Betsey Stevenson

So it's not clear that we're going to be giving up jobs that are worse in order to get these manufacturing jobs. So it's...

Even in his best case scenario, where we have higher prices that persist, that we now make very expensive garments, clothing, iPhones in the United States, and many people can't afford them, so we have smaller sales, that those are the kind of jobs that the American public wants. American public wants high-paying jobs, not low-paying, low-skilled assembly jobs.

Well, obviously, ordinary Americans who are relying on their savings retirees are already seeing that they're taking hits to what they have. But I think what we're really going to see is price increases. And they will happen pretty quickly. We might not see them tomorrow. We might not even see them next week.

But I think within the end of the month, if these tariffs stick, I don't think there are a lot of companies out there that aren't going to be able to withstand paying these tariffs quickly. without passing it on to their customers quite quickly. So I think we're going to see a spike in prices and inflation. And we already see that in the data on inflation expectations.

So people are expecting inflation to be higher. And then what we can see, we will also see, is layoffs. We're going to see an economy that where economic growth is slowing. Will it slow all the way to the point of a recession? I don't know. I think it's more likely than not.

But what we do know for sure is we're not going to have the kind of robust growth that we've seen over the last couple of years. I think we're going to see that start to slow down. And so what you're going to see is

For ordinary people, more of your friends and family who don't have access to jobs, higher prices when you go to the grocery store, when you go to buy clothing or you go to buy ordinary items. And I think that's going to stick around for quite some time.

First, we'll start with overnight. They can't do it overnight even if they wanted to. They're not some magic fairy that blinks their eyes and the factory opens up tomorrow. So this is a long-run investment to open factories in the United States. And you need to be thinking about not just what are the tariffs going to be today, but what are the tariffs going to be over the next 20 or 30 years?

And then you have to ask yourself, are you really going to be able to produce it cheap enough in the United States that you're better off doing that? than just paying the tariffs and continuing with the factories that you've already invested in. I don't think that a lot of companies are going to immediately come and invest in the United States. First of all, we're gonna have a slowing economy.

That's not a great investment environment. We're also going to have less stable prices with higher inflation, also not the best environment for investing. But let's put some numbers on all of this. We have 13 million Americans who work in manufacturing, and we have 123 million Americans who who work in the private sector, not for government, the private sector, in non-manufacturing jobs.

You know, yes, maybe we get. Let's say that he is vindicated and we get 2 million new manufacturing jobs. So we go from having 13 million to 15 million. What if they come at the expense of those other 123 million jobs? How many of those do we lose? And it's also worth noting that the typical pay, the average pay in those other jobs is higher than what we see in manufacturing.