Plain English with Derek Thompson - Why America Will Lose Its Trade War With China

Episode Date: April 16, 2025

The U.S. is in the opening innings of a full-blown trade war with China. What does that actually mean? What do we sell to China? What does China sell to us? How is each country dependent on the other for the supply of electronics, food, machines, and goods? Jason Miller, a professor at Michigan State and an expert on global supply chains, tells Derek that in the trade war between the U.S. and China, one of these two countries seems better positioned to weather a protracted trade dispute—and it’s not the U.S. If you have questions, observations, or ideas for future episodes, email us at [e-mail]. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Jason Miller Producer: Devon Baroldi Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Royal Port Rush, away we go. There's a word that's thrown around a lot these days with Trump's tariffs and China's response to those tariffs and the market's response to China's response to those tariffs. That word is re-industrialization. Re-industrialization is a fancy word belying a simple premise. America used to be an industrial giant that got rich by making hardware. Now we're a finance and tech superpower that gets rich with software. Go back to 1930s and 1940s and the U.S. economy was dominated by manufacturing firms,

by industrial firms, in other words, Ford, GM, GE. In the last 70 years, manufacturing is a share of employment. has steadily declined. In the last 25 years, in particular, the number of jobs in American factories has plummeted, just as China has become the factory of the world. Today, the U.S. hasn't just lost the capacity to sew-clothes at scale or assemble household electronics.

We've lost the technological frontier in industries that are core to our national security, or our economy, shipbuilding, advanced computer chip manufacturing. China, for its part, is not just the world leader in making toys and underwear anymore. The antiquated notion that made in China connotes some cheap scaling of low-skilled labor is a holdover from a previous era.

China has taken the lead in making electric vehicles and clean energy manufacturing, and industrial robots, and drone technology, and flying taxis. Its AI capabilities appear to be right on the heels of the U.S. its patent filings exceed Americas. In this context, re-industrialization should not just mean turning back the clock and reviving the economy that made us the richest country on the planet in the 1950s. We need to invest in the industrial economy that will make us rich in the 2050s. All right, so that's a nice pat line. Why can't we just do it?

I sometimes see folks talk about, quote, bringing back manufacturing jobs. jobs as if it's as simple as retrieving a child's toy you left at a friend's house. Just call them up, bring it back. U.S. companies can't just call up their foreign offices and factories and demand jobs back. We need time to build factories here. We need workers to be in those factories. We need industrial robots to work alongside those workers, and those workers might need train it. The U.S. in 2025 is a fully developed economy with a low unemployment rate. rate and declining business investment. Where are these factories supposed to come from?

Where are these workers supposed to come from? Where is their training supposed to come from? Now, I believe in the possibility of change. I believe in the ability of the U.S. economy to evolve. But change takes time. And it would be nice to have clarity on America's trade policy to invest overtime in our new re-industrialized future. On China, however, the trade policy is as clear as mud.

The U.S. imposed a 10% tariff on Chinese goods in February, raised it to 20% in March, raised it to 145% in April, then announced that electronics were exempt from those tariffs, and then 24 hours later reversed course and declared that tariffs on electronics were coming, but no, under a separate law. I haven't spoken to a single trade expert or manufacturing executive who says this yo-yo approach to trade is the best way to reshape the global order. What is clear, however, is that the U.S. is in the opening innings of a full-blown trade war with China. So I wanted to know, what do we actually sell to China? What does China sell to us?

How is each country dependent on the other for the supply of electronics and food and medicine and machines and other goods? Jason Miller is a professor at Michigan State and an expert on global supply chains. A supply chain is the story of how all the parts that make it into a final product actually get there. You take something like a number two pencil. Very simple product. Wood on the outside, graphite for the writing, rubber erase, that little piece of metal to hold the rubber at the end. But good luck finding one city that has a cedarwood forest and a graphite mine

and a synthetic rubber facility and an aluminum processing smelter. There aren't a lot of pencil towns, so to speak. So to keep pencils cheap, we rely on an international network, say wood from Oregon, graphite from Sri Lanka, rubber from Indonesia, assembled in China, packaged with recycled paper, from Canada and shipped to your local target.

That's a supply chain. What I wanted to know from Jason was what happens in a trade war between two of the richest countries in the world when both China and America are trying to kick the other one out of their supply chain? The short answer is chaos. The medium-length answer is that one of these two countries seems better positioned to whether a protracted trade war and I'm worried it's not America.

The long answer is this show. I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Jason Miller, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. So who are you, and what do you do? So I'm a professor of supply chain management here at Michigan State University. And a lot of what I specialize in is essentially distilling a tremendous amount of government data

so the business community can, you know, derive insight from that. I have to confess something for this show that I don't think I have confessed on other shows because I like to see myself as either an explainer or someone who facilitates explanations. I am extremely, I think, confused by the state of these tariffs. Like on any given morning that I wake up, I'm not exactly sure what the tariff rate on the world is or on China is. You're an expert in this field. Is my confusion okay, acceptable, understandable?

Are you confused, Jason? Oh, absolutely. I was doing an executive ed session the other day, and that was when they announced the 90-day pause and the reciprocal tariff, so I just spent two and a half hours talking about a lot of these issues. Literally, we broke, and somebody said, well, everything we just learned no longer applies.

So do not feel bad. That's what we're all experiencing right now. And before we jump into the story of supply chains and America and China, I do want to just briefly extrapolate from that point. If I'm confused and you're confused and you're a supply chain management expert and you're doing all of this research for hour-long seminars for other supply chain practitioners and all of the work that you're doing proves kaput by the time you finish speaking, what is the logical implication that we should draw for the entire U.S. economy and the confusion that companies and

importers and exporters and customs agents are feeling right now. What is the, what are the costs of this level of confusion and uncertainty? Yeah, so, and you misset it with the last word, it's uncertainty. And when things are uncertain, you naturally hit the pause button. And so right now the biggest challenge is folks don't know what to do. Do you? Do you? Do I shift production from China to Vietnam because now there's this massive 135 percentage point difference in tariffs for a lot of items? Or do I stand, Pat, thinking the president may have a trade deal with China because that would be the biggest single trade deal that could be struck? That's the issue that so many folks are facing and it's being carried out by hundreds of

thousands of decision makers around the country at the moment. And just practically speaking, what does it mean if people are hitting? the pause button, if they're simply saying, I'm going to wait this out. Does that mean you don't order new toys if you're a toy store because you think maybe the tariff rate for toys that you order in three weeks is going to be 130% lower? Does it mean you don't invest in a new factory expansion that you were planning because you have no idea what the relative tariff rates are going to be for various countries? Like, what are the practical, quantitative costs of this kind of uncertainty pausing economic activity?

Yeah, well, you captured a lot of them as, you know, from the big capital investment standpoint, building factories in the United States, it becomes harder to justify those investments. What I would tell folks, don't let these announcements, my like Navidia saying they're going to build AI servers and AI supercomputers in the United States fool you.

Those are decisions that would have made sense even without tariffs being employed. place. But the challenge that decision makers are facing is, do I buy that new piece of capital equipment knowing that it's now 10% more expensive, let's say, or if it was coming from China, 145% more expensive? Do I have to find a different supplier? Do I pause adding employees? You know, just as an example, there's about 8,000 different firms that operate a hobby shop or toy store, those firms employ 130,000 people almost. They're right now trying to make decisions. Do we cut imports? Do we trim certain product categories? Do I not hire as many people because I don't

think my growth is there? And so right now we're seeing that play out across millions of different businesses in the United States that are affected either directly or indirectly by this continual whirlwind of tariff policies. So mostly I want to talk to you. about the supply chains passing through China and the U.S. and what happens if indeed we have tariff rates of 145% or even higher placed on China? The Trump administration is clearly directing its tariff efforts at the moment toward isolating China, which naturally raises the question, how effective will that strategy be? So let's start with some basic facts.

What is it that we buy most from China? where is America most reliant on Chinese manufacturing? So those are going to be two slightly separate questions. So what do we buy the most from China? Number one is smartphones. Number two is laptops. Number three is lithium ion batteries and for electric vehicles. And number four, when you lump it together,

a bunch of product categories, is going to be toys, believe it or not. So that's kind of the list of the top four. And then a whole bunch of other consumer electronics. headphones, things of that sort. And in many of those categories, China accounts for more than 70% of our imports. So, for example, in 2024, there were 81% of smartphones that we imported came from China. Now, what are we most dependent on China for? If we think about essentially China's share of our total imports, it's a lot of stuff associated with being apparent. So car seats, Baby gates, strollers, things of this sort.

A lot of items, baby safety equipment, a lot of things of that sort. You start then getting into your kitchen, your blender, your microwave, your mixer, all this other stuff. Very heavily relying on China. Something over 95-ish percent of electric toasters, for example, or above come from China. And so what we run into for categories like that, and there's many others, is there's just not an easy option of leaving China. Because the key thing to remember is China's producing electric toasters, let's say, for the entire world. They're not just making toasters for the United States. And so the entire ecosystem to build those products is anchored in China.

and you just can't up and move that to another country easily. There's nowhere else in the world that has even remotely the capacity to do it. And per the comment about uncertainty, I wouldn't want to open an electric toaster factory here in the United States. If the only way this product could even remotely be cost competitive is with 100% plus tariffs on Chinese goods, if there's a trade deal struck, I'm suddenly out millions of dollars. and I'm doubting too many banks would want to give me a loan to make that. And even worse, if I did build my toaster factory,

most of the components would have to come from China because that's where the ecosystem is. I wouldn't be able to buy those components from the United States. So I would pay tariffs on components anyway, and then my investment makes no sense. I want to talk about both of these categories, which you outlined so well, both categories of big-ticket manufacturing,

automakers, aerospace manufacturing, military contractors, electric vehicle makers. That's one big category. But I'm so glad you mentioned the other category, which is stuff parents need. I mean, just going through the list that you sent me over the weekend, we rely on China for 99% of imported child safety seats with detachable hard shells. I got one of them. 93% of children's coloring books. I got seven of those. 95% of cooking appliances. 96% of toys for pets, 88% of Christmas ornaments and Christmas trees, and 74% of toy parts for ages 3 and under. Just looking at this, Jim, it seems like a trade war with China is going to give the American consumer, and in particular, the American parent, a very painful lesson in how dependent we are on China for a lot of stuff we don't even think about in our everyday life. practically speaking, what happens if the wall goes up and this stuff just stops coming in?

Yeah, so this is going to be it is the question of what do importers do? So the first is there will be a dramatic reduction in product variety. So in other words, importers are not going to bring in the range of products they would have without the tariffs. That in and of itself is a loss to the consumer because more variety is generally viewed as better. You get to pick the thing that you like the best. For the goods that are still brought in, and we still will need child steins, we will still need electric toasters, the price is going to go up and go up substantially. At 145% tariff, I feel comfortable saying the price of these items is going to become 75% to 100% greater than it currently is, because there's not enough

margin to essentially be spread out amongst the firms to fully absorb this. And we actually saw this in our import data through March, and that while it does appear that suppliers of cell phones are actually lowering their prices a little bit to help the importers absorb some of the tariffs. No, not all of it, just a fraction of it. We didn't see any type of drop for the price of imported household appliances, which would suggest that the U.S. importers are essentially absorbing the entirety of that tariff. Because to, again, clarify, importers pay tariffs.

Exporters do not pay tariffs. And so the reality is the consumer is going to see less variety. And for the goods that are brought in, they're going to face a higher price. There is no way around that. That is why I largely believe the administration backtrack on smartphones and laptops, and they managed to do that at like 10 p.m. on a. Friday night to where I woke up Saturday morning, seeing this announcement, and sure enough, those are the products. And the reality is, is there's no feasibility of producing the U.S.'s

needed quantities of these goods in the United States in any type of short time period, and certainly not at the cost that we see from overseas production from China. And let me just pin you down in that last point, because one thought that a person might have hearing me list all these products we rely on China for is we're America, damn it. We should be able to make that stuff here. We should be able to make our own child safety seats with detachable hard shells and our own pet toys. What is your response to that take? Like both on how long it would take to set up those manufacturing facilities and whether it's worthwhile in the first place for the U.S. to have, say, a deliberate strategy of reshoring toy manufacturing.

Yeah, so could we make it here? Of course we can. We can build F-35 stealth aircraft. We can build Boeing airplanes. We can build incredible motor vehicles. Of course we can make this stuff. The question is, is this what we want to devote our limited resources to make it? And the answer to that is no. And the reason is for any manufacture good, you can sort of think there's kind of three big buckets of where you add value to that good. There's the design and innovation piece. So think about Apple developing a new iPhone, developing the iPhone 17, all of the code, making sure the components integrate, developing their own chips for their computers now. There's the physical transformation process then. This is bucket number two, which is what we

think of as traditional manufacturing. This is putting all the components together to produce a finished motor vehicle at a Ford plant. And then the last piece is marketing and distribution. There's value added there. Think of Nike, taking a sneaker that costs them not that much money in convincing all of us to pay a heck of a lot more for it, right? What you can think about with the United States is a lot of those things you mentioned, child safety seats, pet toys, you know, human toys. Sometimes those are interchangeable, as I found with our dog. is essentially the value adding for a lot of these goods that we've offshoreed is in step one, which is the design and innovation.

So again, the iPhone. Or it's in step three. It's the marketing and distribution. Think the Nike. There's not much value to be added by snapping together pieces of a doll or snapping together the pieces of the iPhone. And so that doesn't make sense to perform in the United States. the United States where we tend to manufacture extensively and lead the world is topics like aerospace, topics like farm equipment.

And those are the type of goods where there's an inherent connection between that design piece and the production piece. John Deere cannot, with 100% certainty, anticipate when they design a tractor the exact how it's going to be manufactured and how the components will all interact. with each other. The same applies to motor vehicles. That's why the motor vehicle makers design their cars and build the cars. When Apple tried to do that and apply the same model that it uses for laptops and cell phones to cars, it didn't work because this is a vehicle that is inherently far more complex and you can't anticipate these interactions. And so the challenge we run into is we right now

have an unemployment rate that's slightly above 4%. You don't, one, have the labor supply in the United States to produce a lot of these goods at scale easily. Two, we don't have, these aren't jobs that would pay well. We would be looking at jobs that would be paying, you know, not that much because this is not skilled labor to, you know, put together a Barbie doll. I'm not trying to be mean to folks, but that is not highly skilled work. and in general.

And so this is where it is a huge challenge to understand what the logic here is for a lot of the proposed tariffs because it's not a strategic focus of only finished motor vehicles made outside of North America. There may be you could actually see some type of argument. I would still be very skeptical of it.

But at least at that point, you're trying to channel production to a type of good for where we are very competitive, and it is a tremendous amount of value added. Jason, I have one more question about the first category that you talked about, lithium ion batteries, electronics, smartphone parts. You mentioned that in a full-on trade war scenario, we might have a situation where American parents are paying double for, you know, toys for their kids, toys for their pets, new toasters. What happens to American automakers or

military contractors or smartphone companies if the guts of their machines are suddenly tariffed 100 or 200% or even if China stops selling us those critical supplies entirely? How catastrophic could it be for automakers, aerospace manufacturers, military contractors? Yeah, so one of the things we're watching very closely at the moment is China recently essentially halted exports of what are called heavy rare earth elements. These are things we wouldn't think about very much, but these elements are needed to produce very powerful magnets. And as you mentioned, those are type of essentially we call them rare earth magnets.

They're used as components for electric vehicles, drones. missiles. So aerospace gets affected. The auto sector gets affected. And right now, the open question that we're still trying to fully understand is what type of inventories of, you know, these heavy rare earth elements are there out there? And so sort of that you can think China's a huge player in this space, Japan and Germany to a much lesser extent as well. And so the concern sort of right now at the moment is lack of access to these heavy rare earth elements would be extremely, you know, challenging for certain industries to deal with.

You know, it's too early for anybody to start, you know, to get worked into a panic thinking, oh, my heavens, like the auto sector is going to, going to shut down. but it also shows, I think, sort of the somewhat asymmetric responses that China has went with in this regard. No, at the same time, China is right now suffering because they've tariffed American propane so much, that propane is now very expensive over there. The challenge with that is propane is a feedstock to plastic manufacturing. So Chinese plastic manufacturers that are making essentially those like raw basic plastics are seeing massive increases in their costs. And so this is, you know, right now we're seeing sort of these complex effects play out.

And that's why again, we're all, I think, hoping for some type of de-escalation to take place and take place rather quickly. Let's take a look at the other side of the ledger here, not what we buy from China, but what we sell to China. After looking at your data and doing a bit of writing for the Atlantic, I calculated that as a share of global exports, China buys 89% of our grain sorghum, 52% of the soybeans we sell to the world, 30% of our cotton, 27% of our pistachios, 73% of our frozen pig organ exports, 51% of our optical instruments for inspecting and making computer chips, which is particularly important because that can layer with tariffs

of the smartphone components that then we buy back from China. What should people know that's most important about what we sell to China? You covered a lot of the key categories there, but what people really need to realize is that we, you know, China is a big export destination for us. exported about $125 billion of products to them. And so as an example, just today, China announced that they will no longer take deliveries of Boeing aircraft that are going to be finished. And aerospace is our number to export to China on a line item basis. We export over $10 million,

$10 billion back in 2024. And so the concern here is that. that these negative effects it has on, you know, U.S. exporters, and therefore, they're been engaging in less economic activity in the U.S. Another example that is almost incredibly ironic is companies like Intel, manufacture CPUs here in the United States for computers. They export those to China for assembly into finished products, which are then re-exported back to the United States. All of a sudden, you have China putting 125% tariff on an Intel CPU. So even if you have a computer, you know, a computer now assembled in China, it's going to be coming back to the U.S. not just with a 20% tariff, but the key part of his guts got doubled

in cost by that first tariff. And so unless there's a drawback provision that is, allowed for the Chinese exporter, a computer would be more expensive. And so part of the challenge as well with these tariffs is there's a lack of clarity about the extent that what we call drawbacks exist. And the concept of a drawback is, let's say, I import steel from Canada. I put that in a finished product that I then export to Germany. Under normal circumstances, even if I pay a tariff on that imported steel. Because I export my product, I can go to the government and say, hey, give me my money back that I paid on that tariff. We're not allowing that for like the steel and aluminum tariffs. No, we are allowing drawback on the reciprocal tariffs. There's lack of clarity,

though, on whether China would allow for drawback in this scenario I just exclaimed. And so that's where we're just really struggling because things are moving so fast. to understand these little nuances that really play a big role in affecting the overall costs that consumers will ultimately bear with these tariffs. There's two points here that I think are so, so important, and I just want to slow down a little bit to make sure that I slash listeners get them. The first point that I hear you making is that the U.S. and China are at risk of severely tariffing one another's intermediate products. So like if China tariffs our instruments for making computer chips and then we tariff their computer chips, those tariffs can stack in a way that makes the entire electronics industry significantly more expensive because every time these products are crossing state borders, there's another 10 or 110% tariff that's hitting that product. Is there any way that this has any effect besides significantly raising the cost of making complex machines and complex computers throughout the world? No, at least from a U.S. consumer side, it would be certainly detrimental for what we're going to experience.

You know, again, we may see some production and assembly shift out of China for these products. again, Apple strategically relying on their capacity in India to service more of the U.S. market and potentially using more of their Chinese capacity to service Europe as an example. But because of the complexities of global supply chains, no one wins in trade wars. And that's, I think, what's important to everybody to understand is there's all these nuances and unanticipated complexities that exist. that are very problematic to essentially, you know, understand. And, you know, again, let's say that there's a global tariff ultimately put on laptops. So what that does is it makes a laptop assembled in Vietnam more expensive to the U.S. consumer,

yet Intel is likely exporting the CPU for that laptop to Vietnam. And so all you end up doing is you hurt the domestic production of C.S. because consumers buy less laptops. And so the irony is there's more value added making that CPU in the United States than there is slapping the laptop together in Vietnam. The second point that I heard from your answer, and this is a subtle point, so I might have misunderstood it, is that I feel like there's an asymmetry between what we rely on China for and what China imports from the U.S. Like China imports a lot of cotton, pistachios, frozen meat, processors. I have to imagine that the Chinese can shift a lot of their import strategies and just buy frozen pig organ meat from some other country or maybe buy processors from, say, Japan. But you mentioned that the U.S. relies on China, the number one global manufacturer, for so many things that we can't easily.

just re-ame our economy toward one other country and say, we're going to buy all of your toasters instead. Am I right in hearing that there's a dangerous asymmetry between the way that China relies on American imports and the way that America relies on Chinese imports? No, there certainly is in some product categories. And so, for example, one of our top exports to China is semiconductor manufacturing equipment. So it's the equipment needed to make semiconductors. It's one of our top exports. Our exporters are very reliant on the Chinese market for business. Chinese importers do have the option of going to European or Japanese manufacturers.

No, it may not be a perfect substitute, but there is that possibility. For us, for something like toaster ovens, there really isn't a plan B to China. Same way with soybeans. That is our top export to China. China does have the option of going and buying from Brazil, which they have increasingly done. Now, for some items, China is dependent on us. So again, people want to buy a laptop with an Intel CPU. Well, then it may have to come from the United States. Now, Apple is a global manufacturer, so perhaps there's an alternative strategy that they fulfill the need for Chinese demand

from a facility in Ireland, let's say. And so there is some potential for essentially Chinese importers to do the same exact thing that U.S. importers are doing. But certainly for some product categories, it does feel like China has potentially more ability to go elsewhere. But again, this is not always straightforward. And we've seen this on the propane side where propane is one of our top exports to China. They're not sourcing from the U.S. Everybody else in the world knows they now can't effectively buy from the U.S. So their prices are going up, but we're getting to sell our propane elsewhere. And so that's one where essentially we're coming out ahead and they're essentially bearing the brunt of this. And so there's a lot of complexity. And so it's certainly not a

one-to-one, we're always at a disadvantage or one-to-one there are always at a disadvantage. It's going to be very specific items and the dynamics, you know, playing out over thousands upon thousands of different types of goods. I want to close by thinking about surprising winners and surprising losers of this trade war. You mentioned earlier, I believe the quote was, nobody wins a trade war. So maybe the answer is there is no surprising winner. But you also said something else, which is that if tariffs are going to be prohibitive on China, but low on, say, Vietnam, then there'll be a huge incentive for Chinese producers to sell their products through Vietnam, right?

Like send the product into Vietnam, have it painted in 45 seconds, and then have it sent out to the U.S. as a Vietnamese export rather than a Chinese export, which might theoretically help create a new kind of shadow Vietnamese economy for repackaging de facto Chinese goods. Are there other ways in which you could imagine

certain countries might be able, to narrowly benefit from the chaos in U.S.-Chinese trade relations? Yeah, so I think there's a couple angles. So one, just so everybody listening knows, what you describe doing while it does happen. Like, you can as an importer do that. That's illegal as can be. So don't go out there and try to do that.

Everybody looks at. Please don't do that. So right now, if U.S.MCA, the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement stays intact, the biggest winner of all of this, likely is actually Mexico, depending on what happens with tariffs from Vietnam. So this is going to be important, depending on what happens, depending also on what happens with the auto side piece. Because right now, USMCA compliant vehicles from Mexico are not being tariffed because basically Customs doesn't know how to subtract out the U.S. value in those imports from Mexico. No one knows when they'll figure

figure this out. Right now, I hate to say this, but in the big grand scheme of things, I personally believe in the Wall Street Journal's written about this. Probably the biggest winner out of all of this is China, because China prior to this event, the entire world was looking at them very suspiciously with a lot of their trained practices, and that they were saying you're overproducing, you're dumping products, the EU is putting tariffs in place, other countries are putting tariffs in place. And the world was essentially starting to unite against China for a lot of their trade practices. We have come in and in the last two months completely gotten rid of that dynamic. And we've now made ourselves the essentially the outlier and how we're behaving. And you can see this right now

with President of Shia China going on a tour of South Asian nations at the moment. And what are they talking about. They're talking about tariffs. You've got Japan, South Korea, and China talking about the potential for a trade agreement. That's shocking in terms of how these developments are. And so effectively, we have ceded a momentum in the world that was looking much more suspiciously on China in their trade practices. And we've essentially now set ourselves out as the odd-behaving nation. And we've essentially taken 80 years of goodwill and a system that we help create, and we've thrown it away, seemingly because people want to make toys again in the United States. There's a way in which it's even much worse than how you described. I mean, one of America's

advantages over every country in the planet is the fact that disproportionately the world's smartest people want to go to school here and want to stay here for work. And if you look at what's happening in American science policy and higher education, we're making the U.S. a very risky bet for folks who want to practice science over the course of many decades. And that, again, is undercutting a historical advantage that we have spent, you said it, about 80 years developing. I want to end with a surprising loser here, or an ironic loser. I've spoken to several large and small manufacturers in the last few days. And one consensus that I'm hearing is that this yo-yoing of tariff rates is an enormous procedural headache. I mean, this is the first thing that you and I

talked about. Big companies might have the personnel and the resources to push through and plan for the future. But small companies exposed to the global trade war, I think are going to get crushed. Do you agree with the assessment that ironically, a plan that is being sold is all about helping the little guy is creating an amount of confusion that will ironically hurt the little guy most. Oh, absolutely. This tariff war will put tens of thousands of small retailers that specialize in sourcing goods from China and selling them in the U.S. It will put them out of business if this stays in place for six months. And again, this is the challenge we all have is because we don't make many toys anymore in the United States,

because we don't make much apparel in the United States, that's what a lot of us are struggling with, is understanding the logic for how this is, you know, good for the whole economy. Jason Miller, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.