00:16:47.380The economist tools, because it's based on concepts like export and import demand elasticities, currency adjustments, and things like that.
00:16:59.220But here's the analytical issue we're trying to do under the principle that the president wants to charge those countries what they charge us.
00:17:08.920As you pointed out, Vietnam has an applied tariff rate that's much larger than ours, but doesn't come near the tariff we've charged them.
00:17:20.440So the question is, how do you value the following, Phil?
00:17:25.180You've got to value currency manipulation.
00:17:28.600You've got to value the VAT tax distortions, dumping, export subsidies, technical barriers to trade, agricultural barriers to trade, quotas, bans, counterfeiting, intellectual property theft, and all of that.
00:17:44.660If you look at the trade deficit, which every country runs from us, the first thing economists should tell you, ask the next one you have on your show, should the UNS have chronic and sustained trade deficits?
00:17:57.700According to economic theory, they should not.
00:18:00.340So what the trade deficit does for any given country, it's the sum of all cheating.
00:18:05.800It's the sum of all unfair trade practices.
00:18:09.040And in a national emergency where the trade deficit itself is the national emergency and security threat because it takes our factories, our jobs, and transfers wealth abroad, the reciprocal tariff is that which...
00:18:29.340He says a Ph.D. in econ from Harvard is a bad thing, not a good thing.
00:18:31.940Result in the ego brains versus one problem, right?
00:18:35.860So now who's right, who's wrong when you see this here?
00:18:39.300Sometimes to get like, for example, you and I talk regularly every day and I know who the guys are that you admire, the economists and all these other guys that are in that space.