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Welcome to Retirement Unpacked with Al Smith, owner of Golden Eagle Financial. You want a retirement plan that alleviates your fears about the future so you know your money will last. As a chartered financial consultant, Al Smith will help you find a balance between the risk and reward of the market and the safety of your retirement income. And now, here’s your host, Al Smith.

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Welcome to another program of Retirement Unpacked. I want to thank you for tuning in. I promise to have some good information for you today. And before I dive into that, I want to reach out to you because I know a lot of the people I speak about who listen to this show from time to time. have certain questions that could be answered if they were to give my office a call and schedule a time to come in. I see a lot of people each week, but I also have gaps in my schedule. And when people are working, I often meet them late in the day because that’s What I do, and sometimes I’ll meet with people on a Saturday, but if you want to meet with me because you have a concern, if you’re saving enough for retirement or if the money you have saved, if that will last, if what you’re doing now is working well enough, if your assets are growing enough to stay ahead of inflation, these are questions I get asked all the time. And I sometimes get asked about the future, and I don’t do any predictions about the future, but what I do is help people prepare so that whatever occurs, that they’ll be ready. My number, if you’d like to have that conversation, is 303-744-1128. And if I’m not there, it will either go to my office manager or voicemail, and I answer my voicemails promptly. A few days ago, there was a big celebration on Monday of this week, and I went downtown Littleton and participated a little bit in that celebration. I didn’t put a lampshade on my head or anything like that, but… There’s an establishment in downtown Littleton called Nick’s Irish Pub, and they had a great big tent there with a pipe band, a bagpipe band, and there was a restaurant right next door that was serving corned beef and cabbage, and it was a big gala celebration. And when I think about that, I often think about what I talked to the listeners about last year. And that was a little bit of the history of St. Patrick, because there are a lot of misunderstandings about him. The biggest being his having driven the snakes out of Ireland. There never were snakes in Ireland. So one could say, well, that’s because he drove them out. Well, there weren’t snakes there before, after, whatever. St. Patrick was not Irish. He was British. And he was born in about 385 or 386 A.D., to a wealthy family. His father was a deacon in their church. They were well-to-do. They lived in a villa. And his name was not Patrick at that time. It’s believed that his name was Maywin Suckett. That’s spelled capital M-A-E-W-Y-N, and Suckett is S-U-C-A-T. It might be S-U-C-C-A-T. I took some notes. But in any event, he was born to wealthy parents, and as happened often during that time on one of their vacations to a villa near the ocean he and some of other family members and workers who worked for his family were literally kidnapped and stolen into slavery this happened when he was only 16 years old and after a number of years St. Patrick escaped and he also had a vision that he should return to Ireland at a later date and share the gospel with many who lived there. And back then they were pagan and druids and so forth. It was a very different environment than it was many years later. And so he became a bishop in about 432 or 433 AD, and he returned to Ireland to share the gospel. And it was, you know, quite an event. And going back to when he was captured at age 16, he was made into a herdsman. And he was purchased as a slave by a Druid chief named Miluic of Slemach. Or maybe it’s Slemach. I’m not sure how to pronounce those Gaelic names, so to speak. But he had a really interesting reputation. background and for i picked up a really good article by um the voice of the martyrs they had a lot of good things to uh to say about him and although patrick’s family escaped when he was uh captured many of his family workers didn’t and he was made a slave to this gentleman as i uh spoke about. And Patrick was given the job as a herdsman. And even though he was raised in a Christian home, he really hadn’t accepted Christ or the gospel as a young man. But In his autobiography, Patrick wrote that the Lord opened my senses to my unbelief so that though late in the day I might remember my many sins with all my heart. This was in St. Patrick’s biography. He also wrote about how his faith grew as he prayed. And after he came to Ireland, when he was captured, spending his time with the flock, he was even ridiculed by some of the other people who were also captives. captured, and some of the other people who were captured, they described him as the holy boy after his visions and so forth. And after St. Patrick had a dream in his biography, according to his vision, he said, soon you will be returning to your own country. And in another dream, he received a response to the first dream, And the vision said, come and see where your ship is waiting for you. And at 22 years old, he traveled 200 miles to the coast of Ireland. And that began his long journey of spreading the gospel in Ireland. And he is clearly the patron saint of Ireland. And Coincidentally, the parades and the great big celebration, that’s been celebrated in the United States for literally a couple hundred years longer than it has been celebrated in Ireland. And the green… in how everybody celebrates, the shamrock and everything like that, that is because of the Irish flag. And the Irish flag has both, not both, but all three colors of green, orange, and white. And the orange was the color of the Northmen in Ireland. And, you know, right now, some celebrate who live in Ireland with orange coloring rather than green. But the representation, the green represented nationalism, orange represented the flag of the North and white represented peace. But I find it’s highly interesting the background that he had and how it’s to some degree been misrepresented a little bit because a lot of people don’t really think in terms of, well, who was St. Patrick and what did he do? Well, he was truly a saint spreading the gospel to the Druids, and many of the pagans in Ireland. And when he spread the faith, he, to some degree, incorporated a little bit of the pagan customs. If you’ve ever seen a Gaelic crucifix, it has a round cross end to the cross and it’s a bit different than a traditional crucifix and some of the things that that some of the concepts that he provided for the people who lived there the druids and the pagans incorporated a little bit of what they were already believing but he clearly brought the Lord to the island of Ireland, and that’s why he’s the patron saint, no question. And when he finished his scholarly studies to become a bishop, he took on the Latin name of Patricus. So he chose the name Patricus, even though his actual name was Maewyn Succot. So here, those are some things that other people probably don’t know about who celebrate St. Patrick’s Day. So it’s about a true person. It’s not just a time when everybody is Irish. It’s not a time to put the lampshade on your head, but it’s a time to truly celebrate a saint, because like St. Paul and many other saints who spread the gospel, St. Patrick was was patron saint and still is the patron saint of Ireland. The reason that we celebrate it on the 17th of March is that is the day that it is believed that he died. And when things go all the way back to the fourth century, sometimes some of those things are clear and sometimes they’re just a little bit fuzzy. Well, so much for St. Patrick’s Day. If you’ve been watching any of the news, or no matter what channel, whether you listen to Fox or CNN, ABC, NBC, you can’t help but hear a lot about tariffs. And you’re wondering, well, what are tariffs? That’s just charges against goods that are imported or exported. Well, that’s true. Tariffs have been around for a long time. And what really are they? And why is there so much economic concern? Why were the markets bouncing up and down with talk about the tariffs, how the tariffs were going to cause harm to the economy? and so forth. Well, tariffs have been around for a very long time. Right after the United States became a nation and adopted the Constitution in 1789, the second law that was passed by the U.S. Congress was the law that provided tariffs. And at that time, the very beginning of those tariffs were 5% and some of them on some of the goods were as high as 15%. But keep in mind that that was the only source of revenue for the federal government at that time. To give you some idea, the receipts in 1792, this is about as far back as our measuring goes, were $4.6 million. And at that time, the average tariff was 15%. A few years later, 1795, the average tariff was only 8%. And that 8% brought in $6.1 million. And it paid for 91% of the federal budget. And there’s lots more information I have for you about tariffs. Tariffs from our goods going to other countries. And tariffs from other countries coming to the United States. Because that’s a significant… thing that’s being discussed out there in the economy that may have an effect on your finances. And we’ll talk about more about that after the break.

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SPEAKER 03 : 15:22

Welcome back to Retirement Unpacked. We’re talking about tariffs. Tariffs have been around since the country has been around. And until 1913, when income tax was passed into law, tariffs were… about 95% of where the federal government got its money. Initially, tariffs started off about 15%, then 8, then 10, then 20. I’m looking at a table where it goes all the way back into the 1800s. And around the time of the Civil War is the only time there was ever an income tax, at least up until 1913. In 1865 and up till about 1870, there was a small income tax. And the reason for that, that was to help pay for the Civil War. But during that time, tariffs were anywhere from 25 to 44 percent. So tariffs at one point in the past were truly significant. And the purpose of tariffs were twofold. First of all, tariffs generate income for the government itself, and they also provide protection for our own manufacturers and farmers and so forth. And that is extremely important because Some people describe tariffs as a protectionist economic policy, but it’s important to some degree that our own manufacturers and so forth have some degree of protection because other countries, specifically China, they will sell some things to our country at even below their costs just to make it difficult for our own manufacturers and trying to dominate some of the world economic platforms, so to speak. But again, what’s interesting, the table that I have here shows tariffs going all the way back to 1792. And it wasn’t until, as I mentioned, 1913 that tariffs, or rather that income tax came into being. 1913 is when it was passed. And during that year, 35 million of federal revenue came from income tax, but 724 million came from tariffs, which at that time were about 17%. We jump a little further ahead and they quickly balance out where tariffs actually, or where, pardon me, income tax actually exceeded the amount that was coming in from tariffs. And withholding didn’t start until 1940. And that is when the federal government was much more funded with income tax than tariffs. About the time that income tax became available, tariffs represented about 17% of the federal government’s income. When withholding tax became popular in 1940, tariffs represented only 12% of income to the government. By the 1970s, it was only 6%. And this only goes to 2010. By 2010, tariffs represented only 1.3% of the revenue coming in to the federal government. But tariffs are also extremely important when we look at the economics of our country versus other countries. More recently, there was a lot of talk about President Trump being unfair to Canada and things like that. Well, I made some notes and did a little bit of research. Canada before Trump was elected, was charging tariffs of between 200 and 300 percent on milk, cheese, and butter for the agricultural products that we were selling to Canada. And obviously that made it extremely difficult during the first Trump administration. Tariffs were levied so heavily against the American farmer that farmers had to be subsidized because right now, a great deal of the yield from our farmers is sold to other countries. And if they’re sold with an extremely high tariff, that drives prices down and makes life very difficult for farmers. And to put this in perspective, like with Canada, which is what we were talking about, we have a trade imbalance from Canada. In 2023, for example, We imported $418 billion worth of goods from Canada, but we only exported $354 million, the difference being our trade deficit in 2024. It was nearly the same. We imported $412 billion, exported $342. So these are things that we need to be concerned about. So tariffs aren’t punitive. They’re creating a balance. And one of the statistics I heard recently, I apologize I can’t quote where I heard it from, but our country pays $350 billion approximately in tariff revenue to other countries. We only take in about $50 billion. And that’s partly because of the imbalance of trade that we have with other countries. Generally speaking, we import more than we export to most countries. There’s a few exceptions to that. I think the UK and one or two Scandinavian countries are included there. But tariffs are a really key component of our government’s economic planning. And if we don’t equalize tariffs with other countries, then it’s going to make us the benefactor of the other countries. India, for example, has some of the very highest tariffs in the whole world. And to give you an example, and this one I heard, and I can’t quote where I got the information from, but I had heard that if you live in India, the tariff on a Harley Davidson motorcycle was 150%. But because Trump was trying to equalize tariffs, they said they would reduce it down to where it’s only 100%. So if a new Harley cost $22,000 at your local dealership in Denver, it would cost $44,000 if you lived in India. And I don’t know how many Harleys are riding around in India, but… Europe is another tremendous example. Think of how many Volkswagens and Audis and Toyotas you see every time you drive around anywhere. But if anyone has been to Europe, did you see a Chevrolet? Did you see a Lincoln? Did you see a Jeep? You might have seen one, but it’s much, much more rare than seeing BMWs, Audis, and Renaults, and British and French and German vehicles. So essentially… Tariffs are a mechanism that will help protect our agriculture and our manufacturers at the same time providing revenue to the federal government. And it can be equated with a tax, but with a tax, you earn income and there’s no choice involved in it. However, with a tariff, if you buy something that included a tariff, I agree that the cost has to be passed on. But you have the choice whether you want to buy whatever it is that’s being imported from China or from China. South Korea or Japan, you have the choice whether to buy that product or not. So whether the tariff affects you or not depends on what you choose to purchase. But President Trump has spoken briefly about minimizing income tax and increasing tariffs, which I think is a good idea, and I think creating some balance between what we import and what we export and the revenue that we derive from that, I think that’s an extremely good idea also. Now, you might be asking, how does this affect you? I’m not a big prognosticator, but I think balancing our tariffs will help stabilize our economy and it will help you permit your own assets to grow for your own retirement. And if you would like to have a conversation about that, give my office a call at 303-744-1128. And definitely tune in next week because I have… a very sharp lady who is a personal chef. She is about retirement age, and she provides meals for groups as large as weddings, as well as people who want to celebrate small events. Again, thank you for tuning in. God bless you. Let’s continue to pray for the folks in Israel and for our country to continue to move forward. Bye now.

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But are offered and sold through individually licensed and appointed agents.