Episode 124: Tariffs, Taxes, and Their International Ramifications
Jeff Rathke
President of AGI
Jeffrey Rathke is the President of the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at the Johns Hopkins University in Washington, DC.
Prior to joining AICGS, Jeff was a senior fellow and deputy director of the Europe Program at CSIS, where his work focused on transatlantic relations and U.S. security and defense policy. Jeff joined CSIS in 2015 from the State Department, after a 24-year career as a Foreign Service Officer, dedicated primarily to U.S. relations with Europe. He was director of the State Department Press Office from 2014 to 2015, briefing the State Department press corps and managing the Department's engagement with U.S. print and electronic media. Jeff led the political section of the U.S. Embassy in Kuala Lumpur from 2011 to 2014. Prior to that, he was deputy chief of staff to the NATO Secretary General in Brussels. He also served in Berlin as minister-counselor for political affairs (2006–2009), his second tour of duty in Germany. His Washington assignments have included deputy director of the Office of European Security and Political Affairs and duty officer in the White House Situation Room and State Department Operations Center.
Mr. Rathke was a Weinberg Fellow at Princeton University (2003–2004), winning the Master’s in Public Policy Prize. He also served at U.S. Embassies in Dublin, Moscow, and Riga, which he helped open after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Mr. Rathke has been awarded national honors by Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, as well as several State Department awards. He holds an M.P.P. degree from Princeton University and B.A. and B.S. degrees from Cornell University. He speaks German, Russian, and Latvian.
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Kimberly Clausing
University of California Los Angeles
Kimberly Clausing holds the Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law, and she is a nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics. During the first part of the Biden administration, Dr. Clausing was the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Tax Analysis in the U.S. Department of the Treasury, serving as the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy.
Professor Clausing’s research examines how government decisions and corporate behavior interplay in the global economy. She has published numerous articles on taxation, climate policy, and international trade, and she is the author of Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital (Harvard University Press, 2019).
Dr. Clausing is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. She has testified before the U.S. Congress on many occasions, and she has received two Fulbright Research awards as well as many external research grants. Professor Clausing received her PhD in economics from Harvard University in 1996.
Peter S. Rashish
Vice President; Director, Geoeconomics Program
Peter S. Rashish, who counts over 30 years of experience counseling corporations, think tanks, foundations, and international organizations on transatlantic trade and economic strategy, is Vice President and Director of the Geoeconomics Program at AICGS. He also writes The Wider Atlantic blog.
Mr. Rashish has served as Vice President for Europe and Eurasia at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he spearheaded the Chamber’s advocacy ahead of the launch of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership. Previously, Mr. Rashish was a Senior Advisor for Europe at McLarty Associates, Executive Vice President of the European Institute, and a staff member and consultant at the International Energy Agency, the World Bank, UNCTAD, the Atlantic Council, the Bertelsmann Foundation, and the German Marshall Fund.
Mr. Rashish has testified before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on International Monetary Policy and Trade and the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia and has advised three U.S. presidential campaigns. He has been a featured speaker at the Munich Security Conference, the Aspen Ideas Festival, and the Salzburg Global Seminar and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Jean Monnet Institute in Paris and a Senior Advisor to the European Policy Centre in Brussels. His commentaries have been published in The New York Times, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Policy, and The National Interest, and he has appeared on PBS, CNBC, CNN, NPR, and the BBC.
He earned a BA from Harvard College and an MPhil in international relations from Oxford University. He speaks French, German, Italian, and Spanish.
The Trump administration has taken sweeping actions on tariffs, with more scheduled to be imposed in April. On this episode of The Zeitgeist, Kim Clausing explains the administration’s approach to tariffs and their role in wider economic policy. She also discusses whether value-added taxes or digital services taxes constitute trade barriers and how these may affect trade relations between the European Union and the United States.
Host
Jeff Rathke, President, AGI
Guests
Kimberly Clausing, Eric M. Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law
Peter Rashish, Vice President and Director, Geoeconomics Program, AGI
Transcript
Jeff Rathke
Welcome all of the listeners of The Zeitgeist; we’re glad to have you with us today. We are especially glad to have Kim Clausing with us. Hello, Kim.
Kimberly Clausing
Hello, nice to be here.
Jeff Rathke
Where are we reaching you?
Kimberly Clausing
In Los Angeles.
Jeff Rathke
Kim Clausing is the Eric Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, and she also previously was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Treasury and the lead economist in the Office of Tax Policy. So, somebody who knows taxes—and I bet tariffs—pretty well. We are glad to have her with us today to talk about taxes and tariffs. I am also joined by my colleague, AGI Vice President Peter Rashish. Peter, hello.
Peter Rashish
Jeff, hello. Kim, hello. Good to be with you both.
Jeff Rathke
Let’s just dive right into it. We are recording on the 19th of March, 2025. I say that because things move quickly, and you never know what announcements might come up today, tomorrow, or in a few days from now. Kim, if we look at the Trump administration’s tariff actions thus far, there are a lot of them. They are switched on and switched back off again in some cases. What stands out to you about the approach to tariffs in the Trump administration, especially compared to the way that the Biden administration also used tariffs?
Kimberly Clausing
Yes, that’s an excellent question. And I think we could also usefully contrast this Trump administration from the prior Trump administration. The prior Trump administration levied tariffs mostly on China. And if you look at the quantity of trade relative to all of our trade, it was about 10 percent of our trade, it wasn’t all of the trade. Biden continued many of those tariffs and added just a tiny bit more, not a lot more, about 18 billion out of 3 trillion of traded goods in certain strategic sectors with respect to China.
And then we get into the second Trump administration, and their interest in tariffs is far broader. They’re interested in tariffing virtually every country in the world, which he aspired to do during the campaign. He mentioned the possibility of a 10 to 20 percent tariff on every country in the world, and, in the early days of his administration, he began by levying tariffs—or at least threatening to levy tariffs—on Canada and Mexico. And that’s an interesting and peculiar choice because those are our two closest trading partners, both geographically and in terms of size. And they are also countries where we have a free trade agreement already and one that was just recently renegotiated by President Trump. I point to that in part as a bellwether for how broadly this Trump administration intends to use tariffs. If they’re starting with Canada and Mexico, we can expect them to include the entire world. And then we’re talking about $3.1 trillion in trade, an amount that’s ten times the size of the first Trump administration tariffs. So a much bigger set of tariffs and also an expanded role of what he expects tariffs to do, less emphasis on strategy vis-a-vis China, much more emphasis on tariffs as fiscal policy, as something that can raise revenue, that can reorient the economy, that can do much broader and bigger aims than what he was aiming for the first time around.
Peter Rashish
Kim, we’ve seen several rationales for the administration’s tariffs. I’m not sure I’ve got them all, but among them at least I can think I see reshoring industry to the U.S., raising revenue, non-economic issues like immigration, and eliminating bilateral trade deficits. Do you think this multi-pronged approach can be effective? And I ask that because the Dutch economist Jan Tinbergen is famous for his rule, the Tinbergen rule, that you should only use one economic policy instrument for one policy goal. That doesn’t seem to be the Trump administration’s approach.
Kimberly Clausing
I agree, and I think it’s easy to look at what they’re doing and be somewhat bewildered because there’s so many different goals they’re trying to reach with this one instrument. In fact, there’s inherent contradictions between the goals. So as one example, the most bullish proponents of the Trumpian tariff approach will say, “oh, well, this isn’t really going to lead to an isolationist United States, we’re merely using these as a negotiation tool to get what we want from foreign partners.” If you take that at face value, then the hope is that Trump would be a good negotiator, we’d get what we wanted, and we wouldn’t levy the tariffs at all. And if you don’t levy the tariffs at all because you’ve achieved your negotiation goals, then you raise no revenue and you don’t change the price signals that are affecting U.S. production and consumption. I don’t think that’s ultimately what they’re going for. I think they want to point to tariffs as a revenue source, in part because they’ve got this big fiscal debate coming up about extending a bunch of the Trump tax cuts that were enacted but that expire shortly. And they also have a bunch of new tax cuts they want to do, so they want to point to some revenue source. But at the same time, you’re not going to get the revenue if tariffs are just a negotiating tool. And similarly, you’re not going to get the revenue if we just end up producing the things that we were going to import anyway. If you’re really trying to reorient production and displace imports, that implies that imports are shrinking. So there’s also a tension between how much revenue you get and how much you reorient production. A lot of contradictions and confusions in the set of goals that they’re trying to achieve here.
Peter Rashish
Right. Why don’t we get into the role of tariffs as revenue raisers, as you were speaking about? I know you’ve done a lot of work on this issue. How would you compare tariffs to other options, for example, like the income tax, as a way to raise funds for the federal government?
Kimberly Clausing
One thing that I think is underappreciated in this debate is how much tariffs are really intended to displace the income tax. We see this directly with this linkage between shrinking the income tax, which the president has made both rhetorically and legislatively in his first term while requiring more revenue to come in from tariffs. At times, the president will assert that that’s shifting the burden to foreigners. I think more than 99 percent of economists would disagree with that. I think most economists feel that tariffs will mostly burden domestic consumers here in the United States. But there are two really distinctive things about tariffs as fiscal policy, in contrast to the income tax. One is the burden and who pays the tax and the second is the inefficiency associated with the tax.
Let’s start with the burden. With the burden, tariffs fall disproportionately on those lower in the income scale. And that’s for the simple reason that poor or middle-class Americans will consume almost all of their income each month and each year, whereas those at the top can afford to save a lot of their income. So if a rich person saves 50 percent of their income, they might hope that eventually when they get around to spending that in their retirement, the tariffs are long gone by then and they will have the full purchasing power of their savings. But for somebody who’s spending paycheck to paycheck, they’re going to see right away the things that they’re buying are more expensive, and that’s going to hurt their real income or their purchasing power of what their wages will buy. If you compare those burdens to what we see from the income tax, the income tax is falling disproportionately on those at the top of the distribution. These Trump income tax cuts will mostly help the well-off, whereas the tariff increases will mostly hurt those lower in the income distribution. There’s a big fiscal switch here in terms of who pays for the cost of government.
But the second reason that one might worry about tariffs as fiscal policy is they’re inherently quite distortionary. And what I mean by distortionary is that they encourage us to make things that we’re not good at, and they displace our productive efforts away from those things that we are good at. To take an example, if we put on a bunch of tariffs, we’ll see that U.S. production supply chains get hit, much like what happened in COVID by higher costs because the majority of our imports are actually intermediate goods. So U.S. production will get more difficult for things like cars, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, and tech, consumer electronics and other electronics. You take all those goods and you make it harder to produce them in the United States, you’re creating new inefficiencies and new disruptions to the workers in those industries. You’re also hurting the export sector directly in two ways. One, exports need imports as intermediate goods, but two, countries don’t take these tariff policies of the Trump administration lying down. They often enact their own retaliation in the form of new tariffs on U.S. export goods. So at the same time that we’re introducing all this disruption, Boeing is finding its plane sales might be lower because trading partners worry or deliberately target U.S. exports as a response to the Trump administration’s tariffs. So it’s shrinking our export sector and moving the allocation of production toward things we’re not good at and causing a lot of disruption at the same time. The income tax doesn’t really do that. We’ve had it for a long time. It’s paid by people who are relatively well off on average, and it’s minimally disruptive. Of course it has its own distortion effects too, but when we compare that to what a tariff is doing, they’re much more minor.
Jeff Rathke
Could I jump in there, Kim? You mentioned two factors, the the regressive nature of tariffs as opposed to an income tax and also the distortionary effect. It seems there’s also another aspect and that is the volume, the size of revenue generation that you would need if you wanted to replace in substantial measure the income tax, the level of tariffs we would be talking about would be enormous, right?
Kimberly Clausing
Yes. And you couldn’t really replace the income tax. The income tax falls on a tax basis so much bigger that even at relatively modest income tax rates, which most Americans pay relatively modest income taxes, you can generate a lot of revenue from the income tax.
Tariffs, the tax base is much smaller, and you’d have to jack up tariff rates really high to get serious amounts of revenue. And when you get to tariff rates that high, you’re going to have crippling effects on economic growth, which is going to hurt revenue in other respects. But I did some work with Maury Obstfeld, and we concluded that the revenue maximizing tariff might be in the neighborhood of 50 percent. And even if you ignore the growth effects that I just referenced, that’s only going to replace about 40 percent of the income tax, not much more than that. And so you’re still going to need the income tax, but tariffs are also going to at those levels create just create havoc with the economy. I think it would be a very unwise move to try to replace that much of the income tax with tariffs. And in general, tariffs are better used for more narrow and strategic aims than this across-the-board version because of all these distortions and regressivity that they introduce. Economies that rely on tariffs heavily, on average, tend to grow more slowly and have less dynamic economies, and we see that both throughout history and across countries that have tried this experiment.
Peter Rashish
Kim, there’s also an international dimension that we’re seeing to the White House’s focus on tax as a part of its trade policies, and one of those is the European and other foreign use of the value-added tax, or the VAT, instead of the sales tax, like the one we use here in the U.S. Do you think the differences between a VAT and a sales tax make it a legitimate target of U.S. trade policy, or perhaps to put it more succinctly, is the VAT a tariff?
Kimberly Clausing
The VAT is most definitely not a tariff, and there’s widespread economic consensus on that. A VAT is just a way to tax consumption, and it’s a pretty efficient way to tax consumption in part because you rely on different tax collection layers to self-enforce, and that’s why it’s called a value-added tax, which might be a little bit too detailed for this podcast.
One way to see that it’s not a tariff is to just simply note that a VAT is going to treat domestic production exactly the same as foreign production. If you sell a toaster in Germany or Canada or Japan, or some country that has a VAT and that toaster is made in those countries, it will face a consumption tax. Whereas if you send a toaster over to a VAT country, it, too, will face a consumption tax. All you’re doing is just leveling the playing field between domestic production and foreign production by subjecting them all to the exact same tax and the same is true with U.S. sales taxes. I pay a sales tax here in California when I buy California wine. And that California wine generates a 9.5 percent sales tax at my store. If I buy French wine, that also generates a 9.5 percent sales tax in the store; the same is true for value-added tax. It’s really just treating domestic and foreign production the same. I think the reason the Trump administration is trying to pretend that the value-added tax is more akin to a tariff is they want an excuse, albeit a poorly thought-out excuse, to apply tariffs more broadly, to claim that these things that foreign countries are doing are discriminatory or unfair, even when that’s not true. Because the president doesn’t have the authority, Congress does, to levy tariffs broadly. It only has these exceptional authorities for things like unfair trade practices or emergencies. He’s trying to lean on the little bit of authority that the president has, but he has to make, or the administration has to make, these highly questionable arguments about how that works in order to invoke that authority.
Peter Rashish
Would it be a little bit legitimate to see it as a non-tariff trade barrier or even not?
Kimberly Clausing
It’s not a trade barrier at all. Countries that are imposing VATs are simply trying to tax all the consumption the same. It’s no more a trade barrier to international trade than it is to domestic trade. Make a toaster in Germany, you have to pay a VAT. You make a toaster in the United States, you send it to Germany, you have to pay a VAT. It’s identical treatment.
Jeff Rathke
To follow that up, you mentioned the authorities that the president has, and those tend to relate to unfair trade practices or emergencies. Are these justiciable in the sense that if there were an imposition of a tariff on the allegation that a VAT was unfair, what recourse would an importer have, for example?
Kimberly Clausing
I think there are legal recourses that they could take to challenge the use of that authority, and a dispassionate judicial system should conclude that the authority wasn’t sufficient to back the administration’s tariff proposals. I think one challenge in this area is Congress. Congress really has the authority but has been very reluctant to assert its own authority. They seem quite happy to give up power to the executive branch, and I think traditionally the damage from doing so was relatively minor because the executive branch would use tariffs in these more narrow instances for national security reasons, for emergency reasons, due to strategic concerns about particular small issues where trade practices might have been unfair abroad. But this broad carte blanche use that we’re seeing now really does directly challenge congressional authority. There have been some legislative attempts by Congresswoman DelBene and Congressman Beyer, of Washington and Virginia states respectively, to try to put out bills that would restrict the ability of the president to use these actions too broadly, and in a way, those bills should be unnecessary because the authorities are already pretty well-defined. But this is an attempt for Congress to state more explicitly, listen, we have the power of the purse, and we intend to use it and we don’t want to give up our power.
Hopefully, if the tariffs do proceed and they are as damaging as everyone thinks, Congress will work up the gumption to do something about this. One problem with lawsuits, as you may know from just life experience, is that they take a really long time. And while you’re waiting for the resolution, a lot of damage can be done. One hopes that Congress will rise to the occasion eventually.
Jeff Rathke
“Hopes” and “eventually” are the two operative words I take from that answer.
Kimberly Clausing
Indeed.
Jeff Rathke
To switch gears a little bit, because there’s another aspect of fiscal policy that we’ve heard from the administration and sometimes in direct reference to Europe and that is digital sales taxes. There are digital sales taxes in some European countries, also in Canada, and these affect of course U.S. tech firms—not exclusively U.S. tech firms—but they would also be captured by this. What is the concern that the Trump administration might legitimately have about digital sales taxes?
Kimberly Clausing
As you mentioned in the intro, I also served in the Biden administration in the early years in Treasury. And one thing I noticed during my service is how bipartisan the animosity is toward digital sales taxes. I kind of scratched my head about that a little bit because in a way, it seems like countries do have sovereign authority to tax any good that they might want to tax, like we could tax cigarettes, and we do. We tax gasoline. We tax wine. And when we tax those kinds of products, it certainly has disparate impacts, right? By taxing wine, we hurt the French and the Italians and the Australians more than we hurt the Japanese and the Germans and the Russians, right? Just because of where wine production is. When other countries undertake their sovereign authority to tax a particular good, and it happens to be that the U.S. firms disproportionately produce that good, it may feel to us like it’s discriminatory, but it isn’t really. If there were a European digital sales company—there are some; Spotify, I believe, is European—they would fall under the purview of that law as well. Nonetheless, I think members of Congress and, in general, in both parties, are somewhat skeptical of this instrument, in part because they hear a lot of complaints from their constituents at home, some of whom are tech executives and tech representatives who say, “listen, this doesn’t seem fair because this is targeting U.S. firms disproportionately.” One thing that we attempted to do in the Biden administration was resolve some of these disputes by resettling some of the rules of international taxation through an international tax agreement that Secretary Yellen helped negotiate alongside her peers. Many other countries have continued to adopt that agreement. The United States has not. If the United States really were serious about cooperating with other countries on these intra-jurisdictional tax matters, it would have to recognize that that they have sovereignty, too. Just like we tax foreign firms that operate in the United States, foreign countries have the right to tax U.S. firms that operate there. Sometimes there’s this confusion among U.S. policymakers where they focus only on, “it doesn’t seem fair if our people are being taxed over there,” when we really hold on to every right that we have to tax foreigners when they operate in the United States, including foreign companies, through measures like the base erosion anti-abuse tax that that Republicans in Congress themselves put into law in 2017. So I think there’s a lot of contradictions here as well. But there is this sense that this feels unfair to Americans because we are so dominant in this particular sector.
Jeff Rathke
Well, it also is another way of emphasizing that the United States has a a trade surplus with Europe when it comes to services, even though the administration focuses almost exclusively on the goods trade deficit with Europe and with other countries.
There’s another layer of complexity here, I think, but tell me if I’ve got this wrong. Digital service taxes are not a European Union issue, there are individual Member States that may have digital services taxes. This is also not the sort of thing that is easily dealt with in the normal channel for trade discussions between the United States and Europe, which is with the European Commission.
Kimberly Clausing
That’s correct. And there are also digital sales tax efforts throughout the world, including in Canada, India, and elsewhere. It’s not a European-only issue, it’s just that Europe has sometimes attracted particular attention in this respect and in some others.
Jeff Rathke
There’s a deeper issue in what you were just saying, because you hit upon the word sovereignty. Which on the one hand is really at the basis of much of the Trump administration’s actions, not only in the international economic sphere. There is this deep emphasis on sovereignty and aversion to obligations that might encumber the the United States and implicitly a downgrading of the choices that other sovereign states might make for themselves. You can pick out other examples of this, the vice president’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, which was remarkable from an administration that campaigned on the idea that it was time for America to stop going around the world and telling other countries how they should organize themselves, suddenly, we take an intense interest in how the Europeans organize themselves. And that brings me to another issue I wanted to ask about, and that’s the digital regulations within Europe. Not exactly a tax, but you have things like the Digital Services Act, the Digital Markets Act, and many U.S. tech firms are very unhappy with these regulations. Do you see any reason or any way that the that the Europeans might change their regulations under pressure from the Trump administration? Is there some way in which these constitute a trade issue?
Kimberly Clausing
Economists and lawyers can point to a lot of things that might act as trade barriers that aren’t necessarily intended to be trade barriers. But I would encourage countries throughout the world, including the Europeans, to set their own regulatory goals with their own domestic goods goals in mind. You can’t completely satisfy the Trump administration by changing this or that attribute of your system. And you need to be true to your own people’s desires to have a free information space and to have their own social goals met, and that always has to come first. So of course, the Trump administration is in the process of bullying countries throughout the world on a host of criteria that aren’t narrowly trade. That can include immigration, that can include foreign policy, that can include regulatory stances. They seem to be under the impression that they can get a much better deal for the United States by wrapping all these things up with the threat of tariffs. But I think it would be unwise for the international community to give up on their global collective action efforts, for instance around climate change or around tax competition or around free and open international trade rules, just because one superpower has lost their interest in global collective action. I think it would be a better approach to think about these problems as long-lasting problems, problems that future U.S. administrations might be interested in solving, too, and to hold to their principles about what is the important social criteria. Of course, there are some trade measures that every country has that are unfair, that one could easily rethink in this moment and that would be a sensible thing to do, and I think countries should be open minded about taking a good look at their policies and where they can improve them and where they might find some common ground with the Trump administration. But I don’t think you can just cave to every whim of that administration without thinking through the long-term consequences for these big global collective action problems. And that includes controlling your own Internet platforms, choices about social values, which might be different than those in the United States. And that’s perfectly legitimate and acceptable.
Jeff Rathke
Right. Maybe a final question, and that is the United States is the biggest economy in the world, the Trump administration has set certain goals about making the global economy work more in the favor of the United States. What the precise objectives are, there’s still some fuzziness about that, as we’ve talked about already. But, fundamentally, does the United States have the power to remake the global economy through a maximalist version of the tariff policies and measures that we’ve been talking about? What’s your sense of that, Kim?
Kimberly Clausing
I’d say two things about that. One, I think there’s a misperception in the Trump administration about how the rules of the game as they’re played now affect the United States. I think the United States has really prospered and benefited from the free and open trading system that we helped create and that we helped nurture and foster over many, many decades. And I think it’s wrongheaded to think that this isn’t serving U.S. interests. We’re one of the most prosperous countries in the world in part because it serves at our interests. The premise of the question itself, I think, is a little bit problematic. I don’t think we can measure a country’s well-being by their trade deficit. On the contrary, I think the trade deficit has often been to the advantage of the United States. We get access to world capital at low interest rates that can be good for us.
But if the Trump administration did want to remake the economy and to remake these rules—getting to the second point, in response to your question—I think it would need to portray itself as a reliable partner who’s willing to honor the deals it makes. And I think it’s going to have difficulty doing that. If it wants to get the rest of the world to set new terms, it has to convince the rest of the world that it’s going to follow through on its agreement, and I’m not sure I would trust that if I were a foreign government. Look at USMCA, for instance, with great fanfare, the first Trump administration threatened to withdraw from NAFTA, renegotiated that trade agreement, pronounced it the best trade agreement ever, and then now a mere handful of years later, when nothing has changed, they have threatened to tear that up and in fact started with Canada and Mexico in their tariff threats early in the administration. They’ve likewise threatened U.S. longstanding commitments to the defense of Ukraine and even withheld aid at times and withheld assistance at times. Those kinds of actions—and I could list more—would make it really hard, I think, for partners and allies to come together with the United States and faithfully negotiate this hypothetical remake of the world economy. It would be one thing if we had an ample stock of soft power if we wanted to change the rules a bit, but that doesn’t seem to be the starting point at present.
Jeff Rathke
Kim Clausing, thank you so much for spending this time with us and giving us your insights into tariffs, tax policy, and the international ramifications. It’s been a great conversation.
Kimberly Clausing
Thanks for having me.
Jeff Rathke
That was Kim Clausing, who is the Eric Zolt Chair in Tax Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, and we want to thank all of our listeners for being with us and we look forward to having you with us on the next episode of The Zeitgeist.
