in quite the same way.
But I do think it is important to remember too, what's happening in DC is happening in DC for a reason, right A, because cinema and mansion suck, and so they refuse to make the mistake, and so the federal government has a lot of power there. But the other reason is because a lot of journalists and a lot of legislators and a lot of people who could be brave live in that city. Sorry, that's cool, Josh Marshall, thank you, thank you, thanks for joining.
Thanks for having me as usual. I love coming on.
Scott Lindseicolm is the vice president of General Economics at the right leaning Tato Institute. Dude, welcome to Fast Politics, Scott, Oh, thanks for having Trade wars are good and easy to win. I was told by Donald J. Trump in the first season of Trump Destroys America. Are we winning well?
Depends on how you measure victory.
I think if what you want is a giant tariff wall around the country and a really amazing vehicle for handing out political favors and boosting political power generally, then Trump two point zero has been a massive victory and surprisingly has resulted in much less foreign retaliation than last time around. So in terms of trade wars, there's less conflict. You know, China and to a lesser extent, Canada have retaliated, but nobody else has smartly.
From the economics perspective, so if you like tariffs.
And you think that other countries not retaliating will somehow boost your exports because you're a mercantilist.
Then you've won.
But from an economics perspective and the political perspective.
We at CATO are anti corporatist.
We're not big into government croniism and corruption and all that jazz.
You're not big into corruption.
No, No, like a limited government, enumerated powers, and prefer corporations to focus on their actual business and not lobbying the government for favors.
If you believe in that stuff.
The tariffs are proving to be just as problematic as the dreaded economists predicted.
The fact is we now have an.
Effective tariff rate of well above ten percent, up from a rate of maybe two to three percent pre Trump. Two point zero so back just back in January. It's scheduled to go even higher, probably fifteen percent by the end of the year. Because there's all sorts of loopholes and exemptions and cases, investigations and others. And that gets to the second point. We have massive amounts of uncertainty and complexity that are being just injected into our trade
bloodstream as we speak. That adds cost. So you're not only taxing people to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars a year, mainly American companies and consumers going to pay that, but you're also imposing these really weird and visible taxes for the uncertainty and complexity and importers, customs, professionals, businesses, institutional investors.
Are all like, I don't know what they have to do.
I want you to first talk about this because this, I think is really interesting, which is there has to be a sort of layer of people who put these tariffs in, who collect them, who make sure that the goods are paid. You know, it's no longer are these goods drugs or something illegal. It's now like, are these goods paying the rate of tariff that they're supposed to do?
Yeah, And I think the way to think about it is pre Trump and now I think it's better to go back to twenty sixteen because that's probably the last time twenty seventeen, last time we had a really relatively clean US tariff system because then, of course Trump in his first term had steel and aluminum tariffs in China tariffs and some other stuff.
But pre Trump one point zero, you basically, if you were a business, when you were importing a product, you only had to worry about where it comes from and what the tariff rate is. And where the tariff rate is was pretty easy for the vast majority of countries. The only exceptions were some free trade agreement partners and some special preference programs we called, so this was a very easy process. Tariffs were also generally low, like I said, you know, around two percent, so a lot of times
you weren't even paying a tariff. You just were importing, filing your paperwork, and then you've add on tax. It was a little bit, right, It was super easy.
And we had this thing called the Deminimus exception, which for Shian Timu and others meant you could order dire directly from a different country, not just China, anywhere in the world and it could be shipped to you directly and you could.
Avoid all of those formalities.
Right.
So Trump comes along and starts messing with this in twenty seventeen twenty eighteen, suddenly Chinese goods got a tariff, but maybe they were subject to an exclusion, and there were all these processes and stuff for that. Steel and aluminum got tariffs, but then there were agreements that carved some of that out. You could lobby the government for your own exclusion. But then they extended the terrace to downstream steel and a limb stuff made with steel in
a limb, what they call derivatives. Tons of litigation as well, so that began the complexity stuff. Now everything's been turned up to eleven. Now through the reciprocal tariff regime, you have different tariff rates for dozens of different countries that are not replacing the old tear tariffs we had. They're applying on top of those. So you need to figure out what was the old tariff. Okay, what's the new tariff,
what's the country. But that's just the starting point. Then you have to figure out is there any Chinese content in it? Because there are different rules for Chinese content what they call transhipment. Does it have any steel and aluminum in it? Because now we're taxing the content of those products of course there are random exemptions and exclusions as well, but this time around they're not transparent. You could used to be able to go to a website
finding exclusion. Now it's again much harder. And that's just one set of tariffs. There's all these other ones that have started. Now we have automotive goods subject of tariffs, copper subject of teriffs, investigations on semiconductors and consumer electronics, and wood products on minerals.
I mean, you can go on and on and on.
So it has turned the US tariff regime from a relatively simple and transparent one that basically anybody and his uncle could operate to something that is its own tariff right because the flexities attacks on smaller businesses and a subsidy to big business. You know, GM and FOD they have an Apple. They have like entire divisions of logistics
pros and supply chain pros. People who are just you know, starting a small business importing a few products, or like running in like an auto repair shop and they just need a couple of parts. All of a sudden, they're getting bills from DHL for one hundred, two hundred and fifty bus dollars. They're getting tariff bills from customs in
the tens of thousands of dollars. And by the way, if they get any of this role, let's say they get the country of origin wrong or the steel content wrong, all of a sudden, they could get fined by customs, investigated by DOJ because they just lacked the ability to figure all this out.
I want to do like a lightning around with you here because this is complicated, but I also think there are some really important points here. So the first thing I want you to just true or falls and explained it to me. Is this our tariff's attax a corporate tax. Yeah, so there are a tax on imports. The big question is who pays the tax.
So legally most import taxes, most tariffs are paid by American importers. So US business is located in the United States importing from somebody overseas, they legally have to pay the tariff.
There's one exception. Will avoid that. The bigger question is the economic incidents.
It could be foreign exporters they could lower their prices kind of eat the tariff. American companies and consumers. Trump one point zero, almost one hundred percent of the tariffs were being paid by American companies and consumers. They were kind of splitting it. Company gets the product, maybe passes on the cost via higher price, maybe maybe doesn't. This time around, foreign explorers are paying a little bit more, but it's still like ten percent max. And then the
rest is being split among companies and consumers. So far with companies paying more like a corp.
I want you to talk about the washing machines. So in the first Trump administration, explain this.
Yeah, so, washing machines are a great example of some of the weird and unintended consequences of tariffs. So we imposed a safeguard measure, basically a global tariff on all washing machines to help the American washing machine industry, mainly Whirlpool, who was lobbying heavily for those.
By the way, how fucking corrupt is that? Oh yeah, Worldpool could lobby heavily for this, and so we tariffed another country's washing machines.
This is trade policy, one oh one.
The modern lobbying system in the United States has its origins in like nineteenth century US tariff policy, which Congress used to handle and it was just an absolute corruption buffet, right.
Which it still is. Right, because fucking Whirlpool does not deserve to have in the.
Steel industry and the shipbuilding industry and the textile guys and the sugar guys. So you get yourself a trade, you lobby for protection. And because tariffs are mostly invisible, like you don't see it on your sales receipt, right, because they target foreigners, and we have these anti foreign biases because they supposedly support jobs and patriotism and all that, it's very politically seductive and pretty easy to get protection.
The only way we short circuited that dynamic was through trade agreements, which, of course Trump has now blown up. So we're kind of back in they just wild West where you hire a lobbyist. Trade lobbying has skyrocketed this year. You hire a lobbyist, you go to Washington, get you try to get your own tariff, or you get yourself a carve out if you're a big company like Apple, where the rest of us are just eating it.
Right. Oh so, anyway, washing machine tariffs, So we imposed washing machine tariffs. Prices of washing machines went up in the United States. But the kicker is that prices of dryers went up too, because you buy your washer and your dryer together.
If you're going to pay three thousand dollars for your washing machine, you're not going to pay two thousand dollar for your dryer. Why not make the dryers three thousand docks.
Yeah, so companies figure this out.
Domestic companies like Worldpool figure this out too, and it turns out that consumers ended up paying more than one hundred percent of the tariff cost because the price of the dryers went up too. So the kicker, however, is that Wirlpool hasn't really even benefited. It turns out that Samsung and LG had some factories in the United States they were already building, so you have Samsung and LG factories, whereas Worldpool's actually still struggling, which again is trade policy.
I have to say, though, that is a little bit of a happy ending, because fuck Worldpool, I can say because it's my podcast, But no, such a good example of how none of this is going to have the first roarer of effects we think.
Right, and it's going to have all sorts of weird effects that we're only going to see in retrospect. And that's another reason why tariffs are so politically seducted. It takes a while for all of this stuff to kind of work its way through the economy. You know, a company like GM has like three tiers of suppliers, So if the supplier at the bottom end is paying the tariff and it passes on some and so it's gonna it just takes forever for this stuff to wash out.
Now we're now a good six seven months into this, and the economic data are finally starting to show the tariff costs, the economic pain, higher prices, slower growth, the lobbying stuff, and the rest.
Right, So, last week, before Donald Trump decided to have an emergency summit with Vladimir Putin, totally because it needed to happen on that Friday and not to distract from anything else, right, those, of course would he there were two bits of news that showed that the tariffs are going to be a fucking disaster. Talk us through them.
Yeah, So we had last week the Consumer Price Index data that's basically the United States government looks at the price you and I are paying for stuff.
And here you're starting.
To see the prices of goods that are mainly importing toys, clothes, appliances, other things. Those are starting to go up. The bigger surprise was in the producer price index, which is the prices that producers in the United States, so these don't include tariffs, are just selling to each other. That was a really big upside surprise, and the big driver were the companies that deal in the import space, so like wholesalers and distributors, sellers of manufactured machinery and other things.
So that had everybody looking at those things and going Aha, terrifs are starting to really leak into the general inflation data and the general price The other data piece we got less reported is that we get data on import prices, and here import prices were up.
A little bit. Now why does that important.
Well, import prices in this data set don't include tariffs, so if we were to see, as Donald Trump claims, foreigners paying the tariffs, we would expect import prices to actually be down a lot, but they're not really at all.
So this is more evidence that it is Americans mainly that are paying these billions in teriffs, and along with of course higher prices for American made goods, because the steel guys and the copper guys and the whirlpools of the world, they're not going to sit around and go, oh, you know we're gonna we're gonna charge low prices because you know, our competitors higher, they're go in charge higher
prices too. That's what being insulated from competition. That's the whole point, right, And that's what we're getting.
That is so incredibly unshocking and unsurprising. And I want to talk for a minute about like a week before that, I read an article that said that all the money the government was making from tariffs, because the government right now is making a gazillion dollars from tariffs, right, what are the numbers.
It's like fifty billion a month right now, so pretty solid. Now it's compared to where we were pre Trump era. We would maybe clear one hundred billion a year in tarrisks because we did have some tariffs on stuff like shoes and clothes, because of course, you know, let's tax those things, right, But generally we weren't making a lot.
Now we have a lot of revenue coming in.
So fifty billion a month, right, and that's ridiculous numbers. I was reading an article that said that no one's going to be able to undo the tariffs because this money is so delicious and it's going to pay down the debt, and we're going to be able to use it to fund a whole new gestoppo ice whatever and make new Alligator Alcatraz is in all of the things that Trump World dreams of. But here's my hottest take for you. We are on the precipice of a complete
financial meltdown. The reason that people, we haven't had tariffs like this since the nineteen twenties or thirties.
Right, Yeah, I got to go back basically to Smooth Holly.
How did Smooth Holly end?
It ended with well, the Great Depression in World War Two?
But but yes, but there was good stuff in between there.
I'm going to be the calm intellectual here for a second and say, most folks think that that tariff's exacerbated other economic problems in the United States. Yeah, I'm not as dire.
As you are. I see this more.
The way I describe it is it doesn't have to be economic catastrophe for economic catastrophe for it to be bad.
I could cut.
Off my foot and still hobble around and live. That doesn't mean cutting off my foot is a good idea. And I think that's more where tariff policy is today than the Great Depression.
Oh that said, at this point, there's only one sector of the market that's growing, which is AI.
Yeah, very likely be above all, right, But remember the United States is a massive, I mean thirty trillion dollar economy. Imports are only around ten percent of our GDP. The United States is actually not as much of a globally integrated economy as you think. We're huge, dynamic services economy.
So you can do a lot of damage in the trade and goods sector that'll leak into the services like auto repair and other things, but it's not going to likely tip us into whatever because so much of the rest of the economy can be just fine without you know,
pay a little more, but be okay. The worry, I think is that there's contagion, right, so people start freaking out and they don't see that in April as the worst case scenarios kind of people started thinking worst case and I think that that's when you get into the scary area.
It's that contagion stuff.
I don't think the director even indirect effects are alone enough. But the fact is that you know, the US economy was weakening before Trump took off. This it wasn't bad, but it wasn't firing on all cylinders. And so the problem with all this tariff stuff is that it's just making us even weaker.
Say tomorrow, Donald Trump, and I don't think we're going into a depression, but I certainly don't think we're going anywhere good. Donald Trump tomorrow says, you know what, I made a mistake. Triffs are inflationary. I was elected to make things cheaper and also to be mean to people who were not born here. I have now made a huge mistake. I want to get rid of these tariffs. You can't do it, so talk us through how hard it is to do it.
Well, legally, he can't. He could literally sign a piece of paper and they'd all go away tomorrow. But will prices go down, No, very unlikely.
You know.
It's kind of like when the price at the gas station goes up, it takes forever for him to come down. When it comes to generally to the price level in the United States. What you have to do, and this is kind of similar to what happened during the Biden era, is you have to just wait for wages to catch up to where prices are. U won't keep heading up, they'll just kind of flatten out, and that's what you.
Have to do.
I think the bigger issue, quite frankly, is the money. Like you said, I think the tariffs can prove quite durable because now you have tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars in new tax revenue, tax revenue that for some insane reason, anti tax Republicans are cheering, and we have fiscal problems. So I think it's just going to be really hard for it to go away now
that it started. And this, by the way, again is exactly why folks like me warn against tariffs, not just the economic harms, not just how they hurt small businesses, but because man, once they're in place, they are.
Incredibly difficult to remove.
And unfortunately that's what we got to deal with, and we do dealing with, of course, because Congress won't do its job and actually fix the laws that allow a guy like Trump to do this stuff in the first place.
Scott, thank you, my pleasure. I hope you'll come back.
Of course.
No, Mom, Sickly, Jesse Cannon.
Molly, we got some serious, seriously fuckery going on right here.
This is special Molly's birthday. Fuck Ray so let's go. Jesse Cannon, I'm scared.
You know, basically I am eight months older than you. You give me tons of shit about this. You talk about the guest sage. So today what I'm giving you as a president is I'm going to tell you every politician that is our age, so you can feel absolutely terrible about how old we are.
This is the worst thing out.
So for listeners out of the note the past, I used to buy Molli cabios from people like Rudy Giuliani, Alan Dershowitz. I look at the list this year and it's just too repulsive of who I would be giving money.
You don't want to give those people any money anymore. It's just no good came up from that.
So I figured this is the less cruel thing to do, even though this is about to be very cruel. Are you ready for a list of people who are just as old as you?
No.
Emmanuel McCrone, Really, he's accomplished so much more. Georgia Belodi, she's also accomplished so much more. God damn it, they're both forty seven. That's horrendous.
Technically within a year of us is what I'm doing here. So it's like you can't do exactly but the Prime Minister of Denmark Metta Fredericson, Oh wow, Congressman Seth multen voldemir is Lenski what. Yeah, he was born on January twenty fifth, nineteen seventy eight, which makes him seventeen days younger than me.
Oh, Jesus fucking Christ.
All right, this one you're gonna be very proud of. Mark Wayne Mullen.
Wait, that guy's our age, Jay, that guy.
Is our age. He's technically a hair older than me.
Mark, Wayne and Jesus Christ.
Okay, but this is the one that always really hurts because she's just a few days older than me. Representative Nancy Mace.
Wow, kind of makes you think.
Didn't we have a friend of the show, Robert Garcia, who's just a few days older than me?
Ah, Robert Garcia.
Then, to get into our profession of punditry, Alex Wagner is our age. Yeah, she's just two months older than me.
Also way more successful.
Just under the gun of being almost exactly a year older than you, but still a little less is Steve Kornaki.
Steve Karnaki, congratulations Karnaki and being our age but you know who.
You're about a month younger than who, Jesse Waters.
And I'm only married to my first husband, so damn it.
Okay, we still got a few more to go and then this will be over.
Let's go. No, I never wanted to end. Keep going.
Okay, you're just a few months older than Representative Byron Donald's all right, go on, Victoria Sparts just a few months older.
Then I'm not going to say anything. I don't want to get canceled.
Just a few months older, did Maryland Governor Wes Moore?
I knew because we went to school together.
I knew that. Actually, okay, but you got just almost exactly a month on Governor Ron DeSantis.
Wait, I'm a month older than Ron DeSantis, younger, younger, I look a lot younger, I think I would agree. And I'm also a lot taller than Ron.
John Oliver is in the same year.
As us, whoa also more successful than we are. That's annoying.
Then we have a Congressman Mark Livin.
Yeah he looks older than we do.
Then we have former Congressman Adam Kinsinger.
Yeah he looks younger than we do.
And then, last, but not least, we have the one, the only Senator Josh Holly, who's about a year younger than us.
I mean, yes, Josh Holly, how.
Do you feel now, BALI did it? Did I cheer up your birthday?
I hate you?
Well, I had to do it.
I truly hate you.
It was this our funding fascist. So there you go.
Thank you, thank you. Let's have a clean out here.
I'm taking a ballot.
Thank you. I'm going to go have an urban breakdown. Thank you. That's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Saturday to hear the best minds and politics make sense of all this chaos. If you enjoy this podcast, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. Thanks for listening.