The Agenda with Steve Paikin (Audio) - How Can Canada Deal with Trump's Tariff Fallout

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

The economic fallout from President Donald Trump's tariffs can be seen everywhere in Ontario and party leaders are taking various approaches to facing that challenge. The Agenda invites two economic watchers to get their takes on Canada's next move. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's also a story about a system that is supposed to protect patients. From TVO Podcasts, I'm Krisha Collier, and this is The Oath. Subscribe today, wherever you listen. The economic fallout from Donald Trump's tariffs are everywhere to be seen in Ontario, and the political parties are taking various approaches to facing that challenge.

We thought we'd bring together two economics watchers and get their takes on some of the ideas out there. And with that, we welcome Armin Yalnesian, economist and Atkinson Fellow on the future of workers, and Harry Margulies, the author of several books on taxes and has worked on international tax policy at the request of the United Nations. And we are delighted, Armin, to have you here in Toronto for a change. I almost don't recognize you without your record collection behind you. And Harry, on this program for the first time ever, thanks a lot. Good to meet you and good to have you here. Thanks for inviting me.

I want to start with this and it's going to say, okay, I'm going to take a very open-minded approach to this, and we're just going to power through. Can you imagine, I want to talk tariffs. I want to talk Donald Trump, I want to talk tariffs. Can you imagine that this approach of tariffing the whole world will actually do what the president says it will do, namely, reshore jobs into America, restore the $7 trillion in lost value that companies have just experienced over the past couple of weeks,

and kind of make America great again. Armin. Not the way he's doing it. And in fact, generally speaking, no, is the answer to your question. But if you had decided that your single purpose was reshoring jobs, putting tariffs up and keeping them there, not putting them there and taking them off and putting them there and taking them off, might have reshored some jobs.

It is the uncertainty that has been unleashed that guarantees jobs will not be reshored, the US dollar will continue to fall, stock markets will continue to be volatile, that is meltdown, and have unexpected surges and meltdown again, and more importantly that the US will be plunged into a recession and bring countries like Canada along for the ride. Harry, what do you see? I see that the president is not consistent. On the one hand, he says he puts up tariffs

to get trillions of dollars in. On the other hand, he says it's a negotiating tactic. If he manages to negotiate and we will have no tariffs, we are back where we started without the trillion dollars in extra revenue. Is there a world, though, in which this tariff policy, let's say it becomes more consistent in the days ahead, let's imagine, could it work? Well I

am a free trader to the core and Armin and I probably differ on this because you're an advocate for workers and I'm an advocate for the consumers and so free trade does one thing very well. It brings the cheapest product from anywhere in the world to the consumer. It is that that has brought us so far in the economic standard. When we change that, we do that at a cost. Every consumer is not a worker,

but every worker is a consumer. So if you put up tariffs to protect the worker, it comes at a cost to the consumer, and even to the workers who are also consumers. Armin, you want to come back on that? Yeah. I mean, I would just echo what Harry said. What is the purpose of tariffs?

Is it for reshoring? Is it to raise funds for the tax cuts that he has promised to continue, which would otherwise expire at the end of this year. Is it for negotiating and showing that the U.S. is the power that every country must bend the knee to? Is it about actually destroying a global world order for reasons we cannot yet discern?

It is unclear what the goal is of the tariffs. It certainly is not uniquely to reshore jobs, because he and his people must admit you cannot reshore jobs in the window he is talking about, keeping tariffs on or negotiating. No firm is going to fold up the tent in one place and try and build a multi-billion dollar facility in a country where maybe those

tariffs are gone in a few months. So it is an extraordinarily unclear goal these tariffs are trying to meet because it doesn't even meet the tests of paying for the tax cuts. If the tariffs are put on and they stay on, let's say he collects $700 billion this year. If tariffs really work and jobs are reshoring, every year he'll get less money. But those tax cuts he's trying to fund continue to accelerate because there's more and more people that are going to, you know, by just inflation,

move into those tax brackets. So the math doesn't add up. 100% it doesn't add up. Nothing adds up in this story. It's maddening. Harry, in which case, there's a great debate in the country right now about what our response to these tariffs ought to be. Right? Some people think we've done programs on this.

Some people think we ought to ignore them. Other people think dollar for dollar, go get them. Which camp are you in? I have problems with whatever we do. And the biggest problem I see for Canada is that this happened while there's a campaign for who's going to be prime minister of the country. That in turn meant that both parties have

to look really, really strong. And they make responses that may not be adequate or as they should. If you imagine just for a moment there are two countries and I will take the two blocks of products. One is presented by bread, one is represented by shoes. The terms of trade is 20 loaves of bread for one pair of shoes. They have had this trading for years and years and everybody is happy to have the same currency. So suddenly the shoe countries decide, we want to make

our own bread. So they put on a 25% tariff on the bread. Should the bread country then respond? And the answer is, if they want to make their own population poorer, they should. And if it wouldn't have been a campaign, political campaign going on, maybe an answer like, we'll give it 90 days. And if we haven't reached an agreement, we may put on tariffs. But it is what it is, and politics intervenes. That is a nuanced position, and nuance generally

doesn't play during election campaigns. It does not. Right, getcha. Okay, what do you think our approach ought to be? Well, they did do a 90-day pause. They said $30 billion in reciprocal tariffs and we've got $120 billion in mind, so we're going to add more later on, depending on how you negotiate with us or you don't negotiate with us in good faith.

So I think the issue here for me would be fight back, fight hard. The man is a bully and he blinks and we have seen that in spades. So I think the response is going to be pain for consumers. That pain is not going to be obviated by any strategy anybody takes. Everything is now a world of pain. Recessions are inevitable, Price hikes are inevitable. Usually you don't have these two things holding hands. Inflation and higher unemployment don't usually hold hands together. But these policies guarantee that people will lose jobs and pay higher prices.

And there is no end in sight to it. So fight, fight, fight. Can I just say about fight, fight, fight. You know, we now have a prime minister who says everything is on the table. And I think it's good to remember we are one-tenth of the US economy. How big is the table? How big is the table? Yeah.

Okay. Having said that, you can't in the middle of an election campaign just say, well, we're going to think about this for 30 days and maybe, you know, maybe we won't do anything unless you want to lose, right? I'm just noting reality. And the campaign has come in between, and it's unfortunate. I mean, the UK, for instance, paused for a longer time, not having a campaign going on right now. They have a good majority in the parliament.

And there would have been other responses. And I would almost bet you there would have been other responses from the both contenders for winning if there wouldn't have been an election. So I'm not issuing any condemnation of what they said or what they did. And I'm just looking at reality as it is. I don't have to like the reality, but it still is what it is. I don't have to like the reality, but it still is what it is. Do you think the tariffs are an attempt by Trump to obviate the need to bring in a national sales tax, which of course he would never do?

Number one, it might take a lot of political courage and, you know, that's on short supply these days. But could the money coming in from tariffs do for America what a national sales tax would do, but they don't want to do that? First of all, I don't have any idea what is happening inside of Donald Trump's mind, you know, in five minutes from now, let alone what he's done in the past. Secondly, if tariffs are maintained and they achieve the goal he says he wants for reshoring, the revenue you will get from it will fall. So it can't replace a sales tax.

Whereas the need for tax cuts to be extended indefinitely or at least another term or whatever it is that he's planning to do after they're expiry at the end of this year, the need for money to fuel those tax cuts will rise because more people will be in that category. So you've got these two lines moving in opposite directions. The tariffs are not a replacement for the tax cuts. The tariffs are not, oh, and by the way, they're going to be paying for those tax cuts

for the rich people, but it's going to be the poor people that are going to lose their jobs. So they're going to lose revenues in another place as well through income taxes in the coming months because he has triggered a recession. Harry, what's your view on whether or not the tariffs can do what a national sales tax might have done? The answer is no. And several reasons. One and the most obvious reason is a national sales tax is on every product.

So it's neutral in the economy. This is geared to preventing imports in the belief that it will create more jobs at home. Just on that alone, I read somewhere that an iPhone that cost $1,000 to make in China with the tariffs would cost $2,000, but it might cost $3,000 to make in the US. So just look at that for a moment and ask yourself, is it going to work? What might work, and I agree with you, this takes political courage and there may be constitutional issues, a VAT, a GST might work. If you have a 25% VAT in the US, it would get to close to a trillion dollars in income. And that would be neutral, would also take away Trump's complaining about Europeans having VATs and Canada having that, because it's neutral and his isn't.

It is directed and it creates a great havoc in the economy. Would you be in favor of a national sales tax, a VAT type tax in the United States? It would be much better than this and it would still be neutral and it would do what he wants to do, namely bring in that billion. You could use them then to lower taxes for just about most of the lower income earn. They would only pay the VAT. You could also give a check every month to the ones who are poorest off so they get neutralized.

And then it's an easier tax system, much easier. Armin, what's your view on that? Well, my view is that the point of raising a trillion dollars is not to help the poor. The point is to get the poor to give money to the rich for their tax cuts. And the tax cuts that he's looking to give money to the rich for their tax cuts. And the tax cuts that he's looking to extend beyond the end of 2026, 2025, absolutely favors

the richest the most and actually sees the poorest paying more under the existing system that he's trying to protect. So it would be the poor paying 25% on everything that they buy to be able to give the rich tax cuts. Plus they get to pay more in income taxes. It's like it's a political no-sell. It might be neutral but it's not possible. Well I think the idea about fairness and we'll probably come back to that when it comes to Ken. I would like to have a level of fairness as a filter on everything we say.

Fairness is predicated on what our beliefs are. So if you are many advocate for workers, I believe that you will find fairness in whatever is needed to get that promoted. It isn't necessarily so that what somebody believes is fairness is best for productivity and is best for the economy. And we may have to solve one problem at a time, but I'm sure we'll get back to that. Well, we're here right now. Why don't we get into that?

What is your concern about what current policy is doing on the issue of fairness and to whom? So the richest in America pay almost all the taxes, and the richest have the ability to move their money out of a country, and the same goes for Canada, by the way, and move themselves with the money. So I have a story and I'd like to tell exaggerated examples that would sort of help explain this. Five people come to lunch every day, one is extremely well off, there's one below him that is upper middle class, two below that are lower middle class and one that doesn't have a job, they decide,

for a long time, I've done this for three years now, that the richest pays 50% of the bill, the two below him pay 10% each, 20% each, and the one below him pays 10% and the lowest one pays nothing. So what happens is that the three in the bottom who pay 10 and 10, they decide to take a vote and decide that he should pay 70 percent because the ones at the bottom and the ones who are next to the bottom, the two times 10 percent, feel that they are not that much better off. And what happens is he stops coming to lunch. And so there is an issue about what will they produce and what can we really do about them. My take is very simply there are two categories that really don't pay tax in a society, the poorest

and the richest. The richest because it's scary when they leave and the poorest because they don't have anything to pay with. This is a nice parable about the progressive tax system but does it do you agree with his final point which is if you tax the rich far too much they eventually get up and stop coming to lunch. The rich have been saying this since the Second World War. The rich has been saying this for as long as I have been an economist doing fiscal analysis in Canada which is way too long to discuss.

They keep promising that they're going to leave, but they don't. How can we miss them if they don't go? Right? So it has been an issue. You are absolutely correct. That is the logic that is presented. You tax us too much and we will go. We tax them too much and they stop coming. That just hasn't been the case because taxes isn't the only thing that keeps somebody in a country.

And if the rules of the game are if you live here you pay taxes, people are willing to play by the rules because taxes are for corporations or for rich people fall somewhere around the seventh, eighth, ninth reason to be located in a place. They are important. They're not irrelevant, but they're not the most important things. Now you do raise the important issue that could you actually tax the corporations so much that they choose to leave?

Welcome to Donald Trump's tariffs. That is exactly what is going on. And this guy is a free marketeer that loves corporations. He's trying to tax corporations into coming to the United States. They might shut down shop here because it's too expensive to ship to the United States. But they will not arrive in the United States.

So I think you've got to be really clear why you are doing what you're doing with taxes and what you think you're going to get out of it when you do it. Harry, are you adequately taking into account the fact that the guy who they now want to have play 70% of the lunch may really love the company of the people that he's with and he's prepared to pay the 70% to enjoy their company. So I am going to go by reality. I have worked as an international tax advisor in Sweden. I have seen billions upon billions upon billions leave for tax reasons

and come back now that Sweden is a tax haven for the rich. And I want to add to that that it is not so that capital is the enemy of the worker. Productivity comes from giving a lot of capital, investing it for the worker to make more. And one of Canada's biggest problems is if you're advising somebody in Canada, you want to start a company here, but you want to just invest in US dollars and let the Canadian dollar fall and make a gain. It's sort of there has to be a complete change in what we are doing in this country to be able to withstand the international influence. I have been party to moving people out of Sweden and also moving

billionaires back to Sweden and they have the best of times in Sweden. You wouldn't believe, compared to Canada, how good it is in Sweden. So what's your advice on billionaires coming to Canada? Would you advise them to do so? Well, you know, they may have, like Armin just says, many other reasons to come here. They do get one good thing. If they come from abroad, they get a step up for all their assets and they don't have to pay tax when they come here, other than when they leave again or when they die

or when they sell an asset. But apart from that, they can come here and invest their money abroad. They could live in other countries that has much cheaper tax systems for them or much easier to create capital. Let me just take Sweden for example. I know I'm a bit long, Normany. You said before you might have been a bit long. Here's what happens. In Sweden you can put down billions upon billions in a tax-free savings account. You get to pay about 1%, below 1% annually for the privilege. If you for

over 10 years double your money, it's still tax free, you take it out, you pay the government a fee every year, the government knows what they're getting. So is that conducive to savings? Yes. Does Sweden have higher productivity than Canada? Yes. Did people leave for tax reasons? Yes.

And did they come back for tax reasons? Yes. Okay, Armin, your turn. In 2009, January of 2009, in the middle of the global financial crisis, the then Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, passed a piece of legislation and had implemented a tax-free savings account plan that was identical to the tax-free savings account plan that George Bush had tried to pass three times in the United States and did not get through because the pushback was

it was too generous to rich people. We have had that program in place for what is that now 16 years and the people that benefit the most from it are the ones that have maxed out their registered retirement savings plans, their registered education savings, they've maxed out all their registered savings plans, which means that they don't pay taxes today until they pull the money out of it down the road. And the tax-free savings account has ballooned for people that can sock away their maximum contributions. We have everything that you're talking about.

Canada is in fact now one of the tax havens, one of the top tax havens in the world. We have lower tax rates than for many things in the United States, including corporations and including the highest paying people. And we tried to introduce capital gains inclusion rates by bumping them up, not because we were asking individuals to pay more in capital gains, but we were asking more corporations that are flippers, that were buying Canadian assets, and then flipping them for a capital gain.

We were trying to prevent that. And for some reason, anybody raising any taxes right now has become some kind of toxic suggestion whereas what we are seeing is a galloping acceleration of inequality. So you want to talk about fairness, let's talk instead about inequality which in and of itself is destabilizing to economic production. I want to seize on that policy item that you just brought up there because that has been it certainly would have would have been an issue in this campaign

had Mark Carney not taken the decision that he took, which was to say the previous Trudeau government, Christia Freeland as the finance minister, wanted to increase the inclusion rate of the capital games tax that the government said would bring in $19 billion to help pay for pharma care and denticare and social housing policies and more social programs etc. The Conservatives opposed it, Mark Carney has now stood down on it.

He has said that that increase will not take place and the Conservatives and Liberals now have the same position on it. Harry, to you first, which is the correct position? The Trudeau government's original position or the Carney government's current position? The Trudeau government's original position or the current government's current position? My point is somewhat more complicated and an easy answer to that very complicated question. I'll give you another fable here and that is about how capital gains and capital gains tax and productivity work together. So I find a seed, I plant it, cost me nothing, I make an apple tree, and the apple tree produces 100 apples a year.

And I'm very happy with that. You come along and say, listen, I want to buy your apple tree. And you know that you can produce 200 apples per year. So if you get the tree, you will pay more tax, you will have more income, and have a better contribution to GDP, the gross domestic product, than I will have. Because I'm doing 200 apples, you're only doing 100. But what happens is we have raised the tax on capital gains so that when I sell the asset, the tree, I pay 60% in tax.

Let's say that it's an exaggerated example. It sure is. I know, but I'm just a mate for making them point. What happens is I will not sell because I'll be left with 400, which gives me 40 apples when I reinvest. Is it fair that I don't sell it? Is it fair that you don't get to produce more for society? And so here is the issue about when you think that you can get fairness as a point. Fairness is in the

mind of the beholder. What you advocate for directs what you think is fair. And if you are for free trade, I would say ask a worker would he like to be living in a fairer more equitable society? Yes. Would you mind having three trillionaires created as neighbors but your standard of living doubles? Yes. So it's all what you are asking and we have proven that capitalism does it. There's an enormous discrepancy between the best of and the poorest of. But I'm inferring from your parable that you think that Carney's decision to put things back the way they were is the way to go.

It's probably the way to go. And we may even want to go just to prove the point that Canada wants to because he now says, by the way, Carney, he's into growing Canada, maybe even lowering capital gains in tax. Armin, your view on that. So I won't use your parable, but I will use your perspective, which is for, it's a micro perspective. It's one company, it's my neighbor, so on and so forth.

This capital gains inclusion rate being raised by a very small amount will have resulted in $19 billion over five years. Let's say that is less than 1% of the revenue. Like it is a very small amount of the revenue that is going to be needed to deal with aging populations, aging infrastructure, restructuring an economy so it can grow because we needed to unscramble it

from the United States. Nobody wants to raise taxes. Cool. But we are going to have absolute demands for at the macro level the things we are going to have to do to take care of an aging population, to take care of the smallest working age cohort we have seen since the 1950s, except both mom and dad are working. So who's taking care of the kids? We're going to need more paid for care from cradle to grave. And for people to not get sicker quicker,

we're going to need to actually spend more on that. Plus we are going to be in a period of, yes, we want to grow, but we can't grow with the United States. So how are we going to grow? We're going to spend, spend, spend, but we can't raise taxes. How are you going to square that math? Well, are we borrowing money? And I know that is one of your propositions to...

Do we get to that later on? We get to that later on. You said, yeah, OK. This is not easy. And so, no, no, it's not easy for the following reason. Is every generation going to skip on to the next generation And so, no, no, it's not easy for the following reason. Is every generation going to skip on to the next generation by borrowing money to keep a standard of living we cannot afford?

And so we vote in politicians who say to us, we'll buy you off with what we borrow, and our successors will have to take it back from their children and grandchildren. But she's actually saying we've got to pay our own way more now as opposed to borrowing money. Why are we cutting taxes when we should probably be raising them? Except for some reason, raising taxes is a goofy idea and everybody should cut every tax. Cut carbon taxes, cut capital gains taxes, cut personal income taxes, cut fees for this,

that and the other. Like that's the flavor of the moment but it is so incredibly myopic. So you don't want to pass a debt on to your kids? Pay more in taxes, Harry. OK. That's your view. I'm thinking that if we could do what is most important for Canada, is raising productivity and getting out of the mess

we are now in because of the USA, which is not as easy as it looks, this could be a lot worse than anybody imagines. Okay, would you agree that a basic form of productivity is people don't get sick as quickly or get the care that they need when they need it, because we've got to have all hands on deck in an era where you've got the smallest working age population, and to be able to do that you have to actually spend more money. So you talk about productivity as if it's an individual businesses problem, or an individual sectors problem.

It is an all of society problem at the moment. And if we do not attend to the needs of people to have paid care when they need it, we are going to see flagging productivity. Why don't you join my parade on that one? Well, I think that the fairness issue may come in the way. You want to protect the worker. I want to see that the consumer gets the best cheapest products. I don't want to see any customs barriers in any way because that doesn't bring what we

want. And if we cared for once decide to grow the economy, whatever it takes, if it takes zero capital gains tax, I would be for that. Not saying it does. I'm just saying I would be for anything that brings higher growth to Canada. Right now we're in a position where we don't know where we're going. We have been in Canada for the longest time, a subdivision to American, let's say car manufacturer, if the Americans really American, let's say, car manufacture.

If the Americans really don't buy our cars, where do we think we're going to send them? Does Korea ever buy our cars or will Europe? We have a precedent for this. Finland. 1991, Soviet Union collapsed. They lost a big chunk of the export market and they went through a steel bath. The only place in the world where I ever heard about this was they decided to even discuss what was called an internal devaluation, internal, which meant lowering wages to survive. We are in really dire times. We may never produce a car to be sold anywhere than domestically.

There's a lot of capacity in the United States, they could take it there, and we want to mechanize everywhere. In 10 years, nothing of this matters. And productivity, again, is when you use a lot of capital. And Canada needs capital formation to increase productivity. We don't have that. As again, I say, if you're rich here in Canada,

you place your money in the United States or somewhere else, Canada doesn't benefit. You gave a hint that we were going to discuss what Armin is referring to as victory bonds, and actually you wrote an op-ed about this a couple of weeks ago in the Toronto Star. Can we bring this picture up now, Sheldon? Those viewers of ours or listeners of a certain age will remember that during World War II, yes, help finish the job by victory bonds. And the public of Canada purchased bonds, in other words, loan money to the government of Canada to help prosecute and win a war.

And you'd like to bring that back now? Do I read that right? Well, if we can't raise taxes and we need more money, you know, to do the things that we need to do to prevent more economic decline that is absolutely on the menu right now. Today, we are looking at an inevitable recession. The only question is how deep and how long.

And depending on who we elect, we will see how deep and how long. But we will need more public spending to disentangle, to unscramble the egg that we have made with the United States, and to be able to deliver the services for an aging population and a shrinking working age cohort that needs help. What rate of interest would the government have to pay to make these victory bonds desirable? Yeah so it historically it was a 5% guaranteed rate tax-free. You could buy an annuity of five years, 10 years,

15 years. You could buy in a smaller denomination as $50. It's a lot of money these days. You could, children could even buy in the Second World War. They sold stamps and you could buy one stamp for 25 bucks, roughly the equivalent of $5 today. When you bought $4 worth of stamps, you got a $5 bomb. That's a tidy 25% return. And it was all done to kind of capture the spirit that we could fight and win.

And I have in my lifetime not seen the spirit that is unifying Canada right now in response to Mr. Trump's unprovoked, unfair, talk about unfair, tariff war with us. So if you can't raise taxes but people want to do more than just buy Canadian, why don't we save Canadian? Our savings rate, yes our household indebtedness rate is near record highs, but our savings rate in aggregate across the country is at rates last seen in 1996 and people really do want to do more than just buy Canadian. They want to not only save Canadian, they want to save Canada. They want to save our production capacity,

our industrial capacity, our capacity to help one another. So why aren't we asking them, would you like a guaranteed return? It might not be 5%. The PBO just put out something last week that said- Parliamentary Budget Office. The Parliamentary Budget Officer was asked by the Green Party, how much would we have to pay citizens if we gave them a 5% guaranteed return

paid out annually for a 10-year bond? And the answer was somewhere between $110 and $150 million a year. It's chump change in a revenue in a sorry it's chump change in the order of the government but it is more expensive than raising the money elsewhere. The question is does is there a price on raising the patriotism and the feeling that we're doing something together? And wouldn't that help the government that is in charge? What do you think Harry?

Well, Armin, you've done a lot of work on this, so I am not going to directly at it. I'm going to go a little indirectly. If we replace the name Victory Bond by increased government borrowing, suddenly doesn't sound equally good. That's what it is. It's increased government borrowing. And let's then take the equality issue into the place. Who gains most from the tax-free interest?

The richest. Who can invest? Not the poorest, only the ones who have money to spare. So it is choosing one thing and you want some fairness for the worker and it also depends and I don't know the answer to this, what is the money going to be used for? Do we think we're going to save all the workers to do all the work all the time or do we really going to use them for restructuring the economy entirely? That is probably what we need.

Now we have an America we cannot trust, We cannot unsee what we have seen. And Russia says they're going to have a bigger presence in the Arctic. And what are we going to do? We are no longer a safe sandwich between Alaska and mainland the USA. So this can come at a much higher cost, become much worse than we have anticipated. And you may be right. I just saying everything comes at a cost. Can I just can I respond to Harry I couldn't agree with you more when we floated the victory bombs in the Second World War we raised

more from the bonds in the first year than they raised from raising income taxes because even though people were paying more in taxes they wanted to win the war and it was there wasn't a question, what are we putting money towards? We want to win this war. And the way they did the marketing, Harry, was that even children could participate. So you can set up a structure where everybody is in it,

even for a little bit. Our strength, we outpaced the Americans with their victory bonds because we had it through payroll. And then workers in every workplace across the country, we had a 97% participation rate through workplaces. So we raised money to fight a war. The question is, what would we be raising? To your point, what would we be raising the money for now?

What's the victory we're trying to achieve? Is it to have our own industrial strategy, our economic independence? Is it to prepare for what appears to be an inevitable war, like an actual military war? Because people are starting to rattle their sabres in a way that I haven't seen in my lifetime. So I don't know what it is for and what it is for is absolutely key to why we would raise these funds. But you do agree, Armin, that if you give out a 5% victory bond, we have a couple of percentage points of spending

that the government could borrow cheaper. A five-year government bond today would pay just under 3% and a 10-year just above 3%. So we're giving away 2%. The government didn't have to call it a victory bond and just borrow the money on the market cheaper. And so all of this, I'm just saying... the government didn't have to call it victory bond and just borrow the money on the market cheaper. And so all of this, I'm just saying...

I hate to interrupt this because this is going so swimmingly, but we're a plum out of time. So we have to get you two back because I love the way that you are civilly disagreeing with one another. It makes for a great discussion. Armin Yelizian, Harry Margulies, thanks for this and do come back. Thank you for having us. Thank you.