 That's not the first time Trump's trade policy has been met with a rebuke from people that look at his policies when Trump gave his big trade Speech in Pennsylvania in late June he cited research from a think tank the Economic Policy Institute EPI the President of EPI made a point of publishing a corrective to Trump's trade speech the Trump trade scam by Lawrence Michelle and Lawrence Michelle President of the Economic Policy Institute joins me now all right good to have you so look You guys have been fighting this battle on trade for years 20-30 years in which economic The economics profession had a consensus these deals were good, but they weren't doing the kind of concentrated harm You said they were you've been on the you've been sort of on the right side of this in certain ways history's moving your direction now Here comes Donald Trump to champion the cause of busting up trade deals. What say you? Well first thanks for that acknowledgement and good to be with you Chris It's also important to note that it's not just Donald Trump, but it's also Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders Everybody is now agreeing that These trade deals do harm to the vast majority of America's workers Okay, and everybody is against the TPP deal That's been been worked forward. So I feel like our position has been validated across the board now Trump I Sighting our work many times makes us very uncomfortable because nobody wants to be associated with a bigot But he is running what I do call as a trade scam. Let me explain that first. He brings up trade But he ends up spending most of his time talking about cutting corporate taxes and cutting regulation that is actually the old tried and failed GOP policies now if Cutting taxes and and cutting regulations were great for the economy We'd all be moving to Kansas where they radically cut taxes, right? We would all remember George W. Bush as the prosperity president and the bush boom, which we don't Okay, so what did he say about trade? Well, the fact is that Donald Trump Thinks that he's a great negotiator and he's gonna do great trade deals But no one has ever asked him and he has never specified what exactly yes, do you want to change? This is the thing that drives me nuts. We go basis NAFTA was terrible to TV Look, there are things in these deals You got to be able to point to the specifics the other thing is and I'm curious what you think about this Look, there are ways the the sort of you know the kind of The predisposition of economists to say look free trade and exchange makes everyone better off Which was a kind of guiding bias that I think drove the kind of Washington consensus and support for these The opposite of that is also true like if you put up an 80% tariff on everything If you started passing laws that companies just could not leave legally there would be economic damage from that I you as a as a trades deal skeptic would concede correct Yes, but the fact is that it's it's worse than that really Chris because when Donald Trump says Ford Motor Company won't be able to move jobs when I'm president. He has no way to do that He has not specified. What is he going to do? He can't pass a law that says Ford Motor Company can't move jobs to Mexico and the fact is that he's not really able to fix our problems Through somehow better trade agreements. I'm with Larry Summers on something if we want to have an international economic agenda I'd go for a treaty then we should be getting countries together to figure out how do we tax Corporate income yes because there's a trillion dollars a year shifted from workers to companies Every year let's work on that. Yeah, that's a good that would be a good thing to pursue a good deal on right I mean if the idea is that you can negotiate good deals. You can get better binding good deals There's a lot of income that's lashing around and essentially being hid And if you want to bring the world together and negotiate a good deal that that would be a good thing to pursue Let's end the tax havens, you know, let's let's all stop You know where companies are going to go to different countries to get the lowest corporate tax rate They can all stop that if they want so the other thing is we need to look at what? Donald omits he would make it seem as if workers are suffering wage stagnation solely because of trade Globalization is part of it and as you know I've studied this for decades, but he omits Many other things and he's against things like raising the minimum wage. He doesn't want to strengthen unions He wants a national right to work law. He now wants to raise interest rates, which will slow economic growth and raise unemployment Not to mention the majority of workers in America are in non-tradable sectors, right? So the majority of workers are not working in in sectors where their jobs are being shipped There's a huge economic problem that lies outside of say manufacturing jobs going overseas I think Donald Trump has successfully used that as a sort of totem to invoke for all of the economy's problems somewhat effectively But if you go and read what EPI is up to you will see that is not the whole story Lawrence Michelle Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. Thank you still to come the enthusiasm level among key voting demographic is in the tank How that could affect Holy?