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  • 7 months ago
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00:00One of the most common things talked about is something called tariffs.
00:05What is your view on tariffs? Is it good economically, bad economically?
00:08Is it going to solve our budget problem? Because I think in the big, beautiful bill,
00:12a lot of money that's coming in comes in from tariffs, and that helps reduce the deficit a bit.
00:17Tariffs are not bad. Throughout history, tariffs were the main source of government revenue and so on.
00:26And any form of taxes has its cost. So capital gains taxes are bad and so on.
00:33Different things have their costs. I think the question is how well executed, how big are they,
00:40how disruptive are they in terms of the process? They can bring a significant, there's something to
00:45be said for them in that they bring in a significant amount of revenue. That means that there was less
00:51that's needed elsewhere. And we're now in a different world. We're in a world where the world
00:57is almost at war. Self-sufficiency. We have to build self-sufficiency. We cannot continue to borrow
01:05or depend on imports for that. And so there's a manufacturing. How do you create manufacturing
01:12in the United States and so on? There's some merit to all of those arguments. The question is whether
01:17that is done really well and so on. For the whole world, tariffs, of course, are not the ideal.
01:25You would like to have, if you're dealing with what's best for the whole world, you would like
01:29to have the least inefficiency. You'd say wherever they produce it the best, and we have it go
01:35around. But we're in a world now that we have to be realistic in terms of we cannot be dependent
01:43on importing a lot of things, and nor can the world be dependent on the value of the bonds
01:49and the debt that we're acquiring in order to pay for those things.
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