Shut Down Your BoomerCon Uncle This Thanksgiving

Gary is ready to talk tariffs. Be ready for Gary.

Let’s face it, the biggest turkey at the table this Thursday is going to be your Uncle Gary from some two-name suburb like Short Hills, or Chevy Chase, or Lake Forest, or Highland Park, who reads the Wall Street Journal editorial page every morning while half-listening to whatever meandering tangent Joe Kernen might be bringing in for a landing on CNBC’s Squawk Box.

Gary’s a nice guy, raised a good family, always has a crew neck sweater pulled firmly over his button-down shirt, and that silver hairline just never seems to recede. He’s a patriot who loves his country and tossing around the ol’ pigskin, which he checks to make sure has not become an offensive term for a football. He pays his taxes on time and so does the firm where he works, which does something in financial insurance options lending. And he’s politically engaged, which you know because, as he’ll often mention, he reads the Wall Street Journal editorial page.

So Gary is ready to talk tariffs this Thanksgiving. He’s got a joke about how it’s not just the turkey that got more expensive this year, but also everything from Turkey. Be ready for Gary.

When Gary complains that tariffs are raising prices and squeezing family budgets, you’ll want to explain that the consumer price index increased 1.5% over the past six months, since Liberation Day, which is the same increase as during the six months prior. Turkey prices (well, “other uncooked poultry including turkey,” if he’s a stickler) are unchanged since last November, and down from two Novembers ago.

All that will be news to Gary, who prides himself on listening to “real economists” like Peterson Institute president Adam Posen and University of Michigan professor Justin Wolfers. He may even be suffering from what Harvard University professor Jason Furman has termed “tariff derangement syndrome.” Be polite. Validate his faith in economics. But explain that good economics does not emphasize static models in which a policy’s full incidence lands instantly on the most obvious target. As an illustration, ask him who he thinks pays the corporate income tax. He will have thoughts.

In this instance, he might want to know that the Harvard Business School’s Tariff Tracker reported this month that only 20% of tariff costs are being passed through to consumers. No source carries more weight with Gary than HBS. Mention also the new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, which finds that tariffs tend in fact to be disinflationary because of their many macroeconomic impacts beyond changes to price levels.

But let’s be honest, household affordability was never Gary’s real concern. He’s a free market guy, and tariffs just aren’t free market. That’s not the Republican Party he remembers. So you’ll need to remind him that the Cato Institute called Ronald Reagan “the most protectionist president since Herbert Hoover,” who of course was also a Republican and “the heavyweight champion of protectionists.” Whether his favorite president is Abraham Lincoln (“Give us a protective tariff, and we will have the greatest nation on earth.”) or Teddy Roosevelt (“Thank God I am not a free-trader. In this country, pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty degeneration of the moral fibre.”), have your quotations ready.

Who are we kidding, Reagan is Gary’s favorite president. But he’ll likely be interested in these others as well.

Is he upset because tariffs are a tax? The first major bill signed by George Washington, on July 4, 1789, was the Tariff Act. Perhaps he is worried about growth. Be sure to share the latest research from Goldman Sachs, second only to HBS in his pantheon, which finds that China’s export-led economic model is boosting its own growth while suppressing ours. “Goldman Sachs said that? I wonder why Joe didn’t mention that on the Squawk,” you’ll hear him mutter.

If your stomach is rumbling, go ahead and eat. Just because Gary has thoughts on “starve the beast” doesn’t mean you have to starve mid-feast. Confronting his soliloquy on “jobs Americans won’t do” may not be the job for you.

But if you have the appetite to go one more round, stay on trade just a minute longer. It’s a safe bet that Gary idolizes Warren Buffett. Did Gary know that, all the way back in 2003, Buffett highlighted that America’s trade deficit and negative net investment position were skyrocketing “to the point that our country’s ‘net worth,’ so to speak, is now being transferred abroad at an alarming rate”? Did he know Buffett warned that “a perpetuation of this transfer will lead to major trouble,” likening it to “selling pieces of the farm and increasing the mortgage on what we still own”? Since Buffett’s warning, our negative net investment position has increased ten-fold.

Does Gary want to guess what Buffett suggested we do? “In truth,” said the Oracle of Omaha, “it is a tariff called by another name.”

Share this news gently. Winning the tariff argument is important, but not more important than your family and their health. The last thing anyone wants is for Gary to have a heart attack, especially before the pie has been served. Remember, it’s not Gary’s fault he was taught to believe that trade deficits are self-correcting, that free trade with an authoritarian country and its state-controlled market is the real free market, that making things doesn’t matter and that the potato chip and computer chip industries are interchangeable. Larry Summers told him, “on this issue there has been only one answer: that welcoming China into the global economic system is right for the American economy and for the global economy.” People listened to Larry.

We are all products of the circumstances and ideological currents in which we mature. In some eras, an ossified dogma is simply accepted, its expositors left unchallenged. In others, like the present one, old frameworks are collapsing, new ones are emerging, and much work is being done to bring order and sense to the chaos. Have sympathy for the BoomerCon, who is ill-suited to this moment, but still deserving of our respect.