Steven Woldenberg

And that's certainly true.

We've seen tariff revenue spike well over $200 billion.

So there is, I think, a good justification that it is a source of revenue.

The problem is it falls disproportionately on lower income households.

And in the end, it really falls on American households.

So it's not a great way to tax people.

I think there are two big takeaways that I have from surveys of American consumers.

The first is, and this is no surprise, that people really hate inflation.

And I learned this lesson during the Biden administration when I was serving as chief economist of the Treasury Department, where we had the unemployment rate at 3.5%.

It was a record low.

but people were still really frustrated with the economy because prices were higher.

And that's, I think, true today where President Trump ran on a platform of lowering prices and inflation has stayed around 3% or a little bit less.

But the second thing is also really interesting where if you look at surveys of both Democrats and Republicans where they're asked, why do we have higher prices?

Really high percentages of Democrats and even high percentages of Republicans attribute the higher prices to those tariffs.

which is economically correct.

Tariffs definitely raise the price of goods.

So, I think that American consumers are fairly astute, and they're also really frustrated with this policy.

I think we learned one big lesson about the American economy and one lesson about trade.

So the big lesson about the American economy that we learned, or at least I learned, was that we are the largest economy in the world.

We're a well-diversified economy.