As we hurtle toward a trade war with the rest of the world because of TrumpTariffs, I keep going back to this exchange on Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me from a few months ago. The guest was Austan Goolsbee, who was chair of the Council of Economic Advisors under President Obama, who actually listened to advisers with expertise instead of spouting off “policy” points based on what he dimly remembered from a class in a school he sort of attended once. Host Peter Sagal asked Goolsbee to explain tariffs.
I’ll tell you why they’re a terrible idea, which they are. But to do that I will give you a small story about my Aunt Trina, who lived in a house with my Uncle Bob in Lubbock, Texas. There’s a disagreement in the family what it was that my Aunt Trina cooked, but it ended up stuffed down the sink, where it clogged the drain. And my Uncle Bob went to the store and got a product, which has since been banned, which was called ‘The Bomb’. And ‘The Bomb’ was a combination of a plunger and a firearm. It had a cartridge in it. You stuck it into the drain. And you fired it in, and it would blow the clog out.
SAGAL: So this is like an explosive device with a projectile.
GOOLSBEE: It’s got a CO2 projectile, and you put the pressure in there, and you blow it out. And it said on the outside, use only one charge. But my Uncle Bob is not the type to use only one charge if more than one is available. So he fired the entire thing into the drain.
SAGAL: I just want to say, this is the most interested in economics I have ever been. This is great.
GOOLSBEE: He cleared out the clog of the drain. The lasagna — whatever it was. And they lived in a, what we in Chicago would call a converted. It was a house. It had a wall down the middle. There were two identical apartments. And the drains did not just go straight down. They connected in a little Y. So every time he blew the bomb into the drain, it didn’t go down the drain to the sewage. It just blew it to the neighbor. And so the next morning, that person comes over and says, ‘Bob, was there some kind of terrible plumbing catastrophe?’ He said, ‘I’d like to show you my apartment.’ And all over the ceiling in the kitchen is my Aunt Trina’s lasagna blown out there.
And that is exactly what’s wrong with tariffs. You can blow it. You can blow the lasagna out of the steel drain, but you blow it out of the steel drain right onto the auto industry, Boeing — it’s all over the ceiling. And that’s what’s wrong with this: It ends up destroying thousands more manufacturing jobs than you’re saving.
SAGAL: That is so great. And I have this deep conviction that if only you had been there to explain it to Donald Trump just that way, he would have understood.
(Drumpfy, after hearing this explanation: “That’s fantastic. We’re just gonna blow shit all over China. I love it. You’re hired!”
Here’s a link to the audio clip. It’s worth a listen; I plugged it in at work and was doubled over my desk, shaking with silent laughter. And now I think I’ll get some shopping done while we still have an economy.
Also, does anyone remember ‘The Bomb’? I’m thinking there had to be some classic ads for such a product, but I haven’t been able to find any.