This is Planet Money from NPR.

Today is a big day.

For weeks we have been hearing about April 2nd.

The Trump administration had promised that today would be the day that they put new tariffs on goods coming in from, I don't know, maybe every country in the world?

This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history.

It's our Declaration of Economic Independence.

The looming tariffs had sent chills down the spines of many economists around the world.

Because tariffs, they're an old economic tool that many economists have disliked for a very

long time. They're basically in import tax, paid mostly by consumers.

And for centuries, they've been used to make a country's population buy its own stuff

instead of another country's stuff.

But economists generally prefer more and freer trade because it means more competition,

lower prices, economic growth. A bedrock theory in economics is the theory of comparative

advantage, that basically countries can specialize in different things, and through trade, we can

all, in the aggregate, get richer. But surely, tariffs have been useful ever, or they wouldn't

exist, right? Right? Hello, and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Mary Childs. And I'm Greg

Rosalski. Today in the show, the case for tariffs.

What can they be good for?

We talk to an economist who has been making the lonely argument for protectionism for the past 30 years.

And we hear how tariffs fit into President Trump's economic worldview from two economists in the orbit of the Trump administration.

So tariffs, we have long heard from economists about how and why they are bad. Today, we investigate what they can actually do, what they can be good for.

And yeah, economists have always acknowledged that free trade has tradeoffs, that, you know, there will be losers in the face of foreign competition.

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