Tariffs: what are they good for?

By Mary Childs,

Greg Rosalsky, Willa Rubin, Meg Cramer

Published April 3, 2025 at 9:19 AM EDT

WASHINGTON, DC - MARCH 26: U.S. President Donald Trump displays a signed an executive order in the Oval Office of the White House on March 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. President Trump announced 25% tariffs on all foreign-made cars.

What are tariffs good for?

For years, mainstream economists have basically said: tariffs are not good. They are an import tax paid by consumers, they've said, and they discourage free trade, and we want more! Because free trade has broadly led to more global economic growth.

But global trade hasn't been all positive for Americans, and in the worldview of President Trump's administration, tariffs can be used to right some of those wrongs. And the U.S. has economic leverage. So if the U.S. wants to level the playing field, it should use that leverage, and use tariffs to accomplish its policy goals.

Today on the show: the case for tariffs. We talk to a lonely economist who's been sounding the alarm for years that more and free-er trade isn't always better. And we speak to economists in President Trump's orbit who make the case for how tariffs can be a potent economic and political tool.

This episode was produced by Willa Rubin and edited by Meg Cramer. It was fact-checked by Sarah McClure and engineered by James Willetts. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

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Mary Childs

Mary Childs (she/her) is a co-host and correspondent for NPR's Planet Money podcast. Before joining the team in 2019, she was a senior reporter at Barron's magazine, where she covered the alternatives industry, the bond market and capitalism. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times and Bloomberg News. She's written about the pioneering of new asset classes like time, billionaire's proposals to solve inequality and diversity and discrimination in the finance industry. Before all that, she was also a Watson Fellow, spending a year traveling the world painting portraits. She graduated from Washington & Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, with a degree in business journalism and an honors thesis comparing the use and significance of media sting operations in the U.S. and India.

Greg Rosalsky

Since 2018, Greg Rosalsky has been a writer and reporter at NPR's Planet Money.

See stories by Greg Rosalsky

Willa Rubin

Willa Rubin is an associate producer at Planet Money, and she likes telling stories that explore how the economy impacts everyday people. Before joining Planet Money, she helped launch and co-produced Gimlet Media and the Wall Street Journal's podcast "The Journal," a daily news show which has won awards from the New York Press Club and from the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. She previously interned at The Indicator from Planet Money. She has a master's degree in journalism from the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY and studied politics at Oberlin College. She's a lifelong New Yorker and loves cats.

Meg Cramer

Meg Cramer is a freelance audio journalist who also teaches at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. She was a reporter and executive producer on the award-winning Trump, Inc. podcast — a collaborative investigation between WNYC and ProPublica. More recently, she edited three series of LAist Studios' flagship podcast Imperfect Paradise and was a Senior Supervising Editor for NPR's Planet Money.