Preston Brashers, a Heritage Foundation research fellow, argues Trump’s tariffs—despite Wall Street’s 8% market panic—are strategic leverage against China and NATO allies exploiting U.S. trade policies, like the OECD’s proposed 15% global minimum tax. He warns America’s $34 trillion debt, with interest payments surpassing defense spending, threatens Social Security insolvency by 2034 and Medicare deficits, urging spending cuts before tax reforms to curb inflation and protect middle-class Americans from rising gas and grocery prices. Automation sustains manufacturing output but fails to replace lost blue-collar jobs, while EPA regulations and the Green New Deal pose bigger hurdles than trade alone. Brashers advocates incremental entitlement fixes, like raising retirement ages or combating fraud, but acknowledges political resistance—highlighting how unsustainable debt risks future economic collapse unless addressed decisively. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Preston Brashiers of the Heritage Foundation.
You know, a couple of weeks ago on the podcast, I put forward a Clavin's theory of what Trump was doing in the matters of foreign policy.
And I pointed out that Trump is a gestalt thinker.
He's a guy who kind of sees things whole.
Maybe he doesn't even know sometimes what it is he's seeing, but he has a bigger picture than I think people give him credit for.
And I think he moves through that picture sometimes on instinct, but sometimes with instinct backed up by reason.
And sometimes because the press reports on it with so much hostility, it's really hard to see what's going on.
So now we have to talk about his economic theory.
And I thought instead of having me do it, somebody who has a hard time balancing a checkbook, I would bring on Preston Brashiers because he is a research fellow who focuses on tax and fiscal policy at the Heritage Foundation Grover M. Herman Center for the Federal Budget.
And I've been reading his pieces and he really has a lot of great insight.
Preston, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it.
Yeah, Andrew, it's a real pleasure to be with you today.
So every morning I get the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal is in such a panic over tariffs that they put it in every headline and every article.
Even on the op-ed page, there are no columnists who are allowed to say maybe this is a good idea.
Should we all be in a panic about tariffs?
I think there's reason to be a little bit concerned because you just don't know where this is all going to go.
And obviously the markets are a little bit concerned and you've seen the markets come down a little bit.
But at the same time, I think there's some that are just going absolutely overkill in terms of their panic on this.
You know, markets have come down maybe 8% or so.
I don't know what the exact number is right now, but this is not completely abnormal.
And frankly, I think Trump in a lot of ways is doing what Elon Musk has done with Doge and what Elon Musk did at Twitter, NowX, in terms of he understood that there was something that needed to be shaken up.
And he's using tariffs.
He knows the tools that are at his disposal.
And one of those tools is tariffs.
And he's trying to use them as a leverage point to get things done in terms of the southern border, things that he doesn't like that's happening in Canada, other places around the world.
And so as a tool of statecraft and using the leverage, the economic leverage that the United States has, which we're a massive economy, we have massive consumer markets.
I'm not necessarily opposed to that per se.
I would like to get to a point where a year from now, two years from now, things have settled and we've kind of come to a good place.
But part of it, I think, is just that President Trump is letting the world know that America is not to be trifled with.
America is strong again and that he's going to push where he needs to get things done and to put America first.
When I was talking about his foreign policy, one of the things that seems really important to him is China.
And he doesn't talk about it much.
And I think he doesn't want to talk about it much because he wants to wait until he feels America is stronger.
But once you put China into the mix, a lot of the stuff he does with Ukraine, with everybody else, starts to make sense.
You start to understand that this is a long-term goal.
In terms of his long-term economic goals, because he puts tariffs on and he takes them off and he's, you know, he seems erratic if you're just watching him.
Do you have a sense of what his overall vision is?
Because since he was young, since he was beloved by people like Oprah Winfrey and the late night comics and they would have him on his show, he has been saying that America is getting cheated and that we need to, we're being foolish.
But I'm not quite sure I'm clear what he means by that and what he's trying to do about it.
Do you understand that?
Yeah, I mean, that's, I guess, the $10 million question, right?
Trump believes in the art of the deal.
So to some extent, you have to kind of consider that some of what he's saying is perhaps a little bit of bluster and negotiating tactic.
And so, you know, I think the question that people have is what is the balance of that?
Because I do think that some of it is a legitimate, he looks at different things and different ways that, you know, the balance of trade and different things, that he actually sees ways that the U.S. is, you know, especially in the last four years, that some bad things were happening and the United States was not exerting the pressure that it should have been.
And so I think it's a, you know, is it 60-40?
Is it 80-20 in terms of whether it's how much is bluster and negotiating tactic versus how much is it he actually really believes that we want to make everything in America and kind of more of an autarky?
You know, I don't think it's one extreme or the other.
I think it's probably a little bit of both where he does think that we need to be a little bit more careful with ensuring that certain industries are, you know, that we have manufacturing here at home.
I think that's part of it.
And then there is a part of it that I think he's just art of the deal coming in really hot and trying to get negotiating wins.
And so I think that's part of it as well.
You know, this has always kind of bothered me, actually, the manufacturing thing.
I mean, we can't just be a nation of consumers, right?
We can't just be a nation of people who buy things.
Ultimately, you want to make something.
The argument that the globalists always put forward was, you know, yes, manufacturing is leaving, but now your iPhone is less expensive because it's being made by slaves in China or whatever.
But in fact, when I would travel to the Midwest, the area was gutted.
When Trump talked about American carnage and the media was, oh, that's very dark.
He was right.
I mean, it was bad out there.
And I can't help but wonder, is there a problem?
Like, can we afford to have manufacturing here?
In other words, will we pay for the iPhone, the more expensive iPhone, to have manufacturing here?
And if not, what do people who work in manufacturing do?
I mean, what do we do?
You know, you can't have people who don't work.
I mean, work is such a source of pride and dignity and purpose.
You can't just take that away and say, we're going to give you a guaranteed income.
So how do you balance those things where the iPhone is buyable, is affordable, but still we're making stuff?
Yeah.
So I guess one thing to consider here is there's a difference between final consumer products and intermediate goods.
And so where I get a little bit more reluctant when we talk about tariffs is especially when we're talking about these intermediate goods.
Because if you're a U.S. manufacturer and you use steel and aluminum, some of those tariffs are going to be actually harmful for U.S. manufacturers.
And so I think that's a little bit of a different thing.
Another thing to consider, and where Trump has a good point, is if you look at all the European countries and most of the rest of the developed world, they all impose value-added taxes.
And so if you have a value-added tax, one of the things that's part of that is similar to a sales tax.
Part of that is that it's a destination-based tax.
And so they have a border adjustment that takes place.
And if you have a 20% VAT, which is common in most of the rest of the world, there is this kind of imbalance that happens.
Now, it's a little bit overstated.
There's going to be some sort of currency adjustment that happens naturally.
So it's not necessarily that they're purely being abusive.
But at the same time, the U.S., the federal government, doesn't have a consumption tax.
And so there's that imbalance.
So, you know, I think if I were to say that what the balancing point is, it's to try to get to a one of the things that you can do within the corporate income tax would be to apply a border adjustment.
And so that would just be simply a flat adjustment that's going to happen, similar to what happens with a value-added tax.
And you can do that.
And what that would do would be if you have a certain amount of imports, the tax would apply to that, whereas the exports, you'd have a credit against that.
That way, when you're dealing with these intermediate products like steel, if you're a car maker and you have products that are going intermediate goods that are going back and forth across the border, that's accounted for and it's not going to have this cascading effect or double taxation that's happening to it.
So it's not going to hit those manufacturers.
And so I think there are ways to go about this that are a little bit, I think would be a better settling point.
I think in the intermediate term, he's trying to make deals.
But if I were to have my way, I guess, in terms of kind of where this settles, it'd be, we have this big tax bill coming up at the end of the year.
You could apply a border adjustment in there, use that as a pay for to lock in some of Trump's big tax cuts from 2017 that he wants to make permanent.
So I think there's an approach here that I'm hopeful we can get to.
So when he talks about reciprocal tariffs, I'm a simple person.
They're putting 200% tariffs on our goods going out.
Why shouldn't we put 200% tariffs on their goods coming in?
Why is that bad?
That's a great question.
And I think the idea, the concept of reciprocal tariffs is not a bad one in the sense of, you know, there you're really getting at it in terms of negotiating.
You're trying to get the trade barriers down for U.S. producers.
And so this idea of reciprocity, I don't think is a bad one per se.
The problem is it's a little bit of a fuzzy area because if I say if you're talking about soy, let's say, and let's say Singapore imposed a 200% tariff against U.S. soy, what exactly would be the reciprocal response in the U.S.?
And that's a little bit of a difficult question because if we impose a 200% tariff on Singapore soy, it would have zero effect whatsoever because we don't import soy from Singapore.
and even to the extent that you're talking about let's say you impose a tariff on 50 billion dollars worth of our products so we're going to impose a tariff on 50 billion dollars of your products it's also a little bit difficult to uh to equate that because you could also have other trade barriers that are in place and that's or or other issues that the the president wants to uh to respond to and so it's not so in in principle i agree with the idea of reciprocity just in terms of let's get the trade barriers down for our own companies
But it is a little bit difficult in practice to define exactly what that reciprocity means.
In your opinion, I mean, America has had a pretty good run economically, I mean, since the war, since World War II.
Is Trump right?
Are we being mistreated?
I mean, it did seem to me, for instance, when he went to NATO and said, you guys should be paying for your own defense.
I lived in Europe for a long time, and I used to say to him, the only reason you have all these welfare things is because we're paying to defend you.
I always thought that made a lot of sense.
But is he right about this?
Are we being cheated in business?
Well, I think certainly in your case in terms of NATO and so many of the NATO countries spending about 1.5% of GDP, whereas the U.S. is spending 3.5% of GDP.
I mean, if you think about it, If we didn't have this big alliance and you were a small country, you would probably be spending a great deal of your economy of your GDP on national defense, whereas the U.S. is relatively secure.
So, yeah, I think in a lot of ways, many foreign countries have been taking advantage of us.
You have, I think, some of the things that are happening with the OECD and the tax space, they've been trying to impose this global minimum tax, which they really did design this tax.
It was done in Paris in a way that it was designed to primarily hit American companies, especially U.S. tech companies.
And so, you know, they're kind of over there in Paris colluding against the United States.
And there's a lot of things I think that the United States has reason to be a little bit upset about.
And so all of it's coming from a point of putting America first.
And I think that's actually a welcome change because this idea that we're just one global, big global community and we should be just as concerned about what's happening in some random far-flung country as what's happening to American citizens.
I don't think that's really the way that nations should work.
Right.
It's not the way anybody else is working.
So why should we?
Yeah.
So the stock market obviously doesn't, I'm not sure whether they don't like the tariffs or they don't like the uncertainty that the stock markets have been really dropping.
I mean, I have to say, some of the things that are kind of annoying is I remember when we went into a technical recession during the Biden administration, all I read were articles saying, well, is it really a recession?
If Trump has three days of a bad stock market, they start talking about it being a recession.
It seems they judge him a little faster and more harshly.
But one of the things that I wonder about is Joe Biden was shelling out a lot of taxpayer money to businesses, and it seemed like graph to me.
I mean, he was just sending it to things that he liked, that he thought were good.
And I assume people who were helpful to him, he was channeling money.
But the stock market doesn't care where the money is coming from.
I mean, the stock market doesn't care whether it's a free manufacturer making stuff that Americans want by Americans for Americans, or if the government is stealing money from taxpayers and giving it to the president's friends.
What difference does that make to the stock market?
So is the stock market overreacting here or is that something that Trump could do to calm them down?
I think there's certainly I wouldn't say whether it's overreacting or not.
There's a lot of uncertainty at this point.
Again, kind of trying to plan out where things are going to be in a year from now.
It's a little bit hard.
And so I think there is maybe an element.
And it's not just the tariffs, by the way.
There's also the uncertainty of this big tax bill.
And by the way, that's kind of misframed in a lot of the media in terms of they want to frame this as this giant tax cut, especially they'll say it's for the rich.
It's not.
But it's not really a tax cut per se.
What they're really trying to do is just lock in the tax cuts that have been in place since Trump's first term, which Biden was happy to keep.
He didn't want to roll those back because he knew how bad it would have been for the economy.
And so there's some uncertainty there as well.
Inflation Control Efforts00:03:43
I think people are maybe a little bit hesitant to lock in plans in some ways until there's a little bit of certainty.
But at the same time, the Trump administration has been making cuts.
They're cutting federal government spending.
I mean, what Doja has been doing has been actually quite good, I think, in a lot of ways.
But there is going to be a kind of a short-term effect from that.
And part of that effect is going to be it's going to help to bring prices down, bring inflation, or at least bring inflation under control.
And I think we've seen that with some of the later numbers.
And if you're bringing inflation down, that actually has a bad effect on the stock market to some extent because those stock prices are going to not go up as quickly.
But even if as an investor, you're not really benefiting from that because your purchasing power is not increasing as much.
So look, there's a lot going on.
I would encourage people not to be too quick to judge because, you know, again, there's a lot going on.
There's some uncertainty.
Let's kind of give a little bit of a leash and see where this goes.
And I think, you know, six months from now, a year from now, I think we'll have a lot better idea.
And I, for one, I'm not panicked.
I'm buying in the stock market.
Not that I can make any formal recommendations or anything, but I'm not panicked myself.
So we're talking to Preston Brashiers of the Heritage Foundation.
So if you could step back for a minute and put Trump out of the picture for a minute, where do you see the flaw?
Our economy seems to me to be kind of weak in a lot of ways.
I mean, it seems that the underlying economy seems weak.
The government seems to be spending so much money.
We're always in so much debt.
A lot of people, like a lot of people are very rich in this country, but a lot of people seem to be struggling.
If you stepped back and thought, what do we need here?
What are the main problems?
What would you personally think?
Where do you think the attention should be paid?
I mean, I think that the biggest problem right now is that our government is too big.
I think that's the root of the problems.
And like I said, I think President Trump is addressing that.
You saw this in Argentina with Javier Malay, that he absolutely, you know, that's where the chainsaw originally originated from that Elon Musk is kind of adopted.
And we've gone nowhere near where Argentina did.
And what you saw in Argentina was kind of the same sort of headlines that he's going to wreck everything.
He's going to destroy the economy.
It's going to be a disaster there.
And then what you saw was the exact opposite.
And he brought the deficit down.
He brought inflation under check.
And the inflation that they were talking about was 200% a year, 300% a year.
It was absolutely crushing for their economy.
And it takes a little bit of time, but it actually was phenomenally quick.
It took about a year for him to get things under control.
And so I think that's the right approach.
Our government is too big.
And if you look at Congressional Budget Office estimates about where things are going, it's just unsustainable, unfortunately.
And so that's going to have this continuing drag on the economy as I think one of the things that people need to understand is that whatever money the government is spending, that's coming out of Americans' pockets one way or the other.
It's either going to come out of Americans' pockets through direct taxation or they're just going to borrow the money, in which case, if they're able to borrow the money and there's maybe foreign investors that are able to buy it, well, then we're going to have to pay that off in the future.
So that's future taxation.
Or in a lot of cases, if people are hesitant to buy up U.S. treasuries, which is kind of the case or has been the case over the last four years, then what ends up happening is that they just effectively have to print the money and it's held in the Fed.
Government Spending Drag00:13:04
And so you end up with this massive amount of inflation that hits especially people in the middle class and people that aren't able to benefit from the growth in the stock market that you get from inflation.
They're just paying higher prices for groceries and gas.
So for me, the root of the problem is that the government's too big and we have a huge spending problem that we need to get under control.
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What should American business look like?
I mean, it's always kind of disturbed me that we became a service, you know, service industries and consumerism just seem to take over everything.
And there does seem to be not just, it's not just pride, but it's kind of control and value that you have from manufacturing things.
What do you think, say, 10 years from now, say, Trump is successful?
What do you think the economy should look like in America?
What should we be proud of?
What should we be pointing at?
It's hard to say.
I mean, I think manufacturing is going to look very different because if you actually look at the manufacturing output, it has not gone down all that much.
It has got, you know, at least as a percentage of GDP, it's come down, but it's remained relatively high, actually, but it's just, it's a lot more capital intensive and less labor intensive.
And I think that's unfortunately a trend that's maybe not completely unfortunate.
What does that mean?
Yeah, so they're using more machines.
So robotics, right?
You have more robotics that you're able to employ and labor costs are higher than they would have been.
And there is what I would say, though, that is a little bit more to your point, and where I think Trump can help in terms of manufacturing and some of these kind of blue-collar jobs that have been lost a little bit is the problem isn't necessarily just on the side of tariffs and foreign currencies being manipulated or things like that.
Those can be issues.
But I think the bigger problem is actually regulations on that front.
We have this EPA that makes it impossible to build.
There's so many things that I think companies would like to be able to do, but it just the process of getting permitting and things like this.
And frankly, I think in terms of the tax bill, there's some things in there that will help to lock in these, they're called expensing provisions, that will help manufacturing a great deal.
So there are things that can be done.
I'm not one that believes in too heavy of a government guiding where the economy is going to go, because I think ultimately, you get a bunch of, even if they're smart people in a room, it's really hard to kind of think through what hundreds of millions of people are going to be doing in an economy a few years down the road.
And I think people tend to get it wrong when they try to have too heavy of a hand in it.
So I would take a little bit of a lighter approach, but at the same time, get out of the way.
Get the government out of the way.
Don't regulate so much.
Some of this Green New Deal stuff has been absolutely stupid for the American economy and for so much of the rest of the world.
And we need to get away from that approach and just kind of let business be a little bit freer to build and to grow and to invest.
So, you know, to talk about the tax bill, the thing that, you know, when Reagan cut taxes, I mean, it set the economy on fire.
But at this point, but it also did increase our debt.
And now our debt seems to be so high.
Should we care?
I mean, some people say, well, it doesn't matter.
Or is there something, you know, when Trump says he's never going to cut entitlements, certain important entitlements, I don't understand how we get out of debt and to be servicing the debt at a higher rate than we're paying for our defense seems crazy to me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, we're spending a trillion dollars a year on interest on the debt.
And again, if you look at the projections going forward, it's just terrifying when you look at how much we would be spending if we continue down this path and we don't make some changes.
I mean, President Trump and Elon Musk, they're starting some good work with Doge and so forth.
But, you know, I think last I looked at their website in Doge, it was $115 billion.
That sounds, I mean, that's a huge number for most of us.
But as far as the federal government, when you're talking about spending $7 trillion a year, the problem isn't, a lot of people, you know, in Northern Virginia are going to be panicked about the Doge is going too far.
The reality is they're not going far enough.
We really have to do a whole lot more.
But at the same time, so in terms of the tax cut bill, and again, it's not really a tax cut bill.
It's just trying to avoid a massive tax increase that would affect people.
You'd have the standard deduction would be cut in half, the child tax credit would be cut in half, people's rates would all go up.
I mean, it's not nothing for individuals.
You would notice that your tax bills would go up or your withholding would change so that you're getting less of a paycheck.
So it's absolutely something that I think matters.
But where it really matters, I think, is there's kind of two different things.
There's tax cuts and then there's tax reforms.
And the 2017 bill that they're trying to extend right now, it had some tax cuts in it where you're just kind of cutting rates, which is good, which is nice.
But again, it doesn't matter as much when you're talking about a country that is $36 trillion in debt and has $2 trillion of deficits every year.
But what it also included were some reforms that were simplifications of the tax code, that were improvements in how we tax things.
We want to avoid double taxation.
So there are definitely some things in that tax bill that I think are really important to make sure that we lock in.
But I think there's some thought that can be had as to prioritization and how exactly we want to do this.
Because, again, the root problem isn't that we don't have a problem with taxes as much as we have a problem with we're just spending way too much money.
And that's the thing that we need to address first and foremost.
So where do we go to address that?
I mean, what are the sources?
Everybody always says Social Security and Medicare.
Is that it?
I mean, so I think that the approach that President Trump is taking, if you look at the Rust vote is kind of instrumental in kind of a little bit of the approach of let's start with the most egregious waste.
And that's what you're seeing with Doge, right?
Let's build a little bit of goodwill.
Let's get into the muscle memory of cutting and showing some of the good things that can happen that the left will always scream with their hair on fire whenever you make cuts.
But I think for the most part, the American people are pretty happy with cutting some of these absolutely wasteful things.
And I think when you kind of build that up, I think you can kind of go from there.
I mean, obviously, Social Security is a very popular program.
I don't think President Trump has any desire to cut Social Security.
I think there are some reforms that certainly can happen.
There is some fraud in these programs.
Certainly in Medicaid, I think some of the things that if you look at what's been going on in California and Medicaid, there's a lot of, you know, people have kind of called it money laundering essentially happening because the federal government is essentially subsidizing the states on their Medicaid.
So there are reforms that can happen to entitlements, but It's not an easy task by any stretch.
And I think you cut where you can, you get as far as you can.
But ultimately, there probably will have to be some reforms to those entitlement programs, even those really popular entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare.
As much as most Americans would want to try to avoid it, to some extent, I think it's coming down the pike.
It's just a matter of when.
On the current path, we're about 10 years, actually less than 10 years away from insolvency for Social Security, seven, eight years out.
So that's coming down the pike, whether we want to address it or not.
It's amazing that nobody will talk about it.
I mean, it's common sense that people didn't live as long and there were more young people to support the old people.
It's just common sense that there's not going to be, I mean, all we really, it seems like all we would have to do is just move the age at which you start collecting Social Security up a few years and that would help.
Yeah.
So, I mean, if we do nothing, what's going to ultimately happen is it's going to run out.
The program's going to run out of money.
And so they would have the default would be that they're going to cut benefits by about 22%, 21%, 22% across the board.
So that's just what's going to happen if we do nothing.
So, you know, I think it's a better approach, whether it's in this administration or whether it's in the next administration.
It's not going to be too long, but someone's going to have to deal with this problem.
They do have to make some sort of actual reforms.
And there's different reforms.
My colleague Rachel Gresler has talked a lot about Social Security reforms that can be made that are going to do it in a way that is kind of least harmful to the people that most need it.
But at the same time, you're absolutely right.
And actually, Medicare is a bigger one in a lot of ways.
If you actually look at where the growth is in terms of the new deficits, a lot of it's going to be coming from Medicare.
And so there's reforms there as well that should be looked at.
Just I'm out of time, but I was just interested.
We're having this argument as we do seem to have every 20 days about shutting down the government and this continuing resolution.
Should there even be a debt cap?
I mean, what is the answer to keep this from happening or should it be happening?
That's a great question.
I mean, well, look, it's been really interesting because how the tables have turned here in terms of watching the Democrats kind of stomp their foot and want to have shut down the government because apparently we're doing too much cutting of the government, which is kind of an interesting dynamic.
You know, I'm not a huge fan of the idea of a continuing resolution.
What a continuing resolution, what this is basically doing is it's saying we're going to take the current funding levels and they tweak it just slightly, you know, a margin of error almost.
And they're going to take the current funding levels and they're going to extend that out for the rest of the year, basically so that they can get to the serious work that they are doing.
And, you know, it's not the ideal, but because they don't want to have the government shut down and kind of stop the work of Doge and so forth, most conservatives have come around that this is, if you're going to, if you're ever going to vote for a CR, this is kind of a good year to do it because they are doing so much good work at actually cutting government.
We don't want to be kind of embroiled in this fight every 30 days, which is what the Democrats were looking for, is a 30-day extension with some of the, so that they get some of their priorities in there.
Preston Brashiers of the Heritage Foundation, an expert on tax and fiscal policy.
Thank you very much.
Very difficult stuff to predict and to understand, but I very much appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
I hope you come back.
Huge pleasure.
Thank you.
Thank you so much, Andrew.
Thanks.
Once again, Preston Brashiers of the Heritage Foundation, very, very complex stuff.
And I think there's a lot of stuff that people don't want to face that they're going to have to face.
But interesting to hear what he thinks is going on, especially in this moment of uncertainty.
And I think Trump is playing a tough political game, but let's see if he wins through.
I kind of suspect he's going to.
And you can win through too to next Friday with the Andrew Clavin Show.