Latest / Politix / Donald Trump's Plan To Make You Poorer

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Donald Trump's Plan To Make You Poorer · Politix

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Trump just ignored him and was like, Meatball Ron eats pudding with his hands.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_01: He's a loser.
• 0:05
  SPEAKER_01: Ha ha ha!
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, everyone.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: You're listening to a free preview of the Politics Podcast.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: This week, we're going to dive into key questions surrounding Donald Trump's policy agenda, such as it is.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: So how it'll raise costs and lower incomes for regular people in order to funnel more money to the wealthy.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: We're also going to look at why, for now at least, this agenda hasn't created huge political problems for him.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: And what, if anything, that says about the viable policy spectrum for Democrats.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: We hope you enjoy the conversation.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: And if you want to hear more about these topics, you can upgrade your subscription to paid at politics.fm.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, everyone.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Politics Podcast.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Brian Boitler.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Matthew Iglesias.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: So to Matt's real and lasting credit, he has been trying hard for several weeks now, I think, to get people to notice that when you burrow past like the jargon into the details, Donald Trump is proposing essentially a huge sales tax and other measures that will exacerbate prices.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: Basically, the public has very sticky concern about prices and Donald Trump's agenda will tend to push them higher.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: except it seems like because he uses the word tariff instead of tax or sales tax and the word immigrants or animals instead of workers, he's not taking much, if any, political heat for what the implications of his agenda are.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: So to me, that raises related questions of how influential policy positioning really is over election outcomes.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: If you can just kind of blow past that,
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: what your policies mean by playing funny word games the way Trump is.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: So we wanted to lay out how Trump's agenda actually works and then look at whether or not this is creating any issues for him with the electorate.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_00: And if not, does that mean that Democrats can do something goofy like revive single-payer health care so long as they give it some clever name like Medicare Part E?
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, you know, I guess the sort of simplest way
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: version of this is Trump has been running around
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: He's been saying slightly hard to parse things about tariffs on China, but he is committed very clearly to a 10% across the board tariff on all imports from all countries.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the way this works, that's a hefty sales tax on all imported items.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_01: So if you buy something, there's a lot of products.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_01: I think the best examples we've come up with are bananas and coffee.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: I like both of those things.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: Got my coffee here.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: Essentially, no.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_01: I'm told it's not true that there's literally no coffee grown in the United States.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's a small amount grown in Hawaii.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_01: But you look at your coffee beans, right?
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: Coffee comes from Africa, from Indonesia, from Latin America.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_01: We do not have the climate or soil to grow coffee in the United States.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is not going to create jobs on American coffee plantations.
• 3:21
  SPEAKER_01: Also, if you've ever seen a coffee plantation, those are not desirable jobs to have.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is just a tax on coffee and bananas and other foreign agricultural products that is going to partially offset the cost of Trump's campaign.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Corporate tax cuts.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: There's also lots of stuff, you know, Brendan Duke at Center for American Progress took my bait on this and actually looked into this.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, he's saying about $120 more per person in expenses on oil and petroleum products, right?
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: Because the way oil works is that...
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_01: To get gasoline or other useful things out of oil, the oil has to be refined.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_01: Refineries have to be tuned in specific ways to refine specific kinds of oil.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: So even though the United States produces a lot of oil, not all of our refineries are tuned for that Texas shale oil.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we both export and import oil.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_01: oil to different refineries all around the world, you put a 10% tax on the crude oil that comes into the refineries in New Jersey from the North Sea, and your gasoline just gets randomly more expensive.
• 4:37
  SPEAKER_01: Apparel, footwear, and jewelry, $70 more.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Crucially, the biggest...
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: element of the tax increase is material and equipment for US businesses, right?
• 4:50
  SPEAKER_01: Which is to say that like, you know, this is not like 1750.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_01: People don't just like take trees and turn them into finished manufactured products.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: Most American companies that make things import at least some of the stuff that goes into the stuff that they make.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, you're going to raise the cost, right?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: Like a Harley Davidson motorcycle, right, is made in America.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: It's made partially out of American parts, but partially out of imported parts.
• 5:23
  SPEAKER_01: If you raise the cost of the imported parts, that both raises the price of motorcycles domestically, but it also hurts American industry's ability to compete on international markets.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_01: This is why, like, when Trump was actually president, he did a fair amount of tariffing.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: Some of it, I think, was badly misguided, some of it less so.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: But what he tried to do was pick specific industries that had specific clout, right?
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: So, like, there are American companies that make washing machines, mostly in the Midwest, and there's also Korean companies that make washing machines, right?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_01: So he put tariffs on these Korean appliances, which did in fact raise prices for American consumers, but it protected real companies.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: You could go to a Maytag plant and say, here's why I did this.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: The 10% tariff on everything.
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: is just much larger in its impact than anything Trump did before, will have a larger price increasing impact, and also just like does not have the same kind of clear job protection rationale, right?
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_01: So like books are going to become more expensive.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: There's no book factory in America.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: that this is going to be protected.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now, you could build one, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: But that would raise the costs even, even more.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: And also, we're in a low unemployment economy, right?
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if you tune out this Trump point, and you just look at the discourse, Biden is running around America saying, look at my incredible job creation record.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_01: And voters are whining and complaining, and they're like, ah, but the inflation.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And Trump has a tariff policy agenda that is specifically geared to increase domestic prices, and the theoretical benefit of it would be some kind of job creation.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: at a time when unemployment is low, and if people cared about policy, which, you know, they don't that much.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_01: But it's very, very deeply backwards.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think deserves more attention than it has gotten, because people are upset about prices.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Like, that is real, right?
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, however much people care about policy, right?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: Anytime somebody goes up, they'll be like,
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: man, things cost more than they used to.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, well, do you want someone who's going to make things cost even more?
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: Because I don't.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_01: I like cheap things.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: I want to like zoom out a bit because I think in a weird way, like what we're talking about is slightly distinct from the concept of inflation writ large.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like Donald Trump has a number of plans, some of which would be pro-inflationary, some of which would be anti-inflationary.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: But I think when they come together, whatever the overall inflationary impact of them are,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: They will make things more expensive for people who have a hard time purchasing them, which will feel like inflation.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: But that will happen through a tariff, which isn't necessarily like an inflationary concept, right?
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: And it will happen because he plans to kick out all these immigrants, which is going to make labor costs higher.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_00: Separately, he has anti-inflationary plans insofar as he wants to –
• 8:37
  SPEAKER_00: like let social security run out of money and revenue from, from making goods more expensive will tend to, I guess, offset inflation.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: So I like, you know, in a weird way, I feel like the conversation the United States has been having about inflation for the last three years is
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: is like misses how Donald Trump has a plan that will, whatever its impact on overall inflation is, make prices higher for people who can't afford them and make those price increases irrelevant to richer people because they're going to get a tax increase.
• 9:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is that more or less how these things fit together?
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:20
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think so.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it's also like
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: This gets into the thing where it's hard to know what Trump really thinks he's doing.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have tried a little bit to ask around to the extent that I know people on the Republican economic policy side.
• 9:37
  SPEAKER_01: And the answers you get are all over the map.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: One thing is that Trump has this well-deserved reputation as being a huge liar.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: So a lot of businessmen who don't like Joe Biden for normal reasons that businessmen prefer Republicans seem to have convinced themselves that Trump just actually won't do this.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: that Trump is lying about the 10% tariff.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: Then other people tell me that no, that Trump and his core team, Stephen Miller, et cetera, they genuinely believe that the full incidence of these tariffs falls on foreigners.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like the foreign coffee plantation owners will pay the 10% tax and it'll have no impact on the price of coffee.
• 10:30
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's sort of how they're selling it to the electorate.
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_01: There also has been just like less polling on this than I would have thought.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Like, I saw this poll that The Hill wrote up.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: It was a YouGov poll.
• 10:45
  SPEAKER_01: And so in this poll...
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: there was like small advantage for Biden on the question of tariffs, but with both of them way below 50%, and with only 44% of people saying they believe Trump wants to increase tariffs, even though like,
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's the cornerstone of his campaign.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's also not even a contested issue.
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_01: Trump is saying he wants to raise tariffs, and Biden is saying Trump wants to raise tariffs.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_01: I thought that was a good indication, though.
• 11:15
  SPEAKER_01: This was late February, so maybe things are changing, but I don't think they have.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe with the bloodbath thing where he was... I was talking about my amazing tariffs, not about bloodline.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean, I do think that like, you know, this is not a subject that people have heard a lot about.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there is just...
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: incredible amount of coverage of politics in America, like the fact that politics exists, but it often tends to not be very substantive.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: This is the centerpiece of Trump's economic agenda, and we're not
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're just not hearing about it.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, here was another YouGov poll.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: It said 31% of people want to keep tariffs the same, 27% want them increased, 19% want them decreased, 23% not sure.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_01: So this is like a big like, A, people don't have any opinions on this issue.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And B, like nobody has heard where any of the candidates stand on it.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know that like,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know that it would be possible to engage the public on this topic, but it's clear that they just aren't.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: This is not something that's been in the discourse.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Let's talk in a minute about why – I have some thoughts about why – I don't think it's so much that people don't know about tariffs.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I think tariffs code in a certain way and taxes code in another way, and we'll talk about that in a second.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But the reason I'm like – I'm a little bit like –
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: fixed on this question of would trump's agenda be inflationary yeah for a few reasons one because it draws in other aspects of the agenda which are i think are also all quite bad um but the i think like the the literal answer is would trump's agenda be inflationary the answer is it depends how aggressively republicans would cut obamacare cut medicare cut social security and
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: Or would they just let the trust fund expire?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_00: And like if the answer is they would go hog wild on that stuff, maybe there wouldn't be any inflation.
• 13:16
  SPEAKER_00: But like it would still be really bad and quite unpopular.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so just on the merits, I think it's important to like –
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_00: draw the lens back a little bit.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_00: But then secondly, it's like, if Joe Biden wants people to understand that Trump is going to do these things and that for almost everyone, it will just tend to mean that they have less money in their pockets, should he...
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: get dragged into a discussion about inflation where A, you have this technical economic meaning of what inflation is and B, then you're kind of reminding everybody that there was inflation in the Biden presidency and they were unhappy with it.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: Or should he forget the word inflation and just be like,
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_00: just kind of itemized.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: Trump's tariffs will make things more expensive for you.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: His tax cuts will make things cheaper for rich people.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: His social security cuts will make things harder for you to afford because you'll have less money and down the line like that.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: Or should he try to like make a coherent argument about how these things all tend to be experienced, like you will experience it as inflation?
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, I mean, I don't think...
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Inflation is like such a thorny conceptual subject.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I think in a lot of ways this stuff just is more compelling the more you cut it down, right?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: I kind of do too.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: Like a 10% tax on bananas is obviously a smaller deal than a 10% tax on all imports.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it just crystallizes it.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: But just like raising the question, like why are we taxing bananas?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: normal people's bananas and cutting taxes for the rich, bankrupting Social Security, da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, is, I think, just like a better thing to say than
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: than a technical argument.
• 15:05
  SPEAKER_01: Now, one thing I do want to note about this that has gotten kind of mixed around, though, is that I've heard from people on the Dem side who've been sort of trying to work out the message.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's a little bit of an unfamiliar issue.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Like, we've just never run a campaign in which somebody proposes a 10% tax on all imports.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, people are trying out different ways
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: messages, different ways to, you know, get people interested in this subject, different ways to try to make it compelling.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, on the Dem side, there is a lot of, um,
• 15:43
  SPEAKER_01: enthusiasm for the idea that Joe Biden has overthrown the neoliberal economic consensus.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: There's a big conference happening this week that my former boss, Mike Tomasky, who's the editor of Democracy, a journal of ideas, is throwing with people from the Roosevelt Institute.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of people from the Biden administration will be there speaking on panels.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the premise of this conference is that Bidenomics has defined a new paradigm for the American economy that casts asunder the Clinton-Obama legacy of free trade and fiscal discipline, et cetera.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: This can be the kind of thing where you're like, who could possibly care about this?
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: Even I don't really care about this kind of big picture economic concepts.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_01: But the people involved really do care.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: There's resistance among stakeholders, stakeholders in the labor union movement, stakeholders at the Hewlett Foundation, to messages that are just kind of like things you could imagine Bill Clinton saying if Donald Trump ran against him in 1996.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like Bill Clinton would say,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: Like, trade is giving us cheaper stuff and that's good.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: And it's important to have responsible fiscal policy to make interest rates low.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: And that's just like cringe and ick to a lot of kind of high level actors.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's for, you know, reasons that have to do with ego.
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's reasons that have to do with serious policy disputes.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: It's the...
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: bitter, toxic wasteland of the 2016 primary.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: One of the big things Biden has accomplished is successfully papering over those kind of divides and wounds.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he did an appearance with former presidents, and everybody was enthusiastic, and nobody got too mad, which is all great.
• 17:46
  SPEAKER_01: But it does make me question, right?
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: Like there's something insane.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: If you had never heard the word tariff or you'd never heard of Donald Trump and somebody was like, okay, this candidate wants a tax on like just like all fruit that comes in.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's like most fruit comes from foreign countries.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: You know, like America is not tropical.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_01: Like, it's fine, right?
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_01: And also, when people talk about like, oh, trade, it's like hollowed out, our middle class, they're not talking about vegetable picking jobs, right?
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: You know what I mean?
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's not what the emotional center of the trade debate is about, that you want your kids to be able to grow up to be working on a banana plantation, and you need the president to make that possible.
• 18:35
  SPEAKER_01: And it connects to the immigration stuff, too, where border security, absolutely.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: You see why Republicans talk all the time, like the border, the border, the border, the border.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: OK, fantastic.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_01: But we're going to deport the guys who were picking lettuce in the summer in El Centro?
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And we're going to do what?
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: We're going to cut your grandma's Social Security benefits so that she can go replace temporary agricultural laborers?
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: That doesn't...
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: It doesn't make sense.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: I struggle actually to understand what it is Trump... What it is that the enthusiasts of this agenda think is going to happen that they're going to be happy with because it's so insane.
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, the...
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think that there are questions as to whether and how much of this stuff they actually intend to implement when – Yes.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: Like if Trump wins, right?
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: Like I do think that they will try to do a big immigration crackdown right away.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: Like that seems like that's really what gets Stephen Miller going.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: He gets real horned up by the thought of encamping immigrants near the border.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: And like I think Trump will –
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: like he kind of did in his first term, talk...
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: bandy about tariffs as a threat and also as a way to make him seem like he's fighting for somebody when he's really just doing nothing.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: And it'll get dialed back from a 10% across the board tariff to like, we're going to make some deals.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because as you say, he's going to create an ungovernable mess if he actually tries to deliver the whole package that he's talking about.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_00: But there are six months until the election, I think seven, something like that,
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: Number of months till the election.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: And this idea that he wants to make fruit and coffee among all other things people buy in America more expensive, I think that that would get people being like, really?
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_00: He wants to?
• 20:47
  SPEAKER_00: And so can Biden strip away the gloss of tariff and-
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: reconceptualize it in people's heads as like a sales tax that will apply to everything for unclear reasons.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because I really do think that like, I mean, you alluded to February polling that said that like neither candidate has a big edge on the issue.
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I just feel like it's measuring something like a little bit
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_00: weird.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_00: Like it's, it's like, it's measuring whether Americans have a decent understanding of tax incidents when what, like what I see is that both Trump and Biden for, um, me, you know, maybe for like reasonable bargaining leverage with, with foreign governments, but, um, but really for like political clout with, um,
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_00: like overrepresented segments of the electorate want them to hear that I, Biden, or I, Trump support quote unquote tariffs, which the people that they're aiming that message at here as I am tough on China and I'm going to protect your job from them.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: So there's a funny-
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: But if that's what most people understand tariff to mean, then A, it seems like it's very hard to make it a negative for that segment of the electorate.
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: And B, like...
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Well, if that's all it takes to smuggle an extremely destabilizing toxic policy into law or into just winning an election on, I mean, we can play some word games around policies we like but think are maybe a little bit unpopular in the raw, unvarnished terms.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: So isn't that worth thinking through?
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, so just one thing is political science corner.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: I was asking some people like, well, how did the president come to have such broad discretionary authority over tariffs?
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_01: And the answer I was given by scholars is that as the US started moving to free trade after World War II,
• 23:09
  SPEAKER_01: The thinking was that voters would want to hear about how you were protecting local industries so that the way to do this was to concentrate a lot of power in the executive branch so that each member of Congress could be like, I'm fighting for your jobs in whichever industries are present in your district.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: But then the president, who would presumably care about national economic outcomes, would mostly not do tariffs.
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_01: And then occasionally, like, you had this with Bush, right?
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: Like, George W. Bush did tariffs very specifically to protect the steel industry in Pennsylvania and Ohio.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because, like, those were the pivotal states in the 2004 election.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: But he didn't, you know...
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Steel is important, but it's not that important.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_01: Pennsylvania and Ohio are states, but they're only two states.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: And it mostly went with free trade.
• 24:03
  SPEAKER_01: And this thing that Trump is doing was just not on their radar as a possibility that you would consider across the board.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_01: right-wing person told me, is that perhaps the right-wing Supreme Court judges will rule that this is an unconstitutional delegation of power and block him.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: So I do think your question, though, about what can you do with word games and unfamiliar issues is interesting.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you talked about what could we call Medicare for All something else.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I think if you go back to the origins of Medicare for All as a slogan—
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: that it actually had that quality exactly, right?
• 24:48
  SPEAKER_01: That if you... Should we put a paywall in place here?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's do it.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: Because this is not podcast for all.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a privilege, not a right to have access to these important... Well, it's also like we are making the big conceptual turn in this conversation at this point.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_00: So it's a good place to break.