Making the complex understandable.
Charlie Wheelan has spent his career making complex ideas understandable and accessible. He’s the faculty director for the Center for Business, Government & Society at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth and the best-selling author of Naked Economics, Naked Money, and Naked Statistics.
In this podcast, Motley Fool analyst Buck Hartzell and Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau talk with Wheelan about:
- Tariffs and trade.
- Manufacturing and technology.
- National debt.
- AI and investing.
To catch full episodes of all The Motley Fool’s free podcasts, check out our podcast center. When you’re ready to invest, check out this top 10 list of stocks to buy.
This podcast was recorded on August 31, 2025.
Charlie Wheelan: The idea of comparative advantage is do what you’re good at, let other people do what they’re good at, and then you trade, and everybody’s made better off.
Mac Greer: That was Charlie Wheelan, a professor of Business and public policy at Dartmouth. I’m Motley Fool producer Mac Greer. Charlie Wheelan is a best-selling author whose books include Naked Economics, Naked Money, and Naked Statistics. As you’ll hear in a minute, Charlie is really great at making the complex not so complex. Motley Fool analyst Buck Hartzell and Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau recently had a chance to talk with Wheelan about trade, technology, and a whole lot more.
Buck Harzell: I’m going to start off, first of all, with tariffs because obviously there’s been since April 2, so called Liberation Day, there’s been a lot of changes in tariff policy. Maybe just for our listeners, can you give us an idea, like, what is a tariff? Then we’ll talk a little bit more about it, but I’ll say, first of all, just what is a tariff?
Charlie Wheelan: It’s a tax. It’s a tax on something that is imported. It’s an age old tax because back before we had the capacity to do income taxes or sales taxes. The easy way to collect a tax was with customs houses. If you go to any big old city, there’s always some beautiful building, it’s the customs house. Where are we going to get money from the ships that come in that are selling tea or wool or something else like that? It’s an age old way of taxing things that come into the country. It is paid by the people who are actually bringing it in. But that’s what we call the statutory incidence. That’s who actually writes the check. But I think for your listeners and to understand the issue, there’s a more important concept, which is, what’s the economic incident? Who actually bears the cost, it’s not the same. I’ll turn your attention to something that most people are more familiar with, which is something like a property tax. You say, who pays the property tax, people who own property. But then if you say, I’m a renter, so I don’t pay property tax, that’s not true because your landlord pays it and then passes it along. The big economic question right now, is how much of these tariffs are getting passed along and to whom? That is a very complicated but very important question.
Buck Harzell: Warren Buffett said something I thought it was interesting. He said, I guarantee you that these tariffs aren’t paid by the tooth fairy, and so that does get at your question, and the worry, I think, has been put out there, is that the companies are going to raise their prices. They’re going to pass it along, and ultimately us as consumers are going to have to eat that bill. Do you think that’s the case, or do you think it’s going to be a mix, the companies eat part of it, and then how do you think that’ll play out?
Charlie Wheelan: It’s definitely going to be a mix, and it depends on how competitive the industry is. It depends on how competitive the imports themselves are. If you think about broadly speaking, three entities who might end up paying. It might be the exporters. It may be that I’m going to stop buying products from Vietnam if they’re 50% more effective, so the people exporting shrimp from Vietnam say, we’ll eat the tariff and we’ll reduce our take, and so your price will be the same. In which case, that’s all being borne by somebody else. I don’t think that’s necessarily the case, or it could be the importers themselves. It could be the wholesalers who buy the shrimp who say, we can’t afford to pass this on because nobody will buy our shrimp. In which case, they eat it, or it could be the consumers. They just pass it all along, and now shrimp are 50% more effective. My guess is depending on the industry, it’s going to be some combination of all those three things. But I can guarantee you that some of it, if not most of it, is going to ultimately be borne by people going to the supermarket, or by companies manufacturing imported capital goods. At the end of the day, it’s going to affect American consumers. It’s going to be more in some places than others.
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