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Episode: Worst. Tariffs. Ever. (update)

Author: NPR
Duration: 00:26:32

Episode Shownotes

The Smoot Hawley Tariffs were a debacle that helped plunge America into the Great Depression. What can we learn from them?Today on the show, we tell the nearly 100-year-old story of Smoot and Hawley, that explains why Congress decided to delegate tariff power to the executive branch in the first

place. It's a story that weaves in wool, humble buckwheat, tiny little goldfish, and even Ferris Bueller... Anyone? Anyone?It's also what set the stage for the Trump tariffs. President-elect Donald Trump enacted a heap of import taxes in his first term, in particular on goods from China. President Biden's administration largely kept those tariffs in place, and levied new tariffs as well, on electric vehicles and solar panels.And now, as Trump's second presidency is on the horizon, he has promised even more tariffs on Mexico, Canada, China, and even on all imports across the board.And now, as Trump's second presidency is on the horizon, he has promised even more tariffs on Mexico, Canada, China, and even on all imports across the board.We update this classic episode about the Smoot Hawley Tariffs, and review the impact of more recent efforts from Trump and Biden alike.Help support Planet Money by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney. You get bonus episodes!Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Full Transcript

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00:02:03 Speaker_08
This is Planet Money from NPR. In the Venn diagram of iconic pop culture moments and critically important economic history lessons, there is an overlap of roughly 40 seconds.

00:02:24 Speaker_07
So first, I guess I want to ask you, do you know this scene from Ferris Bueller?

00:02:30 Speaker_08
Of course.

00:02:31 Speaker_07
Doug Irwin, economist at Dartmouth.

00:02:34 Speaker_08
Can you do it without looking? Like, do you know it by heart?

00:02:36 Speaker_04
I can do the first part. In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives passed the... Anyone?

00:02:42 Speaker_02
Anyone? A tariff bill, the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act, which anyone raised or lowered raised tariffs in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects?

00:03:02 Speaker_04
Anyone? Anyone? No. It did not work out well, and the economy sank further into the Great Depression.

00:03:07 Speaker_08
Not bad. Not bad. Almost word for word. And by the way, Holly Smoot, Smoot Holly, Doug Irwin says, you can say it either way.

00:03:13 Speaker_07
And when it comes to Smoot Holly, you were kind of like the Smoot Holly guy. Is that right?

00:03:19 Speaker_04
There aren't many competitors, I guess, would be one way of putting it. I mean, I think everyone sort of knows of them, but no one has done the deep dive like I have, I guess.

00:03:27 Speaker_08
Doug wrote a book about the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, including an explanation of how it became the most infamously boring high school lesson in movie history.

00:03:35 Speaker_04
They'd cast the actor Ben Stein, who's the son of a famous economist Herb Stein. So they want him to be a boring high school teacher, but they didn't actually script what he was going to say. So they let him rip.

00:03:46 Speaker_04
And he starts talking about the Smoot-Hawley tariff.

00:03:47 Speaker_08
But why do you think it works as a punchline in that scene?

00:03:50 Speaker_04
Well, first of all, it was delivery, mainly, because I think you can make Smoot-Hawley exciting. It's during this conflagration, the Great Depression. It has a lot of drama.

00:04:00 Speaker_04
It has really funny names, Smoot and Hawley, interesting characters, unintended consequences.

00:04:06 Speaker_08
And I guess now it has a tremendous amount of relevance to today.

00:04:09 Speaker_04
Yes.

00:04:12 Speaker_08
Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Kenny Malone.

00:04:14 Speaker_07
And I'm Sally Helm. And did we all skip class on Smoot-Hawley Day?

00:04:19 Speaker_08
We are now 40 days away from the start of Donald Trump's second presidency, and he has promised sweeping tariffs on products coming in from Mexico, Canada, and China. He says they can help American workers without hurting American consumers.

00:04:34 Speaker_08
And economists are not so sure. They point to Smoot-Hawley as one of the key reasons.

00:04:41 Speaker_08
Today on the show, we're going back in history to update an episode that Sally and I did in 2018 about the most notorious names in tariff history and this big old tariff law that helped drag down the world economy.

00:04:55 Speaker_08
And we'll get an update on how Trump's tariffs from his first administration worked out. Stick around.

00:05:06 Speaker_06
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00:06:02 Speaker_08
Okay, so President Trump is weeks from his second term in office and has promised even bigger tariffs than his first term.

00:06:10 Speaker_08
The exact numbers have fluctuated, but at different times he's talked about like a baseline 20% tariff on all imports, 25% on goods coming in from Mexico and Canada, and up to 60% on imports from China.

00:06:27 Speaker_08
Compare that to what he did in his first term back in 2018 when we originally reported this story.

00:06:33 Speaker_03
We will have a 25 percent tariff on foreign steel and a 10 percent tariff on foreign aluminum.

00:06:40 Speaker_07
He'd also put some tariffs on washing machines and solar panels.

00:06:44 Speaker_08
By the end of President Trump's tariff spree, he had imposed tariffs on about $370 billion in imports from China.

00:06:54 Speaker_08
It was a political move by the Trump administration, in part to punish China for what the administration said were dirty tactics in the trade world.

00:07:02 Speaker_07
And also partly a protectionist tax to help people who were a big part of President Trump's voting bloc, a.k.a. manufacturing sectors left behind by globalization.

00:07:12 Speaker_08
Economists tend to not agree on much, but it was hard to find one who thought those first-term tariffs were a good idea, let alone these way bigger, way broader tariffs that he's talking about for the second term.

00:07:27 Speaker_07
And a big reason for that is this kind of economics horror story. It's used to scare young economists around the campfire. The tale of Smoot-Hawley.

00:07:38 Speaker_08
We were thinking like the best place to start is probably with the election in 1928.

00:07:44 Speaker_04
That's the perfect place to start.

00:07:46 Speaker_07
Again, Doug Irwin.

00:07:47 Speaker_04
So in 1928, the US economy was doing exceptionally well. The stock market was booming.

00:07:53 Speaker_07
Employers were hiring.

00:07:54 Speaker_08
The unemployment rate was very low.

00:07:56 Speaker_04
There was no Great Depression in sight whatsoever. And so one question is, what could the parties fight about in that campaign to try to win voters?

00:08:04 Speaker_04
And it turns out, while the overall economy was doing well, there's one sector that was being left behind and was not doing well, and that was agriculture.

00:08:12 Speaker_07
Farmers were feeling forgotten, desperate even, because they're losing their jobs, the economy is shifting away from them and towards a fancy newfangled techie industry benefiting the coastal elites.

00:08:26 Speaker_07
In this case, back then, the hot techie industry is manufacturing.

00:08:31 Speaker_08
Yeah, that's right. Making things like cars and like sewing machines.

00:08:36 Speaker_07
So this became an election issue. Save the farmers. Save the people who are being left behind. And the Republicans and their presidential candidate, Herbert Hoover, they win the election.

00:08:48 Speaker_00
Herbert Hoover, now president of the United States, stood before the people. His platform had been prosperity for everyone.

00:08:55 Speaker_08
By the time Hoover was giving his inaugural address, Republicans in Congress were already trying to make good on this protect the farmers promise.

00:09:03 Speaker_07
Most notably, Reed Smoot and Willis Hawley.

00:09:06 Speaker_08
You want to try and describe these men for our listeners?

00:09:09 Speaker_04
So one of them is sort of tall and lean. That would be Reed Smoot. And the other is a little shorter and a little squatter, a little fatter, and that would be Willis Hawley. Do you know the Muppets?

00:09:20 Speaker_08
Yes.

00:09:21 Speaker_04
Do you know Statler and Waldorf?

00:09:23 Speaker_08
They're my favorite Muppets.

00:09:24 Speaker_04
Yes, they're the guys, the old guys in the balcony who are jeering at the act on stage.

00:09:29 Speaker_00
You know, they can improve the whole show if they just change the ending. Oh. Put it closer to the beginning. Can we do another one?

00:09:37 Speaker_08
Let's do one more. For once they've given us something other than second-rate entertainment. What's that? Third-rate entertainment.

00:09:46 Speaker_07
Do you not like the Muppets? I don't think I'm as big of a Muppets person as you. Whatever. But it's good. Good Muppets.

00:09:51 Speaker_08
Anyway, Reed Smoot was a senator from Utah. Willis Hawley was a representative from Oregon. They were the heads of the committees in the Senate and the House that were in charge of tariffs at the time. That's why their names are on the bill.

00:10:02 Speaker_07
And the two agricultural products that were facing the most foreign competition at that time were wool and sugar.

00:10:09 Speaker_08
So you can imagine one version of this where the politicians just say sugar and wool. OK, let's just put a tariff on imported sugar and wool and then, you know, we could debate the benefits of that.

00:10:20 Speaker_07
But that is not even how the debate went at all, partly because of something called log rolling, which is basically vote trading.

00:10:29 Speaker_07
So say you're a representative from a corn state like Iowa, then you're like, wait, why would I vote for your sugar and wool tariff? I am not supporting that unless you put a tariff on corn.

00:10:42 Speaker_08
But then the representative from Ohio would be like, wait, why am I going to vote for your sugar and wool and corn tariff if you don't protect my goldfish producers?

00:10:53 Speaker_07
And everyone's like, goldfish producers?

00:10:56 Speaker_04
Apparently, there was one firm in Ohio that raised goldfish, and they thought that imported goldfish were eating into their market.

00:11:04 Speaker_07
Are we talking like a little goldfish in a bag at a fair? I think that's what we're talking about. Really? Like an orange goldfish for your bowl at home, like a goldfish?

00:11:15 Speaker_08
That's right. Did they get a tariff?

00:11:17 Speaker_04
35 percent.

00:11:18 Speaker_08
Industry after industry was lining up, asking for a tariff, asking for protection, and the congressmen were overwhelmed.

00:11:25 Speaker_04
They work day and night. There are a lot of complaints of members of Congress saying how they had to stay up so late listening to people droning on about clothespins and oil drums and certain types of chemicals.

00:11:39 Speaker_04
New York State Grain and Hay Dealers Association, they made the plea on behalf of the humble buckwheat industry.

00:11:44 Speaker_08
And just to be clear, is humble buckwheat a quote from what actually happened then?

00:11:49 Speaker_04
I think the buckwheat industry is portraying itself as humble. So they say we are the humble buckwheat industry.

00:11:54 Speaker_07
There were so many industries asking for protection that the Senate heard from more than 1,000 witnesses who gave more than 8,000 pages of testimony, like when it was all printed out.

00:12:07 Speaker_08
And it's worth noting, unlike sugar and wool, a lot of these industries barely had any foreign competition. It's unclear that the tariff would even help them.

00:12:16 Speaker_08
But once the floodgates were open, the humble buckwheat growers, the clothespin makers, the goldfish growers, I guess, they were like, come on, why not us too?

00:12:27 Speaker_07
Yeah, why can't we get a little protection?

00:12:29 Speaker_08
Right. And so instead of this being a tariff on sugar and wool and maybe one or two other agricultural industries, the ultimate number of tariffs that increased was how many?

00:12:45 Speaker_04
I think over 800.

00:12:45 Speaker_08
Over 800? Right.

00:12:47 Speaker_07
And look, of course, Congress has passed tariffs before or since the beginning of the country. But this particular group of congressmen seems to be going pretty tariff crazy.

00:13:00 Speaker_08
There is one group watching from the sidelines and thinking, oh, what are you doing?

00:13:07 Speaker_07
Yeah, the economists. When politicians start talking about tariffs, economists get very exasperated. Because tariffs, it might seem like they're solving one problem, but they can cause a million other problems.

00:13:22 Speaker_08
That is true even for the people the tariffs are supposed to help.

00:13:25 Speaker_07
I think we wanna sort of help people understand like why this was gonna potentially backfire.

00:13:31 Speaker_08
Like imagine Sally is a wool farmer from then.

00:13:34 Speaker_07
She is a sheep farmer.

00:13:35 Speaker_08
Yeah, what should we be saying here?

00:13:37 Speaker_04
Wool producer, sheep farmer.

00:13:38 Speaker_08
A shepherd, she's a shepherd.

00:13:40 Speaker_07
I'm a shepherd.

00:13:42 Speaker_04
So if you raise the tariff on wool, that's definitely going to help sheep farmers and wool producers. They definitely want that. That's why they're fighting for it.

00:13:49 Speaker_04
But it also raises the cost of all the manufacturers of woolen goods trying to produce coats and pants and others for consumers.

00:13:56 Speaker_07
This is known as a downstream effect.

00:13:59 Speaker_08
And so that is one problem. A tariff on wool may help Sally the Shepherd, but it has these unintended ripple effects for other people. And Smoot-Hawley was not just a tax on wool.

00:14:10 Speaker_08
So now whatever benefits Sally the Shepherd's getting, they're probably canceled out by the fact that tons of other things she needs to buy, those are going to cost more because Sally can't get these things at the global competitive price.

00:14:23 Speaker_07
And another thing economists hate about tariffs is that they can cause chain reactions around the globe. Like, you can't just put a tariff on something and expect other countries to sit back and let that happen. There will be counter tariffs.

00:14:38 Speaker_08
And this is yet another unintended consequence that lawmakers apparently had not thought through back in 1930.

00:14:45 Speaker_04
They didn't anticipate that there would be retaliation.

00:14:47 Speaker_08
I mean, that's so crazy. Like, why not? Why would they not see that coming?

00:14:51 Speaker_04
Well, because this was considered domestic legislation, pure and simple, and there would be no foreign ramifications. And that was the way it was thought about at the time.

00:14:59 Speaker_08
So those are like a few of the reasons that economists were screaming into their pillows about the Smoot-Hawley bill.

00:15:05 Speaker_07
And before the bill made it to the president's desk, the economists tried to explain all this one more time very clearly. A group of more than 1,000 economists got together.

00:15:16 Speaker_08
1,000 economists. Adjust for inflation. That is like 5,000 economists by today's economists.

00:15:22 Speaker_07
Easily 5,000 in today's economists. And they wrote and signed a letter begging President Hoover or Congress to stop this Smoot-Hawley nonsense.

00:15:32 Speaker_08
We have a copy of that letter right here, and it outlines all of the ways these tariffs will be a disaster for the economy in beautiful, passionate, meticulously detailed language.

00:15:43 Speaker_07
Oh, can I, may I see that?

00:15:44 Speaker_08
Yes.

00:15:48 Speaker_07
Hoover, the politicians, they were like, nah, these ivory tower elites, they've never worked a day in their lives.

00:15:54 Speaker_08
Hoover signed the tariffs into law and virtually everything the economists warned would go wrong went wrong.

00:16:02 Speaker_07
One of the most insane examples is eggs. American egg producers theoretically got the benefit of one of the many Smoot-Hawley tariffs.

00:16:12 Speaker_04
So the tariff on eggs went from 8 cents to 10 cents a dozen. But Canada, they were so incensed they raised their tariff from 3 cents to 10 cents. Whoa. So that was reciprocity. They won the same tariff as we did.

00:16:24 Speaker_08
And here is the beautiful boneheaded twist of Smoot-Hawley. American egg producers were exporting eggs. They were making a ton of money by sending their eggs to Canada, or at least they were before Smoot-Hawley.

00:16:38 Speaker_04
Our exports fell from almost a million dozen to 13,000 dozen eggs over the same period. So our exports of eggs really got whacked.

00:16:46 Speaker_07
We lost a lot of dozens.

00:16:47 Speaker_08
And Canada was not the only country that got pissed off at Smoot and Hawley and America. This kicked off an unprecedented wave of protectionism across the globe.

00:16:57 Speaker_07
Protectionism aimed specifically at the United States. There were a bunch more counter tariffs. Countries formed trade blocs against the U.S. Global trade fell by 26 percent in the years after this.

00:17:10 Speaker_08
Because of Smoot-Hawley and the protectionism that followed it. but also because of a little thing called the Great Depression.

00:17:18 Speaker_07
Yeah. Smoot-Hawley was in the works before the Great Depression, but it didn't pass until things had already started to go south.

00:17:26 Speaker_08
And so probably the nicest thing anyone says about Smoot-Hawley is, well, it didn't cause the Great Depression. Yeah.

00:17:35 Speaker_07
Economists generally agree, you know, a lot of things caused the Great Depression, monetary policy, etc. But then the passage of Smoot-Hawley, it sure as hell did not help. We tried bouncing some metaphors off Doug Irwin.

00:17:49 Speaker_08
The Great Depression caused the U.S. economy to basically flail in the water, drowning, and the passing of Smoot-Hawley was the equivalent of sort of throwing it a brick to help.

00:18:02 Speaker_04
Or a line with nothing attached at the other end.

00:18:05 Speaker_08
Oh, that's so mean. That's like worse.

00:18:07 Speaker_04
Because then you're giving people hope, but then you start pulling on it and there's nothing there.

00:18:11 Speaker_08
And how did Smoot-Hawley work out for the politicians involved? Anyone? Anyone?

00:18:16 Speaker_04
Did it work out? Anyone? And it turns out both Hawley and Smoot were kicked out of Congress by their constituents, ultimately. So it didn't work out for them.

00:18:24 Speaker_08
It took decades to truly undo the damage from Smoot-Hawley to untangle the tariffs and the counter tariffs and the counter counter tariffs.

00:18:32 Speaker_07
But slowly. We did. The world moved away from protectionism towards free trade. Agreements were made. The World Trade Organization was set up as a kind of referee.

00:18:43 Speaker_08
And then for years you could shut down a conversation about tariffs by just saying, Smoot-Hawley.

00:18:49 Speaker_07
In fact, in the 1990s, Al Gore was debating Ross Perot. Perot was against the North American Free Trade Agreement. And Gore brought a photograph of Smoot and Hawley to the debate to be like, see where this got us last time?

00:19:03 Speaker_04
Now I framed this so you can put it on your wall if you want to. Thank you.

00:19:09 Speaker_07
That is the sound of Ross Perot kind of slamming this photo face down onto the desk.

00:19:14 Speaker_08
And that's because Smoot-Hawley had become shorthand for, remember the last time we tried this? Protectionism is a bad idea. Of course, things have changed a bit since then.

00:19:25 Speaker_03
We have to protect and build our steel and aluminum industries.

00:19:32 Speaker_08
After the break, Smoot, Hawley, and Trump.

00:19:37 Speaker_06
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00:21:13 Speaker_08
So, a couple of things you may have noticed about the recent tariff situation. We're talking through Trump's first term and then through the Biden administration, which kept a good chunk of Trump's tariffs in place.

00:21:25 Speaker_08
So, for one, you may have asked yourself, where was Congress in all of that? Tariffs were seemingly enacted with no hearings, no vote. There was no goldfish lobby. No, no. It appeared as though the president was able to just tariff.

00:21:40 Speaker_07
Yeah, he kind of was. A huge difference between the Smoot-Hawley days and the Trump days is that the president now has a lot more power to set tariffs.

00:21:49 Speaker_08
And look, you know, Trump and Biden did actually have to follow a process here. They had to come up with justification for the tariffs. In the case of the steel and aluminum tariffs, it was national security.

00:22:00 Speaker_08
But like, clearly, they were able to get the tariffs done.

00:22:04 Speaker_07
And this fact, the fact that the president can now levy tariffs, Doug Irwin says that is part of the legacy of Smoot-Hawley.

00:22:12 Speaker_08
Yeah. After Congress went tariff crazy in 1930, they basically said, maybe we should have our tariff privileges revoked.

00:22:21 Speaker_04
Congress delegated powers to the president to oversee the whole tariff system. So essentially, Congress said, look, we made a mess of it. This didn't work out so well.

00:22:30 Speaker_08
They were like a bunch of children who'd been let loose in a candy store and realized they couldn't be trusted to moderate their own intake.

00:22:37 Speaker_04
They overate. They got sick. And they said they need some restraint on themselves from doing that again. So they just, you know, delegate it to another party.

00:22:46 Speaker_07
Over time, they delegated that power to the executive branch and to the president. They decided that is the better system.

00:22:53 Speaker_08
And arguably, we watched that better system in action in 2018, because when Congress dealt with tariffs, the game was stacked against narrow tariffs. You want to protect like only wool and sugar. Well, good luck, buddy, because it snowballs quickly.

00:23:11 Speaker_08
But when President Trump wanted to protect steel and aluminum, no snowballing. He didn't have to trade votes to get it passed.

00:23:18 Speaker_07
And so we're not seeing hundreds of tariffs like in the days of Smoot-Hawley. Instead, we're seeing these very targeted, very political tariffs.

00:23:26 Speaker_07
And it could stay that way, but these tariffs still have economists like screaming into their pillows again. Because even narrow tariffs are going to cause the same web of problems. Downstream effects, ultimately shooting ourselves in the foot.

00:23:41 Speaker_08
Back in 2018, when we first reported this episode, we asked Professor Doug Irwin, like, do you think in 20 years somebody is going to write a movie scene about a boring high school teacher teaching the lessons of the Trump tariffs?

00:23:56 Speaker_07
And he was like, who knows? Probably not. But if they do make Ferris Bueller too, Doug Irwin will be ready.

00:24:04 Speaker_08
Do you want to give it a shot? Like doing the Ben Stein thing? But based on Trump's tariffs? I could give it a shot. Give it a shot. Ben Stein improvised.

00:24:12 Speaker_04
Come on, Doug. Okay. In 2018, the Republican administration of Donald J. Trump instituted higher tariffs on anyone, anyone, steel and aluminum in an effort to protect the jobs of steel workers. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone?

00:24:29 Speaker_04
It did not work, and we lost jobs in downstream user industries, and it failed to revitalize the steel industry.

00:24:34 Speaker_08
That is, that was off the top of your head? Yes. Well done.

00:24:38 Speaker_07
Well played.

00:24:39 Speaker_08
That was six years ago. So, this past week, we called up Doug Irwin one more time for an update. We played him, his impressively ad-libbed Ben Stein impression.

00:24:53 Speaker_04
I guess if we were doing that again, I would do the same riff, but include China. But unfortunately, the result would be the same as, did the tariffs work? No, they really didn't. China didn't change its policies.

00:25:04 Speaker_04
They retaliated against US farm exports. And bilateral trade went down.

00:25:10 Speaker_08
And what's interesting is that the Biden administration didn't really pull back any of those tariffs in their time in office. Most of the steel and aluminum tariffs are still in place today. And Biden hiked the tariffs on China even further in 2024.

00:25:25 Speaker_08
And Doug says that that has not changed our relationship with China. If anything, they've doubled down on their economic model. And now we can take a look to see exactly how these tariffs worked out in other ways.

00:25:39 Speaker_08
For example, who bears the cost of them?

00:25:42 Speaker_04
Well, in general, when a country imposes an import tariff, it's taxing its own consumers and other countries are not paying that tax.

00:25:49 Speaker_04
So we see that very much with the economic evidence that's accumulated from the Trump administration's tariffs during the first term.

00:25:55 Speaker_04
There have been multiple studies by economists that show that basically there was full pass-through of those tariffs to the final purchasers or consumers of those goods.

00:26:04 Speaker_08
You know, the Tax Foundation, a self-stated nonpartisan but conservative-leaning think tank, estimates that the Trump-Biden tariffs amounted to a $200-$300 tax increase on average for American households, and a reduction in long-run GDP by 0.2%.

00:26:22 Speaker_08
And Doug says, again, we have some history here to lean on. In the late 19th century, when sugar tariffs were reduced, we saw a similar reduction in prices for consumers, one-to-one with the tariffs.

00:26:35 Speaker_08
So that implies, once again, sort of full pass-through. And we don't see this just with tariffs, but quotas or other trade restrictions. They all can cause ripple effects beyond the specific products being restricted.

00:26:48 Speaker_04
When we saw that President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s limited how many Japanese cars could be sold in the U.S.

00:26:53 Speaker_04
market, the price of Japanese cars shot up quite a bit and the price of domestic cars went up as well because it shifted demand to those cars and capacity was limited in the short run and so the prices went up.

00:27:05 Speaker_08
Now, Trump has promised via Truth Social to impose tariffs of 25% on all imports from Canada and Mexico and an additional 10% tariff on all imports from China when he takes office for his second term.

00:27:21 Speaker_08
He has also mentioned like a baseline 20% tariff on all imports coming in from anywhere. It's a little unclear how much of this will get implemented, but

00:27:32 Speaker_08
If it does, there is a little bit of that Smoot-Hawley energy poking through that has economists worried yet again.

00:27:40 Speaker_04
So the similarity between Trump's proposals and Smoot-Hawley depends a little bit on which Trump proposals you consider. If we're just talking about the special tariffs on Mexico and Canada, that's not really a Smoot-Hawley scenario.

00:27:52 Speaker_04
But if we're talking about the 10% or 20% across-the-board tariffs, that's in the ballpark of a real Smoot-Hawley increase.

00:27:58 Speaker_08
And also in the ballpark of Smoot-Hawley, Mexico and Canada have already warned of similar tariffs in response. Today's episode was originally produced by Laina Richards and edited by Bryant Erstadt.

00:28:12 Speaker_08
This update was produced by Sam Yellowhorse-Kessler. A previous update in 2020 was produced by Irina Huang with help from Gilly Moon. Fact-checking by Sierra Juarez. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer. And also, we have a TikTok account.

00:28:27 Speaker_07
And it's hilarious. It is seriously worth a watch.

00:28:30 Speaker_08
It is funny. They're incredibly unique. And if you like adult swim and economics, you're going to love Planet Money TikToks. We are at Planet Money on most social media.

00:28:40 Speaker_05
I'm Sally Helm.

00:28:41 Speaker_08
And I'm Kenny Malone. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And for what it's worth, Doug Irwin, popular at parties again.

00:28:50 Speaker_04
Most people avoid economists at parties because we're known to be not exactly the most scintillating of personalities, but all of a sudden my phone is ringing once again asking about historical analogies and what's going on with tariffs today and what the prospective impact might be.

00:29:05 Speaker_04
So my holiday is over.

00:29:14 Speaker_06
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