A new tariff on imported medication

Oh, and you thought we were done with tariffs for a little while. From Marketplace, I'm Sir Ben Asher, and I'm David Brancaccio. President Trump signed an executive order threatening new tariffs on imported medications. They could be as high as 100%. The president also overhauled how steel, aluminum, and copper tariffs are collected. Marketplace's Novasafo has more. The new tariffs on patented drugs come with lots of exceptions. Drugmakers that reach pricing deals with the Trump administration or are at minimum building manufacturing facilities in the U.S. can avoid the levies or pay only 20%. Existing trade deals with countries including the U.K. and those in the E.U. mean lower tariffs for drugmakers there. As for the metal tariffs, changes are said to be focused on simplifying how they're collected and to combat cheating. 50% tariffs will be eliminated for products that contain small amounts of aluminum, steel, or copper. They'll come down to 25% for most other products, such as household appliances. But they'll now be assessed on the full value of the product, not just of the metal it contains. In addition, the administration will now calculate levies on imports of the metals themselves based on what they're worth in the U.S. The White House says some importers have been gaming the system with artificially low prices charged abroad. I'm Novosawf for Marketplace. The economy added 178,000 new jobs in March. The Bureau of Labor Statistics announced just a few minutes ago. The unemployment rate ticked down a notch to 4.3%. Julia Coronado is on the line to talk about it. She's founder of Macropolicy Perspectives and a professor at UT Austin. Hi, Julia. Hello, how are you? Good. So, 178,000 jobs. Unemployment rate ticks down. How do we feel about that? Well, it's a strong report in the headlines, but there's also a lot of noise. We have 178,000 jobs in March after 133,000 job loss in February. Averaging through that, it's a pretty low but positive rate of hiring. The number of long-term unemployed people is up more than 300,000 in a year, worrying or no? Well, yes, it is worrying. We are in what we call a low hire, low fire environment. So, for those people who do lose their jobs, it's increasingly difficult to secure a new position. And that's not a sign of strength. As you kind of mentioned, the number of job gains or losses really for the past year has been just wildly all over the place one month to the next. Same thing with revisions. What does that mean? It means it reflects a couple of things. One, it reflects that the budgets of the statistical agencies have been slashed, so it's harder for them to collect the data and we get more noise in the data. And it also reflects an economy that is being pretty disrupted. So, there's a lot of shifts and changes in the sectors that are driving hiring and that also adds noise to the data. Julia Coronado, macro policy perspectives. Thank you so much. My pleasure. Have you ever thought to yourself, uh, I should have been a doctor or chemist or bartender. Some job you're not doing but wish you were. My colleague David Brancaccio is exploring the roads not traveled in his series, Business Envy. Today, he talks to Mark Davis, founder of Moment Motors out of Austin, Texas. He and his team convert vintage cars for a price, which is something David thinks he could do. All right. So, I got to find the classic car that I love or maybe you owned already. I don't own a classic car, but I'll have to find one. I could bring it to you and you could do what with it? You want to start with a classic car that you love. And we take them in and we strip out their internal combustion engine drive trains and we replace it with a brand new electric drive train. And you're not starting from scratch on the electric motor, right? Is it like a modular system that could be used in different cars? We're a small company, so we're not inventing our own motors or our own battery cells or anything like that. What we're doing is we're piecing together automotive technology from, you know, the most, modern suppliers we can work with. And we are creating a drive train that fits into these classic cars. And as we're approaching these different vehicles, everyone is different. So, we have to have a modular solution that we can adapt to each one of those different platforms. All right. Now, this statistic I'm mentioning for a reason. The average cost of private four-year college per year in America is 45 grand. Okay? So, to do this, if I bring you a classic car, is it two years, three years, four years worth of college? It would cost? That's funny that you would use that metric as I am paying for one of those kids right now. We kind of say on our website, it's anywhere from 75,000 to 175,000. A lot of it depends on the size of the vehicle, the power requirements, and the condition of the vehicle. And so, it does vary. But yeah, it is expensive. You do this because you want the end result. You want this amazing experience of flying down the highway silently with so much, you know, modern electric torque and power, but still be sitting in a 1960s Mercedes or, you know, any car that you dream of. I have a list of five that I would like you to do for me. I'll let you bounce each of them off of you to see if one would be better than another. I don't own any of them, but you know, you got a dream. Exactly. Okay. Numero Uno for me is Roger Moore's car from The Saint. I would go with a 19, in my case, 1969 Volvo P1800. Is that too small to do? No, absolutely. We've had lots of inquiries about the P1800s. They're really interesting cars. We haven't done one, but they're absolutely convertible. All right. Now, my mom, if she were still with us, would ask you to convert a 1972 Mercedes SL two-seater convertible. That would work, right? Big enough? You know, there is a lot of heartache about what we do from some aficionados who are concerned that we're taking the soul out of the car by taking the gas engine out of it. And I can guarantee you that if you went back into the 60s and found some Mercedes engineers and said, hey, we've got this amazing electric power plant, you know, 370 foot-pounds of torque and 300 horsepower, do you want to use it? Every single one of them would have raised their hand and said, absolutely, and put it in those cars. Some of it's about preservation, right? People do this for a variety of different reasons, but it is fundamentally about preservation. These cars, you know, if they are not taken care of, end up in people's garages and then barns and then, you know, sitting rotting away. And this allows them to be driven and experienced, you know, anytime and anywhere. And I think that that's part of, you know, preservation. Mark Davis, founder of Moment Motors in Austin, Texas. Thank you very much. Thank you. And that was Marketplace's David Brancaccio there. And next week, David is back covering a pioneering roaster of coffee beans, a firm that makes non-toxic rocket engines, and a co-op that furnishes tools and training so you can fix your own bike. If you have ever heard of a job so good, you would live for Monday mornings, email us. You can find us at MorningReport at marketplace.org. Our executive producer is Nancy Fargali. Our digital team includes Antoinette Brock, Emily McEun, and Dylan Mjötanen. Our engineers are Brian Allison, Tessa Block, and David Shrek. And in New York, I'm Subri Veneshore with the Marketplace Morning Report. From APM, American Public Media.