‘Jake and Spike’: Are the Trump tariffs going to help jobs or hurt the economy?

President Donald Trump announced that the United States would begin issuing “reciprocal tariffs,” imposing a base 10% tariff on international imports, with even higher tariffs to be issued on certain nations. The stock market did not react positively, and now, the hosts of the “Jake and Spike Show” on KIRO Newsradio are debating the strategy.

“He (Trump) calls them reciprocal tariffs. But that’s not the case,” said Spike O’Neill. “He put out a list of countries that are all ‘taking advantage’ of the United States, but some of these countries have never even sent anything to the United States.”

Spike also noted that many of the percentages cited during Trump’s speech are “wildly false figures” and not an accurate representation of imposed tariffs.

“China is not imposing a 67% tariff on American goods,” said Spike. “They took how much we sent and divided it by how much we got back, and that’s how they arrived at that number. That may be a valid trade deficit number, but it’s not an imposed tariff.”

Will Trump’s tariffs help with manufacturing jobs?

But Jake Skoreheim wondered if these tariffs could result in getting manufacturing jobs back to the United States.

“Don’t we want to be the manufacturing capital of the world? Those are good jobs,” said Jake.

Jake argued that many American consumers choose imported goods made from “cheap labor” because we can’t afford anything made domestically—but there’s a chance tariffs could change that.

“I do think you could make a good argument that if these [tariffs] are successful, and people have to then turn their dollars back to what we are making here locally, that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world,” said Jake.

But Spike pointed out, something like that would not happen overnight:

“It’s going to take a long time for America to decide if it’s even possible or desired for America to become the manufacturing capital of the world,” said Spike, “A vast majority of financial experts say this is a disaster waiting to hurt their businesses.”

Listen to “The Jake and Spike Show” weekdays from noon to 3 p.m. on KIRO Newsradio 97.3 FM. Subscribe to the podcast here.