It can be hard to follow and make sense of all of the volatility we’ve been seeing in the markets and economy recently. Lucky for us, Joe Weisenthal, co-host of Bloomberg’s “Odd Lots” podcast is joining this week to help break down what’s been going on. He joins WITHpod to discuss recent economic volatility and what it means for financial markets vs. the real economy, the impact of tariffs and more.
Note: This is a rough transcript. Please excuse any typos.
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Joe Weisenthal: There’s the story of the real economy and then there’s the story of the financial markets. But I also think there is this sort of distinct, and maybe you could call it political, maybe you could call it geopolitical, I’m not sure. So, there’s other story, which is just about Trump, the character, as he tries to negotiate in the world and establish himself, right, as the master negotiator, which he seems to see himself as a deals person.
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Chris Hayes: Hello and welcome, “Why Is This Happening?” with me, your host, Chris Hayes.
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Chris Hayes: I want to start off today with a confession, which is that I, full-time, pay attention to the news, particularly domestic politics, particularly the Trump administration covered every day. I am having a hard time tracking the tariff story. Like, where, what is, which one is on? Which one is off? Which one is paused? There’s been this crazy cycle where Donald Trump announces some new tariff, and out of seeming hurt feelings or spite or pettiness, or just an undying rage at the people of Madagascar and the penguins on that random island, and then he comes back and says, we’re pausing them, but then hikes some new ones and then maybe does some carve outs. It’s been very hard to track this story because in some ways I think there are kind of three stories. There’s the narrative story of Trump’s attempting to unilaterally bully the world into kind of paying the U.S. a kind of tribute. He views us as a kind of mercantilist empire that people should pay us for the privilege of selling things to us, which is very weird.
So, there’s sort of the story of how Trump is dealing with the tariffs. There’s how financial markets have dealt with the on again, off again-ness. And then there’s the real effects to the real economy. Like people that actually have to use an import steel or lumber or dropship products from China because that’s part of their business model. And I feel like those three stories are proceeding on different tracks. But it’d be easy to lose sight of what’s actually happening at the bottom layer of those stories.
And one of my favorite podcasts, the “Odd Lots” podcast on Bloomberg with Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway, they track this kind of thing. They’re one of the best go-to sources to keep your finger on the pulse of what’s actually happening, both in financial markets and in the real economy. And so, I thought to try to get a little clarity in this very, very unclear murky situation, I would have Joe Weisenthal from the “Odd Lots” podcast back on WITHpod. Joe, how you doing?
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Joe Weisenthal: It’s been too long. I’m thrilled to be back here. I’m good. I’m loving covering the news these days.
Chris Hayes: Yes, you’re sort of in it right now. What do you think about that kind of tripartite distinction between this story? The Trump story of his negotiations, the financial market’s reaction and the actual real economy.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, actually you put it better than I had. That was really good, because I would’ve said, yes, there’s the story of the real economy and then there’s the story of the financial markets. But I also think there is this sort of distinct and maybe you could call it political, maybe you could call it geopolitical, I’m not sure. So, this other story, which is just about Trump, the character, as he tries to negotiate in the world and establish himself, right as the master negotiator, which he seems to see himself as a deals person.
You know, it’s always very funny to me because you have these, you know, there are third parties or people out there, pundits, who are, you know, people ask them what do they think, and they don’t know, and no one has any idea. And I think there’s more uncertainty now than ever, but they’re always like, well, he’s a deal maker, right? The one thing we know about Trump, he’s a deal maker. And I’m not really actually sure if that’s true, there’s definitely deal makers in the world. Many of them work at banks or private equity funds and so forth. I’m not really sure if Trump is a deal maker, but he certainly fashions himself as one. And he certainly sort of imagines, I think, that if he could just, you know, talk to Xi Jinping and, you know, figure out a deal or something like that, and I think it’s sort of like important for him to do something like that, something that is deal-ish. Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean it connects to this, on the Trump part of it, right, it connects to this other story that’s been sort of a funny story in the last week called the Trump TACO trade which is —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — Trump Always Chickens Out, which is basically financial markets betting that when he —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — announces some new tariff, he’s not going to see it through. And so if you buy the dip —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — when people freak out, you’ll do well, because in the end he’s going to retreat. That, to me, is maybe a more honest assessment of him as deal maker. I mean we sort of saw this the first time around with NAFTA. He railed against NAFTA, they renegotiated a deal that was not like some massive substantive differences.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, it wasn’t a radical departure at all.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: What’s happening is people are paying less and less attention to each one for precisely, each headline, for precisely the dynamic —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — you’ve described. People think it will be degraded. The steel terms change all the time. What’s going on with China? You know, there are headlines every day that would’ve been a huge deal in the middle of April that today, in early June, people are like, oh, and they just sort of look up from their screen. And the one thing I will say though that I think is important, like, people, yes, have been conditioned to think that you just buy the dip, right?
The markets will have this forcing mechanism, and he’ll go back, and that’s probably true. This is also the case for decades of U.S. history, right?
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: Just pray (ph). For real, like, I really think this is important, which is that actually betting on the demise of the U.S. has been this terrible trade for decade after decade after decade.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And that yes, there’s this sort of Pavlovian thing where traders have sort of been conditioned to just you always buy the dip. For good reason, it always seems to work. And so far, there’s nothing that has emerged that says like, that is going to change soon, which I think is an important thing to recognize.
Chris Hayes: Meaning like, right, does he either have the will or the ability to unilaterally —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — destroy the American economy in its position —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — of global hegemony?
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, that’s exactly right. And I think right, both of those questions because if you actually think seriously like what he wants to do, like if you took this sort of like strong form Trump and you’re like all this sort of like very populous idea and just like, oh, capital M manufacturing and we really don’t want to rely on others because relying on others is always zero sum, et cetera, I think that would be terrible for corporate profitability, if you really took all these things very seriously. And that would be very bad for the stock market.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: Which is largely driven by the long term trends and profitability of the biggest companies in the United States, which are the biggest companies in the world. But the flip side is like, A, does he really want to do that? B, you know, there are a lot of forces conspiring against that from happening. C, it’s like short term painful, and D, it might just be really hard to slow the juggernaut of the U.S. corporate sector, which is global, which is incredibly powerful, which is driven really increasingly by a handful of unbelievably profitable, rapid growing gigantic corporations, largely in tech.
And so there is to some extent, this sort of this incredible force, these giant companies that we all know the names of the Metas, the Googles, the NVIDIAs of the world —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — hoovering up every last dollar of profitability that there is and it’s really hard to derail, even if you want to. And I’m not sure anyone wants to.
Chris Hayes: Well, the thing you just mentioned there about what is his preferred end state? I think is worth —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — taking a second with. Because I actually do think, one of the things I think that’s makes this different than other areas of Trump policy, for instance, if you look at the big beautiful bill.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The well, we’re all going to die bill, as Chuck Schumer just called it. He doesn’t care about hardly anything. He has no fixed ideological commitments. I mean it’s been a huge advantage to him how transactionally he can be because he just doesn’t like other people in politics genuinely care about. Do more people get Medicaid or not, you know? Are we cutting spending or increasing it? Trump doesn’t care at all. He has no fixed ideological commitments on this. He wants to see his like rhetorical promises delivered like no taxes on tips. But other than that, he doesn’t care.
On trade, he cares, like he has a genuine worldview and ideological commitment. And I think, honestly, you mentioned this, but I think it’s worth taking a second. Like there’s this term autarchy which refers to a fully self-sufficient economy in which there is no external trade. Everything is produced domestically. And I kind of think he thinks that’s the best way to run an economy. Like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — if he had his druthers, that’s what he wants.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, I kind of think you’re right. I think there’s actually two things which is, I think you’re absolutely right that he has this sort of deep intuition, that international trade is a loss for the United States. And it’s interesting the way he talks about American trading partners. Because if you notice, and I believe him when he says it, because he is consistent and it sort of fits, he never seems to hold it against the other country, even though he says like we’re getting these terrible deals from Canada, we’re getting these terrible deals from China. And then he says, oh, if I were Xi Jinping, I would’ve done the same thing. If I were Justin Trudeau, I would’ve done the same thing. So, he doesn’t seem to really hold it against these countries, but he does seem to think that, you know, he mainly blames past leadership. So, he has this deep intuition, I think, that trade is kind of a loss.
On the other hand, I think there’s part of him too, and this maybe gets back to his self-conception of a deal maker, what is a win for him? Maybe it’s just something that there is an end state where there is something called a tariff in the world. That okay, maybe it’s 10 percent or whatever and that’s not enough probably to like kill international trade. But maybe from his perspective in terms of like, what does a policy W look like? Maybe it’s just that the existence on a sustained basis of something that looks protectionist.
Because I don’t think, even if he does not really believe in the premise of international trade is a good thing, I don’t get the impression that he has the political appetite to actually like kill it, which he, you know, on April 2nd, when he announced that tariff schedule, it was like, oh, he’s just going to kill trade, like that’s unplugging the international trading system.
That rolled back pretty quickly, doesn’t really look like he has the appetite to actually do that, even if that is what his intuition is. But I do think he wants there to be something in the world. I think he wants tariffs to exist on some level.
Chris Hayes: Yes and he wants them higher. And that gets us to a sort of the third part of the story, right. So, there’s his back and forth, there’s the markets kind of at first being thinking he’s full of it and then being like, oh my God, he’s serious. And now —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — increasingly thinking he’s full of it, right. So, the big sell-offs, there’s fewer and fewer of them.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes. And the sensitivity, the market, right, in both directions just does not respond to headlines about tariffs the way it would have in April, because, I guess, everyone just sort of figures we’ll get this mediocre, you know, this sort of, this middle state of something but nothing major.
And I think I’ve increasingly gone down the mental path of thinking in recent history, Brexit is probably the analogy, which is like this immediate shock. And then, does it overnight like eviscerate the U.K. economy? No. But is it great? No, it just sort of you get this, it’s just less good than it probably otherwise would be.
Chris Hayes: I’m glad you brought up Brexit, because Brexit to me is such a perfect example. It’s also a little like Italy under Berlusconi where it’s like, it’s not a cataclysm.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But it definitely makes everything just worse. I mean that economy has been hurt by Brexit. Things are grinding along. The country has lost tremendous ground. If you look at its growth projections where it should be and where it is, its politics have gotten even crazier post-Brexit interestingly. Like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the Brexiteers won the policy victory. Majorities of folks in the U.K. say it was a mistake. And yet the Reform Party is like on the rise, which makes no sense when you put it all together. The Brexit example is great, because to me it’s sort of unsatisfying undramatic. It’s just everything is a little shittier. Like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, I think the cost of doing business in the United States is going to go up on account of tariffs. And is that the end of the world? I don’t think so. And you know, you look at the market, it doesn’t think so. That’s why we stopped that spiral that was happening in April. The data since then, the way I’ve been seeing it lately, is the data falling off a cliff? Definitely not. Is there deceleration? I think so. Probably, it’s the type of deceleration that the Fed could cut rates and have probably lean against in some way.
But I think it’s just, yes, I think that people will see the cost of doing business in the United States has gone up. It would be a less dynamic economy. I think there are other factors that are probably driving that. Some of the policy uncertainty around fiscal, some of the cut to science spending and so forth. These are all things that when you sort of add them together, like none of them are instant cataclysm.
But none of them would seem to make it a more robust, a more prosperous economy per se, or even necessarily a safer, more secure economy either. It seems like the addition of these things, like, it’s just not going to be as strong.
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Chris Hayes: More of our conversation after this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I mean, one thing that’s happened here is this sort of Kahneman and Tversky, famous cognitive scientists, talked about the anchoring effect, right, so —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — if someone says, I’ve got a house to sell you for $10 million and you’re like, I can’t afford $10 million house. And then they’re like, I’m cutting it —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — 90 percent to $1 million. And you’re like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — oh my God, that sounds like an amazing deal. But it turns out the house is only worth $300,000, right?
Joe Weisenthal: Yes. Chris Hayes: And you’re like, you’ve anchored on the value at 10, you’ve come down to $1 million, but like, it’s actually still not a good deal at $1 million, right. This is happening with the tariffs. Like we have 30 percent tariffs on China, we have a 10 percent moat around the country. We have the highest tariff level since Smoot-Hawley. Like, the actual, even after all the up and down —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the tariff level in the U.S., my understanding and correct me if I’m wrong, is much higher than it’s been since the 1930s.
Joe Weisenthal: It is a fact and it’s very high and it’s at protectionist levels, and this is real. Now, you know, there’s a few things that are sort of notable here which is that the U.S. is a gigantic economy in its own right. It has a gigantic complex domestic economy that to some extent is more autarchic than many other countries in terms of —
Chris Hayes: That’s interesting.
Joe Weisenthal: — you know, like, we grow a lot, we have a lot of fuel and oil and gas in this country. We have a lot of grain and cattle and fruit and stuff like that. We have a lot of pretty decent manufacturing in this country, both like, automobiles and planes and semiconductors. Are we at the cutting edge? Are we where we want to be with some of this stuff? Clearly not, right.
But when you just look, like, we have an extraordinary mix, internally. So like, could you actually do autarchy in the United States to some extent? Actually yes, like if there’s a country in the world —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — that could probably do it, like really seal it off, I think we would be a much poorer country, if we really went for that.
Chris Hayes: Definitely.
Joe Weisenthal: But could we? Yes, like I think we would take like a material hit.
Chris Hayes: You’re right. We’ve got a better shot than Belgium.
Joe Weisenthal: Absolutely, absolutely. We have everything. I think this is really important.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And you said it in the beginning, like it is true, I think, to some extent that there are probably, this premise of like paying for the privilege to sell into the United States, I don’t 100 percent dispute the premise across the board.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: So, it’s interesting, like this week there were earnings from Dollar General, which you’d think is like one of these companies that would, my co-host, Tracy, wrote about this, you’d think it was one of these companies that, oh, they’re like right on the crosshairs of tariffs, right. Because you walk into one of those stores or like a Five Below is another one, which I just went into, I just went into my first Five Below this weekend. My kids loved it, but it’s just shelves and shelves of the cheapest junk in the world. It’s not junk, but you know what I’m saying.
Chris Hayes: Made not here.
Joe Weisenthal: Made not here, the vast majority of it. And yet, the shelves are all still completely full. And if you read the Dollar General earnings, they have actually been able to exact some cost concessions from their international suppliers, in part because there is not another United States out there. There’s nowhere close. We’re so rich in this country. We have so much buying power.
So, the idea of like, okay, we’re going to like force other countries to like eat some margin, or other suppliers. There are going to be instances where that doesn’t work. There are going to be cards. You know, China has the rare earths, other things like that. But is it like always completely crazy that companies would eat some margin, so that they can remain, have some access to the United States? No, it’s actually not crazy at all.
So, you add up that reality and then you add up the fact that like we really do are endowed by extraordinary amount of sort of real resources and wealth within our borders. And you could sort of see why like even with the fact that we have the highest tariffs since, say, the 1930s or whatever exact year it is, why it is not cataclysm —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — automatically.
Chris Hayes: But then there’s a question of like, okay, it’s not cataclysm —
Joe Weisenthal: But what do we get for it? Yes.
Chris Hayes: Right, this is really important because it’s like, right, like the Brexit example I think is good. It’s not cataclysm, still a very wealthy country. You know, you can still go to a pub and —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: –you could still like have a great time in London.
Joe Weisenthal: It’s great. I was in London in April, great city.
Chris Hayes: Yes, and it’s not like, you’re not like, oh my God, it’s unrecognizable.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s the same, it’s a little poorer for sure. Now, then the question becomes, okay, well, what do you get for it?
Joe Weisenthal: What do you get for it?
Chris Hayes: And this, to me, is also part of what has been so weird and maddening about this. I mean do you feel like you have an understanding of what is the, like, okay, it’s not autarchy.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It’s some version of the 1950s, but not really. The joke I always make is that like they want the 1890s, not the 1950s. And the reason I say that is because Donald Trump keeps saying that all the time. He’s quite clear that the 1890s were like the high point.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes. I got to go back. If I close my eyes, envision America in the 1890s, I actually don’t have like a sort of typical picture. You know, the 1950s I do. It’s like some like white picket fence and —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: –all that stuff. I need to work on my 1890s visualization. Anyway, keep going.
Chris Hayes: Well, the 1890s is like peak gilded age, right. So —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it’s peak industrialization, urbanization. Huge amounts of immigration that are sort of —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — starting to take off. Enormous inequality.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: You know, enormous corruption.
Joe Weisenthal: Was there like a middle class in the 1890?
Chris Hayes: No.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, I wouldn’t have thought so.
Chris Hayes: There’s not really a middle class.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean this is sort of the thing. Like the reason I bring this up is when Howard Lutnick says your children and your grandchildren are going to work in the same factory.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes
Chris Hayes: I’m like, what does that even mean?
Joe Weisenthal: Right. It’s weird, it’s weird. I mean it’s very strange. And I think like, what do we really get out of any of this is to my mind one of the huge unanswered questions. Because look, at least with arguably under Trump one, and then certainly like under the Biden administration, regardless of whether these things were well-executed, not,or whatever, I had some sense that there were a few clear strategy goals with regards to how we were a thinking of trade, right. We want to have some sort of battery industry, right —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — in this country because so many things are going to be electric. All right, that makes sense. We want to have some sort of greater capacity to ma manufacture advanced semiconductors because for reasons that we all know and lessons we learned in the pandemic. And there’s also elements of probably lessening inequality.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And the fact that we don’t necessarily want to have an economy in which all of like the physical work is sort of done overseas. You know, there’s some like various. I get that, like —
Chris Hayes: And high wage —
Joe Weisenthal: — these things I like, yes.
Chris Hayes: — middle class jobs for non-college —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, right.
Chris Hayes: People without college degrees.
Joe Weisenthal: And I do think like that specific point is very load-bearing, which is that people really want there to exist a comfortable lifestyle for people who didn’t go to college.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And I think there’s a lot of frustration that that doesn’t seem —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Joe Weisenthal: — to exist. And college is extremely expensive in this country. So, you have to like put out this big, upfront expense —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — to have the shot at something that resembles a middle class lifestyle, that we call comfortable, strikes a lot of people on both sides of the aisle as being deeply perverse or deeply wrong, a real sign of like structural degradation. That like, even with a college degree —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — you’re not guaranteed of anything, but you’re certainly guaranteed of not getting it (ph) if you don’t have a college degree. And it’s crazy expensive, you take out debt. It’s not a good equilibrium or a lot of people perceive that to be as such. And so, part of it is like, can there exist an industry that employs a lot of people who didn’t go to college, and yet those people can have something that we recognizably as a middle class existence? Clearly, like a big goal. But how any of this actually gets us there, it’s unclear.
Chris Hayes: Well, right. Okay, so take that next step. Because with the Biden administration —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — whether it was well-implemented or not, and I think some of it was and some of it wasn’t, that was the vision. Like we want to —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — for both national security reasons, macroeconomic stability reasons, right —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — on the superconductors.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And international competition reasons as well as inequality, we want to sort of regrow a domestic industrial manufacturing base, focused on the industries of the future.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Such that, we build more factories. We have more job and on that front, it worked. Like manufacturing and construction went through the roof.
Joe Weisenthal: That’s correct. And at times, like, even on April 2nd, you know, Trump specifically cited semiconductors. He specifically, you know, even on the day where the blanket tariffs like, on everyone, he’s like, oh, we’re going to have the greatest, I forget the exact line, but we’re going to have beautiful semiconductor factories in the United States. Even as the administration, as far as I can tell, has dramatically pulled back —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — all of its interest in the bipartisan CHIPS Act that was signed under Biden. Now, I’m sure there are other ways. If you want to argue with me, you know, the CHIPS Act itself like is not synonymous with chips, the industry. That we can foster a semiconductor industry in the United States, but really rethink the incentives because the CHIPS Act, like I’m totally fine with that.
Chris Hayes: Sure, yes.
Joe Weisenthal: But I don’t know what that thing is under the current trade. I don’t think anyone has seen like what the substitute is. And it’s sort of weird too, because there is this whole tech right element obviously within the Trump coalition. And I don’t know what they’re getting yet from any of this.
Chris Hayes: Well, I have a theory on that, which I want to talk about. But to stay on this about like, okay —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — what’s the goal and how do you get there? Okay, at least in the case of the Biden administration, I was clear of the goal, and I was clear that these were the things they were trying to do.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Inflation Reduction Act, bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the Chips Act, right. And there were some places where there were clear successes. There were some places where it was much more middling. I think there are some people who would say that some of the implementation was bad, okay. There is no path from A to B with Trump, which brings us back around to the narrative part of this, because the end state goal, if you are as charitable as possible, which is some 21st century version of the 1950s and 60s industrial manufacturing boom, right.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Middle class America, can only happen if there’s constancy in the policy.
Joe Weisenthal: I would think so, yes.
Chris Hayes: That they can’t do for like five days.
Joe Weisenthal: I mean that’s my intuition too. You know the other thing I think is interesting is you mentioned early on that Trump himself does not seem to have any particularly strong ideological commitment. I do think on the other hand much of the congressional GOP does have pretty strong ideological commitments. And a pretty big one, I think, is this sort of disbelief in the premise of a robust public sector in any realm.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: You know, the premise that the public sector could play a positive role in fostering a competitive private chips industry, et cetera. Some of these ideas, like I think most, you know, it does not look like most Republicans, certainly in the House, like really accept that premise —
Chris Hayes: Yeah.
Joe Weisenthal: — that that’s possible which is whatever, but that’s very different. You know, there’s like, the idea that like the government could aim for something, could aim dollars at something, could put out a target at something and then create incentive for private industry to hit that.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: I do think Trump himself could be convinced. And there are probably people within the White House who actually do sort of buy that premise. It does not feel like the party is bought into that premise.
Chris Hayes: Right. But the weird thing about that is that tariff is much more an imposition and a sort of tool of central planning than industrial policy passed —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — by Congress, like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — at least there’s a schedule, there’s stability, there’s constancy. This is like, the tariffs on China are 145 percent, no they’re 30 percent, no they’re back up to 50.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: I mean there was a Trump administration official a few weeks ago who was talking about like we’re going to make the dolls here in the U.S. You don’t need so many dolls.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And it’s like, all right, let’s say, that’s the goal. We need more doll factories in America. Okay, I’m going to start a doll business. I’m going to start a doll factory.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Well, the doll factory only pencils out, if the tariff level —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — from China is 60 percent.
Joe Weisenthal: Stays there forever, forever.
Chris Hayes: Forever.
Joe Weisenthal: So, the moment you start that doll factory, this is really important, this is really important, the moment that you start that doll factory, you are going to be the number one lobbyist on Capitol Hill.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: For protectionist policies.
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Joe Weisenthal: And so it actually like, you know, you think about, yes, this is really key. And any of these companies, I mean even the big companies that like, all right, at some point, our big, you know, you think like auto companies, et cetera, it’s like at some point they may make bigger commitments to produce here or you look at what’s going on with Nippon Steel and U.S. Steel.
And so you look at these like range of industrial commitments that may emerge. We’re like, all right, we are going to do more here in the U.S. And then if they’re going to break ground on these things, they better have some certainty that this is never going to change —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — in their lifetimes. That this is not going to be reversed in 2028 with the next president. And look, I mean it is probably not a crazy bet. I mean, look, Biden was a continuation. I mean Trump started this whole thing, right. Prior to Trump one, there was not this sort of real bipartisan consensus, particularly on the China component. He really kicked that off. Biden —
Chris Hayes: I mean, I don’t think he did intellectually, but I think, politically, yes.
Joe Weisenthal: Politically, yes.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: Okay, right. But politically, I mean, there was no real impulse to reverse any of that when Trump lost. I was a little surprised by that, like in 2019, I still thought that there was a real possibility that whoever came into the White House in 2020, if it was a Democrat, would reverse the tariffs on China. It still seemed like a possibility. And clearly not only that did that not happen, but trade restrictions and export restrictions to China all expanded under Biden. So like now, the idea of like going back to, I don’t know, 2005, 2015 —
Chris Hayes: Yes, no, that’s gone.
Joe Weisenthal: — environment, that’s gone for like —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — the foreseeable future, probably our lifetimes, right. But you could imagine that as these things persist, then they build their own momentum and suddenly, one day it may be unimaginable that we don’t have a minimum 10 percent tariffs on the U.K. and Canada and countries that for a long time we assumed were just like our most open trading partners.
Chris Hayes: Yes, I mean the point you just made there about the political economy of this, right. So, if you do break ground on the factory —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you’re going to be the number one lobbyist to keep the tariffs. You know, I mean this, is literally the original insight of Adam Smith, right? Like the birth of market capitalism as described by Smith and the invisible hand is a polemic against mercantilism. And particularly the dead weight loss of mercantilism, how it makes everyone poorer.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But also the political economy of it, right? To your point before of like ideologically, it’s hard for Republicans to get on board this industrial policy. I guess the point I’m making is this sort of tariff craziness with one man being the one who decides it creates all kinds of like political economy —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — rent-seeking perversions that —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — I would argue are worse than passing a bill that at least is transparently written out that everyone can look at.
Joe Weisenthal: I mean I would say a few things on this. One is the Jones Act in D.C. gets a lot of attention. Nothing ever happens about it, but people like to debate it. It’s this law that requires that if you’re going to do U.S. to U.S. shipping, it has to be on a U.S. build and U.S. flagged vessel. So, you can’t move goods from Houston to New York, unless it’s on U.S. vessel. Those don’t really exist. So, you just have this very tiny domestic ship building industry.
No one thinks it’s really successful quote, “industrial policy.”
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: No one thinks it’s invigorating at all to the U.S. ship building industry, which is almost nonexistent, but there are a few Jones Act compliant companies out there. There’s this big loss and you just have this like, yes, protectionist husk of an industry —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Joe Weisenthal: — that doesn’t really exist. And that I think is like a pretty legitimate concern that like you just sort of get more Jones-ish elements. The one thing I’ll say too in terms of like this tension of like, well, like why is this better than doing something in a bill, right? And I don’t know the answer actually. But what I did notice was that in early April, when we first got the sort of maximum version of the tariffs announced, the only real like full defenders were like mostly like cultural conservatives. Like there weren’t really many people that I saw like online or anywhere who were —
Chris Hayes: It was pretty hard. It was a hard thing to defend.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes. The only people who were like really willing to stick their neck out were people who like really sort of see contemporary U.S. society is fallen in some way, perverted in some way and —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — like really like it is sort of turned back the clock in a very literal sense of like no, the U.S. economy needs to be cleansed. It needs a hard reset of some sort. And if this is the pain, if we have to like go through the fire to be forged, then this is it. It feels to me like that is still perhaps some of the driving impulse in why you can have sort of GOP that’s comfortable with some tariffs, et cetera, because of at least some people in the party sort of having a worldview such as this. We really need to endure pain. We got to be cleansed of our wickedness in some way and this is a path forward.
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Chris Hayes: We’ll be right back after we take this quick break.
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Chris Hayes: I mean I found it so striking to sort of go back around to what Silicon Valley’s got (ph). And I want to talk to you —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — a little bit about.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I’m using this, I’m working on this essay right now that’s sort of about this. So, I don’t want to sort of scoop myself on it, but Scott Bessent gave this speech, I think, at the Economic Club of New York or Chicago, where he said this thing that was so striking to me where it was like, you know, there’s more to life basically than cheap stuff from China, I’m paraphrasing.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes, yes. He said that, yes.
Chris Hayes: And what was so striking to me is like, you and I are on the same age and cohort. I came up in sort of lefty media, particularly a socialist magazine in Chicago called “In These Times.” I covered trade fights 1999, WTO. I was still in college but the aftermath of that, I wrote a profile of Sherrod Brown in 2005, when he was running for Senate. He was one of the lead critics of U.S.- China bilateral trade —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know. It’s so wild to me that like the lefty critique of the neoliberal global trading order.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: WTO, Naomi Klein, Sherrod Brown, blah, blah, has become a kind of consensus to the point where like Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — were like big Wall Street guys are running around being like, why do you need all this cheap crap from China you buy at Walmart? And at some level there’s something to that.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That was a thing that we said —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: — that people on the left said 30 years ago, there’s more to life —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, totally.
Chris Hayes: — than cheap crap from China at Walmart. Like for instance, vibrant downtowns run by mom and pop shops. But what’s so crazy to me is they’re saying all this, about the failures of this consensus —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — at the same time everyone is winding up to do to college graduates and white collar folks with AI, what trade and globalization —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — did to the blue collar.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like there’s a crazy —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — mismatch of like, wow, we really got that wrong. Hmm, 40 years of we’ve been kind of doing this the wrong way. Boy, we sure screwed up Youngstown and Gary, Indiana. And now it’s like, what if we can make Marion County like Gary, Indiana and we can make Purcell —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — look like Youngstown. It’s like, well, maybe that’s going to go the same way guys.
Joe Weisenthal: You know, it’s essentially for what it’s worth, like I mean I certainly remember all of the left from, you know, I was in college and stuff, the left wing critiques of international trade. But also, I lived in a co-op when I went to college at UT Austin and I just want to say like, in our co-op in 2000 or 1999, we had a big sign on the kitchen about the dangers of seed oils.
Chris Hayes: Oh yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And canola oil and stuff —
Chris Hayes: Totally, yes, absolutely.
Joe Weisenthal: And this was like cannon for like back then, you do not eat seed oils.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: So yes, this is one of these other topics —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Joe Weisenthal: — that I’ve been hearing about for like 25 years.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And now has traveled to the right, yes.
Chris Hayes: Let me do you one better.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, we can play this game. Yes, I’m down.
Chris Hayes: At that time also in the world that I went to, that I lived in, young lefty, you couldn’t go to a single event where you didn’t have the 9/11 truthers out and Bush knocked down the towers and controlled demolition of Building 7.
Joe Weisenthal: Oh yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: And now you’ve got the Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin on the Homeland Security Committee, basically saying Building 7 was controlled detonation.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: This was like dorm room —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — radical, poor bong hits in stuff.
Joe Weisenthal: Look I could go down, I would just say my last point on this very specific thing, since I was in Austin, one of the frequent attendees at anti-Iraq war protests in Austin —
Chris Hayes: Was Alex Jones.
Joe Weisenthal: — was Alex Jones —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — on his bullhorn. So he was there. So all —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: –of this is just, you know, extraordinary full circle for guys like us —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — who have seen, yes.
Chris Hayes: So to be in 2025 and it’s like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — Scott Bessent and the Wall Street guys are saying —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — the neoliberal global trade agenda was a mistake. And Ron Johnson is like Building 7 was controlled that nation is like, Jesus Christ.
Joe Weisenthal: Like, on this thing about like the way people are talking about AI, and like I really do not have strong, what do I know, I do not have strong views about the way AI —
Chris Hayes: Me neither.
Joe Weisenthal: — is going to develop and unfold.
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Joe Weisenthal: And I really —
Chris Hayes: I’m totally open to being persuaded in a million directions, yes.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes. Yes, me too. But that and world trade, you know, I think one thing is that like certain things are discussed with the, this is inevitability. This is like, of course, the world is globalizing. Of course, we’re going to have integration of the global economies. Of course, you can no longer afford to do manufacturing in the United States. Of course, labor is going to be cheaper elsewhere. Of course, environmental regulations are going to be worse elsewhere. Of course, AI is going to develop, et cetera.
And I do think that all of these things, there is this discussion of like, yes, and that like, why are we having this debate or with the AI thing, you know, with AI certainly it’s like you’re sort of wasting your breath giving your opinion on it. It’s going to unfold one way or another. And what either of us say on a podcast is almost certainly going to be irrelevant. But it is interesting that in 2025, what we were told was like no —
Chris Hayes: Exactly.
Joe Weisenthal: — of course about the global economy, about trade. People are saying it did not necessarily have to be this way.
Chris Hayes: That really identifies part of what I think is —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — rubbing me the wrong way is that, yes, exactly at the same time that there’s this sort of 180-degree sort of counter consensus that’s formed. I mean really like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — a counter consensus that says, no, we really made some missteps with this 30, 40-year project we underwent.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: It had real cost that this new discourse has arisen about the next step of the global economy, which has all the same kind of naturalistic fallacy sort of stuff about it, of like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — this just is the way it is. It’s like complaining about the weather. Like it just —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it’s out of our control, but it’s like, well, wait a second, like the fact that these two stand side by side, sometimes in the same interview.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like JD Vance, when he’s interviewed, he’s like mister critique of neoliberalism in global trade. And then also mister like bullish on AI, don’t worry about job loss. It’s like, wait a second, these look like very similar stories to me.
Joe Weisenthal: The whole deciphering, the sort of discourse around AI in itself is super interesting because —
Chris Hayes: Because of how ideologically fraught it is?
Joe Weisenthal: It’s so ideologically fraught and like understanding anyone’s motivations for saying anything —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: –like you’re right (ph). So because —
Chris Hayes: Totally, yes. It’s like a carnival. It’s like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — it feels like everyone is talking their book. No one has —
Joe Weisenthal: Well, if I have an AI startup, then I also have this desire to like, say like, oh, it’s going to disrupt the entire world.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: And it’s going to like result in the elimination of all white collar labor which is simultaneous, it’s like this weird Baptists and bootleggers type of phenomenon where they’re working together on the same. So, the AI doomers —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — and the AI investors are actually talking the same book because the common thread is like, well —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — I really worried this could be disruptive, but that really probably implies these companies are worth insane amounts of money. And so even the AI startups, they’re all labs. You know, like they’re like OpenAI labs or whatever, because it sort of gives this, we’re doing a science project here. We’re going to shroud it in some sort of corporate structure that is not a typical like startup day. We’re going to wrap it in a nonprofit because we got to keep it contained because it’s sort of Manhattan Project. Like it’s just all very strange. But I have to say, I actually, for real, for real here, I genuinely like some of the comments that David Sacks of the “All-In” podcast has been making. Even though he shrouds them in like really intense like ideological, things where he talks to like two Republicans, et cetera. He’s like, don’t repeat these Obama-Axios talking points, these unproven arguments about how it’s going to destroy the jobs because that’s going to feed into regulation, et cetera.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: But I do actually appreciate it in the specific sense that he is presumably financially exposed and wants to see the AI industry boom, et cetera, but isn’t talking about it as if the nuclear bomb is being developed, which really worries me. Like this idea, like the way people talk about —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — AI, especially geopolitically, it’s like, oh, we have to beat China, right? There’s this very like intense imperative, we must beat China to this technology that will confer as much power to its owner as the nuclear bomb did to countries as they developed it after World War II. And I sort of appreciate that even in this sort of like weird, torqued way that there are some voices talking about AI. That’s like, no, this is not pushing back. This is not —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — that existential, et cetera.
Chris Hayes: Right. Although, I think he’s talking his book there because he doesn’t want to be regulated.
Joe Weisenthal: He doesn’t want to be regulated.
Chris Hayes: Right and so —
Joe Weisenthal: I agree. I totally agree. I agree with that. I agree.
Chris Hayes: And I would say people that I’ve talked to who are very close to AI development, who I trust, right. These are people that I know —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know, I had someone say to me like, look, imagine if we ran the nuclear arms race but we just ran it through a bunch of private companies.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Think how insane that would be. What if there were like —
Joe Weisenthal: But, yes, I know.
Chris Hayes: But again, my point here, and I think you and I are in the same wave length on this —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which is depending on whatever the last article I read, I could be convinced of everything from literally the world will be annihilated by an AI apocalypse before my children reach adulthood to —
Joe Weisenthal: In two years, yes.
Chris Hayes: — to the whole thing is absolutely a con job is going to fall in on itself, like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know, Web3, the metaverses, like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, I’m jealous of people that have like formed a really strong opinion on this question because I certainly have not. But like, you know, I don’t know like who you talk to within the industry, but I do feel like people within the industry, they’re like have been six months away from achieving AI or AGI for the last —
Chris Hayes: Totally.
Joe Weisenthal: — two years, right. They see something in the lab. They’re like, oh, well, we’re seeing, it’s really freaking us out and we’re really scared of like this stuff. I can’t talk about it just yet, et cetera.
Chris Hayes: But okay but here’s where these two stories, to me, because these are the —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — in some ways, these are sort of the two macroeconomic stories of Trump, right?
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: There’s clearly this kind of rebellion against the neoliberal consensus.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Push for mercantilism and autarchy.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Reestablishing tariffs and trade wars, right, with some, I think, sort of misguided notion of like some new version of the American factory worker, even though I don’t think these–
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — things he’s doing are going to produce that. At the same time that AI is going to, you know, these people love AI. They use it to write all their reports. The AI people are giving them tons of money. They’ve got an AI czar who’s very pro AI.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like yada. The way that these to me combine is that is in the automation story, which is —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — when you look at the data, I think of fair reading of the data is that automation has had a bigger effect on these jobs, the ones that you and I are talking about, people want there to be, going away as much, if not, more than trade.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And like there’s a bunch of companies that want to automate all truck driving in America.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: Truck driving right now is a classic example of a pretty good paying job where you can have a decent middle class life —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: — with a — with a high school diploma.
Joe Weisenthal: I think it’s the most common job in every state for males —
Chris Hayes: In every in state.
Joe Weisenthal: — who don’t have a high school diploma, is that the most common job is a truck driving. I’ve seen that stat a couple of places. Yes, I mean I think this is totally, totally true. You know, I think one of the things that’s going on too is there’s this view of AI as the final technology that has to be developed ever, right? Because once AI —
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes.
Joe Weisenthal: No, for real because once —
Chris Hayes: Yes, totally.
Joe Weisenthal: — AI is developed, then I think there’s this fantasy that all the other technologies become trivial to solve. That if you have something that is called AGI, well then the AGI could solve self-driving trucks. Then, the AGI can solve like the organization of a purely, the AGI can build robots.
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: The AGI can have, therefore, robotic factory and everyone. So, I do think like part of the weird thing about this moment and the AI obsession is this belief that almost nothing else is worth talking about. Like all these other like science problems, you know, because as I said —
Chris Hayes: Climate frenzy (ph) which no one in that world seems interested in, even though —
Joe Weisenthal: No.
Chris Hayes: — it’s a very pressing problem.
Joe Weisenthal: But yeah, that’s exactly right and there are like these various factions within the tech, right, that is interested in some other things in the world. And yet I get the impression that the way the circle is being squared and the fact that look, they’re cutting funding for science, et cetera. Well, why invest in human science, et cetera, because after we have AGI, then that the AGI will make all these breakthroughs that currently humans in the lab are theoretically working on. And that is how you sort of like satisfy this desire for —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — progress with a capital P the way many people who live in California and elsewhere are excited about. While at the same time, you know, cutting investment in these areas.
Chris Hayes: Right and when you come back to this sort of question of like, what does this new economy look like? I mean I think this sort of —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — idea of 1890s is probably a useful one because, again, Trump says it himself. So, like you might as well listen to him.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Like —
Joe Weisenthal: I’m a big fan of taking Trump literally by the way.
Chris Hayes: Yes, yes and a lot of stuff I agree.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: He has been very clear. He said, this is when the U.S. was at its richest.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: But I think that, you know, the other thing I could come back to on, when I think about sort of being on the other sides of these arguments, right, about if we go back to trade is at the same time that in the late 1990s, early 2000s, I was in the trade skeptic ideological camp.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: The pro-trade people would make this argument, which also had some real teeth to it and which is true, which is this is a boon and windfall for working class people.
Joe Weisenthal: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: Because all kinds of stuff that used to cost so much money has gotten so much cheaper.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And we had a period of basically 30 years of disinflation.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That meant that like all these accoutrement —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — of the modern household that used to be out of reach and you have to do layaway, like people could buy and it actually —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: — created a huge welfare boom. And the reason I’m thinking about this is when I think about like China’s BYD electric cars.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I like look at them, I’m like I want to buy one of those.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, me too.
Chris Hayes: They have dope ass electric cars for like $20,000.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And you can’t get them as an American.
Joe Weisenthal: No, it’s crazy too. And I do think like the more I think about it, the more angry I feel about that. Like, I’m an American, I should be able to buy the best car in the world. Like it does not, that feels very wrong, and it feels like kind of ahistorical, not ahistorical in a —
Chris Hayes: I agree.
Joe Weisenthal: — judgment in way, but in a way that feels like it’s an unusual moment in American society.
Chris Hayes: Why are you telling me I can’t buy a BYD?
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, that there’s a car that exists that’s better than anything on the market and I’m not allowed to like purchase it is like really strange. I also agree that like, you know, when you go back to some of these comments are like, oh, the kids only need two dolls or there’s more to life than cheap goods from China. And there’s a part of me like, is there? No, I don’t mean it quite that extreme. But I do mean that like part of like modern like wealth and comfort, et cetera, like is connected to the fact that we can consume a lot of stuff at very low cost. And I also say, by the way, like, if I were going to intervention in the abundance discourse.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: It’s like, if what we have in the United States today is not abundance like what is? Right? Like people are talking about, I mean, oh my God, we’re swimming in abundance. I understand that the media is heavily concentrated in New York and California, and so the vast majority of people work in the media are unhappy with how much they pay for housing. But the actual, in reality, like the square footage of American household is gigantic. American households are swimming —
Chris Hayes: Has gone up a crazy amount. Joe Weisenthal: Yes, so Americans are swimming in space, they’re swimming in cheap stuff. Like if this isn’t abundance, I mean come on.
Chris Hayes: Right, but the other thing —
Joe Weisenthal: That’s my contribution to that discourse these days.
Chris Hayes: Well, the thing I would say to that, and this is, I think, a really interesting place for this conversation to end up because —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — you know, by all kinds of metrics, the American economy is the sort of little engine that could, not little —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: Big ass engine that could.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes:And it, you know, there was a million predictions of recession during Biden, and they didn’t happen.
Joe Weisenthal: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: And it’s outperformed every other economy in recovery. It outperformed a lot of economies in recovery from the Great Recession, even though it did —
Joe Weisenthal: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — poorly in many ways, but a lot of places did worse. It outperformed every other economy in the recovery —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — from COVID. It does a lot of things when you look at the natural statistics and you compare it to other countries. It has a bunch of things going for it that —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — continue to produce —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — best in class results.
Joe Weisenthal: Correct.
Chris Hayes: And yet, and yet, Americans are, by all the measures we have, considerably less happy —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — than peer (ph) countries and they die earlier.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And there’s something to that as the fundamental paradox that we’re solving for.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That we’re using these tools of like trade or all these things where it’s like, why is it the case?
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: And I think inequality is a huge amount to do with it, but it’s both the case that we have the wealthiest, the best economy, and also the unhappiest citizens in our cohort who died the earliest. And that to me is the central contradiction of the country at this moment. Joe Weisenthal: Yes, I think you’re right. And you know, when I talk about like, oh, Americans have gigantic houses and we have tons of stuff and multiple cars in our garages, the way I’ve been thinking about the American economy is not only is —
Chris Hayes: I mean lots of people don’t. We should be clear. I just want to say because people will be like —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, no, for sure. No, no but like —
Chris Hayes: — screw you Joe, like —
Joe Weisenthal: So no, lots of people don’t, but lots of people do.
Chris Hayes: Right, yes.
Joe Weisenthal: But what I think is that lots of people do because there is a real ground down underclass in —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — American society.
Chris Hayes: Yes, that’s a good point.
Joe Weisenthal: And so that like a lot of people, like from a sort of purely material standpoint, like if you counted how big their yards are and how many bedrooms they had and how many cars they had, a lot of Americans have it well. But then there is this like layer underneath of people —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — like people like deep poverty, deep, like very little prospect of moving up. And then there’s, of course, a country that’s like riven with addiction and health inequality and other things that are like seriously detrimental that driving down the terrible stats for things like you mentioned, like longevity, et cetera, worsening stats. And so what I think is that, like, there is this sort of like deep pathologies in American society —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — that are not everyone, but like very concentrated and everyone else is sort of has benefited from the existence of like this sort of ground down underclass.
Chris Hayes: And I think that, to bring it back around, I think there’s these sort of monomaniacal, I think Pete Navarro and to some extent Trump —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — and Stephen Miller think that the answer, the reason for this to a certain extent, to the extent they have real views that you can credit as genuine views is a kind of monomaniacal view that trade and immigration together are the reason for all of this.
Joe Weisenthal: Right.
Chris Hayes: That it’s too much trade and too much immigration that is made the country a country where people are unhappy and, you know —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — alienated and pissed off and this kind of underclass and so there really is this, if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — approach, to the extent there’s a problem being solved for, and again, I’m crediting them more than I usually do, particularly in the immigration —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — which I think is really in the case of Stephen Miller genuinely motivated by animus but to the extent there’s a non-animus motivated version of his views.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: That these two things, that these are the source of the (inaudible) and the problems and the lack of mobility at the bottom. And if you, you know, if you go at them and I just think it’s just a complete mismatch between —
Joe Weisenthal: Well —
Chris Hayes: — what they’re doing and what the solution.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, I mean I think actually that is a very good characterization of the views. The other thing I would say, look, we are seeing it right now with the attempt to pass the one big, beautiful bill. It’s really hard to make policy in this country for various reasons. One of the things that happens to be true is that the executive branch has been delegated, now the courts are fighting this, but there is one area of real policy where the executive branch does seem to have a lot of unilateral capacity and that is tariffs. So, it’s actually beyond like, if everything —
Chris Hayes: And immigration.
Joe Weisenthal: And immigration, so that’s exactly right. So you say like, all right, if all you have is a hammer or everything —
Chris Hayes: Right.
Joe Weisenthal: — whatever the phrase, there is one area —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — that like you don’t actually have to deal with the tricky parts of capital P, politics and allocating resources, et cetera, where the White House can just go on its own. And these are the two areas, uh, trade and immigration. And so I’m not like it’s not particularly surprising —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — that like, they can’t even, I mean there’s the Republican Party, it should be the most trivial thing in the world to extend the tax cut, right. That’s arguably what the big part of what the party is for.
Chris Hayes: Party paid (ph) for, yeah.
Joe Weisenthal: It’s proving to be really difficult. It’ll probably happen, I would get but —
Chris Hayes: Yes, but on this —
Joe Weisenthal: — if this (ph) to be tricky.
Chris Hayes: On this last point and I think this is actually —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — really interesting because we’ve been talking about this weird sort of ideological inversions from —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — 9/11 truism to anti-sea oil to —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — trade, what’s really interesting about that bill is that for all of these ideological inversions that have happened, that bill just could have been 2004 Republican —
Joe Weisenthal: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: — party, 2000 —
Joe Weisenthal: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: It exists out of time.
Joe Weisenthal: That’s right.
Chris Hayes: Of all of these ideological trends.
Joe Weisenthal: No —
Chris Hayes: It’s just George Bush, Mitt Romney-ism (ph).
Joe Weisenthal: So I would say two things and I generally agree. So, one thing it’s like, it is interesting like watching Elon’s specific arc because a lot of people expected him is like, oh, he’s going to bring techno thoughts to the government.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And apparently he just got really freaked out about the size of the deficit and the debt. Like that’s all he seems to care about D.C.-wise. And I do think there is a slight, there’s like two circles that overlap but not perfect, which is this sort of like pro-business Republican Party, which I associate with like a Mitt Romney type or maybe a Georgia W. Bush type. And then the sort of like anti-government type and they’re like slightly different, right.
Chris Hayes: They are, yes.
Joe Weisenthal: They’re slightly different impulses.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: And I think that like right now and sometimes they could be mistaken for one another —
Chris Hayes: I agree.
Joe Weisenthal: — because both camps like lower taxes. But I think right now it’s like the anti-government one is really the one that’s in charge and the sort of quote, “pro-business” one, the, you know, the chamber Republicans —
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: — whatever, like, it feels like they’re kind of on the out still.
Chris Hayes: Yes.
Joe Weisenthal: Even in the legislative realm.
Chris Hayes: Yes. Well, I guess I think they’ve done better in the legislative realm —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, yes.
Chris Hayes: — than in some other places, but we’re going to see. It would be really interesting to see —
Joe Weisenthal: Yes.
Chris Hayes: — where this all goes. And by the time this hits your ear holes, maybe it’s all moot because we’ve got some new tariff.
Joe Weisenthal: Yes, like we don’t know.
Chris Hayes: — for, you know, everything has been —
Joe Weisenthal: That’s the risk of our job these days.
Chris Hayes: Joe Weisenthal is co-host of the excellent “Odd Lots” podcast with Tracy Alloway. I really recommend it, it’s great, listen. Joe, great to have you back on.
Joe Weisenthal: Anytime Chris. It’s so great chatting with you again.
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