Scott Lincecum
speaker
168 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 1 Apr
Scott Lincecum’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 2.
Appearances
The Bulwark Daily · Will Saletan and Scott Lincicome: A Crime Boss Has Taken Over · 3 Feb 2025
podcast
But you have to do it because you need to get reelected or there's national solidarity, all that kind of stuff. And you can actually – apparently, the Canadians are really pissed right now.
And Canadians are like the nicest people ever. So for them to get upset, you've done something really wrong. So going back to retaliation. So there's a political incentive to retaliate. There's also a strategic incentive. So if you don't retaliate, you're basically encouraging bad behavior by the initial actor. This is all game theory stuff, right? You see a lot of retaliation in this space. But –
How do you retaliate? Well, you don't want to just do blanket tariffs like Donald Trump did. You want to hit politically influential groups. So you're going to go after pork producers. Pork guys carry a lot of weight. So you're going to go after pork imports. You're going to go after steel producers. imports. They famously went after bourbon because of Mitch McConnell and Kentucky bourbon.
So this is very standard practice. You try to do these targeted hits. Well, that's a shame.
Yeah, $350 billion right off the top, right? And I would add, even if this all goes away tonight, I think this may be a good place to close. There are still reasons to expect this to be damaging in the long term, because the United States today has effectively abrogated its free trade agreement commitments with its closest trading partners. And
and has done it in a way that is just clearly absurd and damaging. And so if you are a foreign government official, and you are looking to increase economic integration. And you have, on the one hand, China, Xi Jinping, total pain in the butt, lots of problems with China's economic models and human rights.
Compared to what you just got with Donald Trump and the United States, the calculus has changed. And I think that this is going to do long-term damage to government's willingness to increase integration with the United States. That just means slower growth, less competitiveness for the US economy, onward and onward.
I would note, as one of our adjuncts posted over the weekend, it also could come back to bite us when there's another global crisis because governments tend to work together, whether it's through public health or monetary policy or whatever. Trade agreement partners tend to do the best when it comes to working together in these things.
But now we're basically destroying those relationships in real time.
Well, it was a joke that I guess has increasing relevance.
Yeah. So on Saturday, the president issued three executive orders invoking a national emergency with respect to fentanyl and the importation of fentanyl from China, Canada, and Mexico.
Correct, correct. And, of course, then applying tariffs on imports of all goods from these three countries. 10% for China, because they already had 25% tariffs on a bunch of stuff. And then 25% on all imports from Canada and Mexico. Leaving aside whether there is a Canadian fentanyl crisis.
Yes. Well, it's – and the big point and I think the point that I think is going to be litigated is even if you grant all of these crises, the remedy is utterly disconnected from the emergency itself. I mean how does applying tariffs on avocados solve the fentanyl crisis?
That's the big – I think the bigger issue here is that the remedy is really damaging for the US economy, for the United States global reputation, whatever – however you want to call that. I really mean that in terms of international economic agreements. Because, you know, Canada and Mexico are our biggest trading partners.
They have had relatively free trade with the United States since 1994 because of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which then Trump rebranded the USMCA and said it was the greatest trade deal ever. So Trump's trade deal, all of that has been thrown away. along with, of course, all of the microeconomic stuff, right? So you have supply chains that have evolved over decades.
Automotive parts will cross the US-Mexico border five, six, seven times before getting put into a vehicle. And they do that, again, because of this free trade zone. This has been a relatively good thing for the US economy overall, right? Yes, there have been discrete harms for certain workers and companies. But overall, it's been a good thing.
It's allowed US firms to compete against Asian supply chains and European supply chains by diversifying. So all of this is good. And yet, Trump's going to implode all of it because of fentanyl. It just it really makes no sense.
Well, they're very nice people.
And Trump was on Truth Social bringing up the trade balances, bringing up that this is going to be a great thing for manufacturing. So yeah, the fentanyl thing kind of disappeared within about 12 hours, right? And I would add, it's not just their words that show they understand this is going to be painful for the US economy. It's the actions as well, because they carved out
canadian oil so canadian oil gets a special 10 tariff not the full 25 now why would you do that if this is going to be good for the american economy well you do it because in reality it's going to raise gas prices in the midwest because we import a ton of canadian crude oil we do that not because we're not energy independent or any of that nonsense we do it because canada makes a certain type of crude oil that goes in the refineries that are in the midwest
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