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Making The Case For Removing Tariffs

Eric Zetterquist/ Zetterquist Galleries

China has been at the center of a months-long debate about tariffs this year. The U.S. has erected trade barriers in two phases so far. Fifty billion dollars of Chinese goods are currently affected. The U.S. trade representative is talking about tariffs on a further $200 billion of imports, which could apply as soon as this week.

If this latest round happens, it will mean that by value, about half of the goods imported from China into the U.S. will be taxed an extra 10 to 25 percent. That includes Chinese antiquities, which is ironic for two reasons. First, while those goods may have been made in China originally, many hundreds of years ago, they don't actually come to us from China: dealers usually buy them from places like Japan or Korea. So the tariff doesn't affect China at all. In fact, China has banned the export of antiquities, which means the tariff actually helps China, as opposed to hurting it.

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Elizabeth Kulas is a producer on Planet Money. Before that, she produced shows at WNYC, Gimlet and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. In 2016, she was part of the NPR team that reported on the Wells Fargo banking scandal. That reporting won a George Foster Peabody Award, an Edward R. Murrow Award and a Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Before falling in love with making audio, she studied Art History and German, with a focus on life in the former East Germany. She graduated from The University of Melbourne in her native Australia, with stints at Barnard College, New York and Berlin's Free University. Right now, she's entirely obsessed with space.
Stacey Vanek Smith is the co-host of NPR's The Indicator from Planet Money. She's also a correspondent for Planet Money, where she covers business and economics. In this role, Smith has followed economic stories down the muddy back roads of Oklahoma to buy 100 barrels of oil; she's traveled to Pune, India, to track down the man who pitched the country's dramatic currency devaluation to the prime minister; and she's spoken with a North Korean woman who made a small fortune smuggling artificial sweetener in from China.

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