| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
You guys at C-SPAN are doing such a wonderful job of allowing free exchange of ideas without a lot of interruptions. | |
| Thank you, C-SPAN, for being a light in the dark. | ||
| This afternoon, a discussion about Israeli public opinion toward democracy, conflict, and the country's political trajectory. | ||
| A month after the Israel-Hamas ceasefire. | ||
| Hosted by the Georgetown University Center for Jewish Civilization, you can see it live at 4 p.m. Eastern on C-SPAN, C-SPAN now, our free mobile app, and online at c-span.org. | ||
| Today, on C-SPAN's ceasefire, at a time when finding common ground matters most in Washington, former Alabama Democratic Senator Doug Jones and former Ohio Republican Congressman Steve Stivers come together for a bipartisan dialogue on the shutdown and top issues facing the country. | ||
| They join host Dasha Burns. | ||
| Bridging the divide in American politics. | ||
| Watch Ceasefire today at 7 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eastern and Pacific only on C-SPAN. | ||
| We want to welcome back to the program Erica York. | ||
| She is the federal tax policy vice president at the Tax Foundation here to talk about the president's tariff policies and his proposal for a tariff rebate check. | ||
| Erica York, thank you for being here. | ||
| I want to begin with President Trump's Truth Social post on this where he said, people that are against tariffs are fools. | ||
| We are now the richest, most respected country in the world with almost no inflation and a record stock market price. | ||
| 401ks are highest ever. | ||
| We are taking in trillions of dollars and will soon begin paying down our enormous debt, 37 trillion. | ||
| Record investment in the United States, plants and factories going up all over the place. | ||
| A dividend of at least $2,000 a person, not including high-income people, will be paid to everyone. | ||
| And his Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, had this to say about the president's rebate check proposal. | ||
| Do you have a proposal, a formal proposal to give a $2,000 dividend to every American? | ||
| I haven't spoken to the president about this yet, but the $2,000 dividend could come in lots of forms and lots of ways, George. | ||
| It could be just the tax decreases that we are seeing on the president's agenda. | ||
| No tax on tips, no tax on overtime, no tax on Social Security, deductibility of auto loans. | ||
| So those are substantial deductions that are being financed in the tax bill. | ||
| Erica York, before we get to this idea of a rebate, let's just begin with the president's tariff policies. | ||
| Broadly describe what the president did when he took office for the second time and where we are at with the tariff policies. | ||
| The president has imposed several rounds of new tariffs using various statutes. | ||
| A couple of the new rounds of tariffs involve an emergency law that has never been used to impose tariffs before. | ||
| A lot of people will call that IEPA or the IEPA tariffs. | ||
| These are related to border crossings and fentanyl, and they include tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China. | ||
| There are the so-called reciprocal tariffs. | ||
| If you remember back to April and the Liberation Day announcement from the president that involved a 10% baseline tariff on almost all imports into the United States, plus higher tariffs on certain trading partners. | ||
| And then separate from the emergency tariffs, we have some industry-specific tariffs. | ||
| These are usually referred to as Section 232 tariffs, and they affect things like steel, aluminum, automobiles, copper, furniture. | ||
| And there are more investigations ongoing to expand the scope of those tariffs. | ||
| In all, at Tax Foundation, we estimate that together over the next decade, all of the new tariffs will amount to a $2.4 trillion tax increase. | ||
| So they are quite substantial in terms of the revenue that they will raise. | ||
| Revenue raised for the Treasury. | ||
| So the President has talked about so far how much has the United States accrued because of his tariffs. | ||
| So if we look at Treasury Department data, every month the Treasury Department reports how much tax revenue it has brought in and how much spending the federal government has undertaken. | ||
| The latest data that we have on that is through September, and it shows that in total for January through, well, for the full fiscal year, 2025 fiscal year, the federal government brought in $195 billion, that's billion with a B, in customs duty revenues or in tariffs. | ||
| That $195 billion includes pre-existing tariffs, so tariffs that were in place before Trump took office, as well as the new tariffs. | ||
| So if you break it down even further, the new tariffs have to date raised about $120 billion of tax revenue for the federal government. | ||
| So you'll notice that's far short of what we often hear the president say when he speaks of trillions of dollars coming in. | ||
| So there's a really big gap between the actual revenues being paid by U.S. importers versus what the president is saying the tariffs bring in. | ||
| Is the U.S. government chipping away at our nation's debt with this tariff revenue? | ||
| So far, no. | ||
| So if you recall back in the summer, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. | ||
| That was a very large tax cut. | ||
| It did include some spending cuts as well. | ||
| But overall, the impact on the deficit of that bill itself over the next decade will be to increase the deficit somewhere between $3 trillion and $4 trillion. | ||
| So even though we are bringing in some tariff revenues, the president has also done things that increase the deficit elsewhere. | ||
| So the net effect of all of these policies is that the deficit is growing, which means we are still adding to the national debt. | ||
| We are not chipping away at the national debt. | ||
| Erica York, what has been the impact of these new tariffs under the Trump administration on the consumer, the American consumer? | ||
| Consumers have started to see some retail price increases because of the tariffs. | ||
| Some of the most commonly experienced and talked about price increases, of course, have been for things that you buy at the grocery store, things like coffee and bananas, where you've really seen a direct increase in prices because of the tariffs. | ||
| But overall, we have seen retail prices climb. | ||
| And that's retail prices for things that are imported because the tariff adds to the cost and that gets passed on to the consumer. | ||
| It's also retail prices for things that are made in the United States, because when people substitute away from foreign goods toward domestic goods, that increases demand for domestic goods. | ||
| And so prices for those domestic goods can rise too. | ||
| All in all, academic economists peg it at about 20% pass through. | ||
| So about 20% of the tariff burden has passed through to retail prices so far. | ||
| That's in part because there's just been so much uncertainty. | ||
| We've seen announcement and then walking back announcement and then exemptions and then delays and pauses. | ||
| So a lot of changes in tariff policy have made businesses overall take a sort of wait and see approach, waiting to see what will actually be in place before they change their pricing strategy too much. | ||
| New York Times headline, Trump administration prepares tariff exemptions in bid to lower food prices. | ||
| If the proposal goes into effect, it would be the latest rollback of one of President Trump's economic policies over concerns about affordability. | ||
| Tell us how this would work. | ||
| What is the Trump administration talking about here? | ||
| It seems like they are thinking about exempting goods that can't commercially be produced in the United States at scale. | ||
| So some of those things I mentioned earlier, like coffee and bananas, that we just don't have the climate or enough land with the appropriate climate to grow in the United States. | ||
| So they're looking at a selection of mostly agricultural products that would potentially be exempted from those tariffs. | ||
| That would provide some relief to consumers of those products. | ||
| But it's a most likely, we don't have all of the details yet, but it's most likely going to be a rather cosmetic change. | ||
| The bulk of the tariffs will remain in place. | ||
| They will continue to create pricing pressures in the economy, but there will be a little bit of relief for these highly visible, for these highly visible products. | ||
| And then USA today with the headline, Trump's $2,000 rebate checks would cost $600 billion, double the new revenue from tariffs. | ||
| If the president were to go forward with this 2000 tariff rebate, how would that work? | ||
| And what do you make of USA Today's analysis that it would cost $600 billion, double the new revenue from tariffs? | ||
| It would probably work similar to the COVID relief payments that we got in 2020 and 2021. | ||
| Those were administered through the tax code. | ||
| You either received them in advance or you reconciled it when you filed your taxes. | ||
| But that takes an act of Congress. | ||
| That's not something that the president can just decide on his own to do. | ||
| So if this is going to be realized, if people are actually going to get $2,000 checks, Congress would have to enact a law in order to do that. | ||
| They have not done that so far. | ||
| So there is no pending check right now. | ||
| But there is a big math problem with the checks. | ||
| So like I mentioned earlier, the new tariffs have brought in about $120 billion to date. | ||
| Of course, through the end of the year, that will grow, but it's substantially lower than any sort of estimate of these checks checks out to be. | ||
| I've done some math too, just looking at Americans who file tax returns who report earning $100,000 or less on their tax returns because Secretary Bessant has alluded to that $100,000 of income being the cutoff point for receiving a check. | ||
| If you assume it just goes to taxpayers and spouses, no children at all receive the checks, then it would cost at least $300 billion. | ||
| So the range of estimates for the price tag of these tariff rebate checks is somewhere between $300 billion to $600 billion. | ||
| And all of that is far more than what the tariffs have generated for the government. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, we want to invite our viewers to join us in this conversation this morning. | ||
| Get your thoughts on the President Trump's tariff policies. | ||
| Democrats 202-748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| And remember, you can text if you don't want to call at 202-748-8003. | ||
| Include your first name, city, and state. | ||
| Tammy in Florida and Independent Europe. | ||
| First, Tammy. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, I just wanted to thank C-SPAN for staying neutral. | |
| I heard the comment earlier today. | ||
| I think it's critical to the U.S. that we have neutral commentary, given the status of the news systems like Fox, where they've been proven liars and excluded from use in other countries. | ||
| I was a Republican, but I think the Republicans are being irresponsible. | ||
| Although I do think a $2,000 stimulant to people under $100,000 would be appropriate Because of, you know, given the tax breaks they're giving to the rich, assisting people at low income is very important to this country. | ||
| However, the choice of how they will fund that will likely be to go even further in debt because they've blown so much money, which is the same cause really for the shutdown as they just keep spending and spending. | ||
| They gave Trump $800 million per year budget in the last budget round to provide travel, which he's traveled over 110 days to and from his residences in Mar-Lago and other golf courses over the course of his short tenure in this term. | ||
| All right, Timmy, I'm going to jump in. | ||
| Erica, York, let's talk about the first part of it. | ||
| She said, giving a stimulant to the folks that make under less than $100,000 economic stimulus is a good idea. | ||
| Is that what it does, though, for folks? | ||
| Did that work when the Biden administration did it during COVID? | ||
| So if you look at the impact of the COVID-era stimulus checks, most estimates say that those stimulus payments, as well as the other fiscal stimulus, all of the COVID money that the federal government spent contributed anywhere between one to three percentage points to headline inflation. | ||
| Now, the scope of what we would be looking at, the deficit financed amount of these checks would be substantially smaller than what was deficit financed during COVID, but it would create more inflationary pressures in the economy. | ||
| And so in that sense, it's a bit misguided at this point to do stimulus checks. | ||
| A better way to target relief to low and middle income Americans would be to lift the tariffs in the first place. | ||
| The tariffs are creating a drag on the economy. | ||
| They're adding to costs. | ||
| They're reducing incomes. | ||
| That's particularly true for low and middle income households. | ||
| And so getting rid of the tariffs would be better than a sort of band-aid policy of sending them $2,000 checks. | ||
| Can you put some numbers behind reducing income? | ||
| Yeah, we've estimated that on average, the tariffs in 2025 amount to a tax burden of about $1,300. | ||
| In 2026, when they're in effect for the full calendar year, that will grow to $1,600. | ||
| It can differ across households depending on how much imported goods they consume, what industries they work in. | ||
| So you could see an individual household or an individual taxpayer's burden be larger or smaller than that average amount, but that gives you an idea of just the substantial tax increase, which results in a decrease in your after-tax income or your ability to consume because the government is pulling this money out of the economy through the tariff payments. | ||
| And that is why it's a drag, as you said, drag on the economy. | ||
| Define that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So most estimates, including ours at Tax Foundation, find that the tariffs will decrease economic growth. | ||
| They'll reduce productivity. | ||
| They'll reduce output. | ||
| They'll increase costs and prices. | ||
| And so that is why you see the drag on economic growth. | ||
| If you think about what a tariff requires a business to do, suppose that they're importing inputs and they turn those inputs into a final product. | ||
| When you place a tariff on those inputs, it increases the cost of doing business in the United States. | ||
| And so that business facing higher costs may try to pass those price increases on to consumers, which means we have less money left over after we buy our basket of goods and services. | ||
| It may mean that that business is forced to reduce hiring, to reduce wages, to reduce investment. | ||
| And as those choices at each individual business play out across the economy, what happens is a lower level of income, lower level of investment, lower productivity, and ultimately the economy is a little bit smaller than it would have been if we didn't have that tariff distorting those decisions. | ||
| We'll go to Nashville, Tennessee. | ||
| Marshall is a Republican. | ||
| Welcome to the conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, Greta. |