SPEAKER_01: 0:00

I dare you to ask me about Willy Wonka.

SPEAKER_00: 0:02

Oh, yes, I wanted to do that. Oh, you're giving me a look. Is Willy Wonka in it? My last name is Canada, Anna. So I've gotten a lot of commentary. Are you from Canada? My name gets a lot of jokes. You own a chocolate factory, which makes me think of Willy Wonka. So I want to know what is the best comment that someone has made.

SPEAKER_01: 0:26

I get a lot of Willy Wonka questions, and I'm sorry, I'm gonna ring in on your parade list. I hate Willy Wonka. Charlie Bucket, though, the little kid who got the golden ticket. Yes. He is like the epitome of the American dream. Like it's like winning the lottery. All these he comes from a scrappy family, hardworking, good people. Did you watch any of the movies? Yeah. So I'm also a little bit uh anti-Gene. Um Gene Wilder? I oh you are taking the creep now. I'm one of those that's like no Gene Wilder for me. Ooh, he's creepy.

SPEAKER_00: 1:04

I don't know that I can publish any of this, Anna. I think this is too controversial for the podcast. No Gene Wilder? Okay. Nope. Hard stop. Whatever. So we've talked about no controversial issues today. It's only been Willy Wonka, Gene Wilder, and the Trump administration's tariffs. Welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues, a podcast that dares to ask. You're putting a tariff on happiness?

SPEAKER_01: 1:41

Yes. All right. That's exactly what we're talking about. All right, so and now you have to do yours. Welcome to New Hampshire Has Issues, a podcast that dares to ask. Can we afford chocolate?

SPEAKER_00: 1:53

Why why is the Trump administration anti-choccolate? Yes, bingo. That's the one. Well, if I haven't been canceled yet, it's definitely going to happen on the chocolate episode. That is that is certainly what's going to happen. Well, I am your host, Liz Canada, and joining me today is Anna Grazier, the founder, owner, and chocolate maker of Anna Chocolate. Hi, Anna. Welcome to the show.

SPEAKER_01: 2:18

Hi. It's an honor to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_00: 2:22

I'm so glad that you are on because you are the number one favorite place of many people, including our 12-year-old, who, when he knew I was doing this podcast with you, he said, Can you get me a hot chocolate? And I was like, We're not recording in person. 12-year-olds, they don't they don't care. They just want to know what's good. Wait till I tell him about the tariffs. He's gonna be bummed out. Yeah. Actually, recently, he did say recently, you know, I really shouldn't spend my money. I've got to really think about inflation. What am I gonna need in the future? I was like, I don't even think about that, and I am 42, and I don't think about that. But this 12-year-old is like, I'm worried. Yeah, yeah. In other words, I'm buying his hot chocolates. He's saving because he's thinking about inflation. Maybe he should be here interviewing you. That was my mistake. I see that now.

SPEAKER_01: 3:13

He could probably um pose some really interesting questions.

SPEAKER_00: 3:17

So I had reached out to you because there's all this news that's coming out about tariffs, changes in pricing and this percentage, and things are going up, and it's 10%, it's 50%, it's 100%. And I'm like, I don't, I don't know what any of this means. So I reached out to you. I was like, Anna, can you tell me about this? Like, would you come on the podcast and talk about tariffs? And you're like, I have a lot to say about this. And I was like, oh, thank goodness. Because I don't even know where to begin on this topic. Like, I honestly don't know where to begin. I am not a business owner. I do not know businessy things. So when I see a headline that's about tariffs, I get like mad, but then I shut down because I'm like, I won't understand what that means. I better ignore it. That makes problems go away. It sounds like the tariffs are gonna impact me and everybody else, even if I don't want to read about it.

SPEAKER_01: 4:09

They're going to impact everything and everyone. Yeah. Consider it a 10% tax on everything.

SPEAKER_00: 4:17

I like to start every episode with a simple question. Okay. So, is your chocolate made in the USA?

SPEAKER_01: 4:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_00: 4:25

That's fantastic. As far as I know, that's what everyone's looking for here in our federal government is that everything just happens in the USA. And so you're doing it.

SPEAKER_01: 4:34

My chocolate is made in the USA with organic products, agricultural products that are not and cannot be produced in the USA. Okay. So this gets into Yeah. At a very small amount, but not nearly enough to meet the world demand or even the US's chocolate demand.

SPEAKER_00: 4:51

Okay. So you make your chocolate, like we can look through the glass, we can see you making your chocolate bars and all of your products. Yes. You have a chocolate shop, a chocolate factory.

SPEAKER_01: 5:01

It is a chocolate factory. Yes. It's a very small chocolate factory, but it is a petite chocolate manufacturing chocolate.

SPEAKER_00: 5:10

A petite factory for but it was it's a it's a real factory. So uh when we go to your shop, we can literally watch you make chocolate through the glass, you know, on the other side of the wall.

SPEAKER_01: 5:21

I have a window through the cafe. You can watch the inner workings of my brain in the form of making chocolate.

SPEAKER_00: 5:28

It is incredible.

SPEAKER_01: 5:29

Organizing everything around making chocolate.

SPEAKER_00: 5:32

Yep. Okay. What is a tariff? What does it mean? How does it impact you? Like, how do I even spell it? Is it two R's, two Fs, one R? Like, I don't even know. Check notes. Right. One R, one R F's. Two Fs.

SPEAKER_01: 5:45

Let's just think one comes first, two comes second. Uh-huh. Yeah. I have to admit, I am not a tariff expert. I have been, like most of the rest of us, living in a country with a fairly stable economic conditions.

SPEAKER_00: 6:00

Yep.

SPEAKER_01: 6:01

Economic policy fluctuates, but I've been able to start a business. Other people have been able to start businesses. Prices, yes, go up and down. I know the price of certain things at the grocery store are quite high, but all in all, things are fairly stable. And that includes my costs of doing business. And I depend on brokers who buy the raw commodity, cacao beans, for me from the countries of origin and then import them to the US. And they handle the tariffs, the all the import fees and duties and tariffs, which are imposed on goods coming into the US from other countries. You asked what tariffs are. I actually thought, oh. Well, tariff is a tax, right? But I didn't know how to explain that. So I went to Google.

SPEAKER_00: 6:50

Right. Tariff is just another, it's a fancy way. It's a tax. A difficult way to spell tax. Like it is A X. Thank you. I can spell that word. Spell tariff, spell tax. So it is a tax on imported goods. Imported goods. And so for your small business, and we're talking about a small business. How many people do you employ, for example? Like how many people work at your chocolate factory?

SPEAKER_01: 7:15

I have four part-time employees.

SPEAKER_00: 7:18

Okay. And you're selling me. Yes. Yeah. So it's a very small. Very small business. Petite factory. It's a nano factory. Let's just call it what it is. Yeah, a nano factory. Yes, perfect. So the tariffs are on imported goods. And how many of the things that you use in your shop do you need to have imported into the country?

SPEAKER_01: 7:43

I would say everything. The machines that I use for manufacturing are all made. Some are made in the US, but most of them are made overseas. But even if they're made in the US, they're made using components that are manufactured in other countries. Right. Or with materials that are from other countries. And then the my primary ingredients, cacao, cane sugar, and for the cafe coffee, those are all three agricultural products that don't grow in any uh significant quantities in the United States. So those have to come from overseas.

SPEAKER_00: 8:21

Now, they don't currently grow in our country at the rate that they need to. Could these tariffs, like if we put enough tariffs on things, could we then suddenly start growing all of these products here? Like, will it incentivize the United States to it's not possible.

SPEAKER_01: 8:39

It's not a possibility. We have quite a ways to go before climate change brings us to the brink of being able to grow cacao in New England. So silver lining to the climate change. So probably have other problems to address that were taking priority at that point.

SPEAKER_00: 8:58

When we are able to grow these products in New England, we will be thinking about other issues at that time, is what you're saying. I believe this is true. Yes, I think that's probably true. So no matter how many increases in tariffs might happen, there's no way to grow them here.

SPEAKER_01: 9:18

So the trees they grow outside this, but they only really produce uh volume of fruit within 20 degrees of the equator. That is the tropic zone. Hawaii is closer to 22 degrees, so Hawaii's kind of an outlier. It has struggles to do the full process of growing chocolate, but it's from tropical places. It's from places that have been colonized.

SPEAKER_00: 9:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 9:42

Let's be clear. In some contexts, it's called the Cocoa Belt around the world. It's where colonists took cacao as a cash crop to places where they had colonies throughout Africa, Asia, the South Pacific, and Central America. Basically, everywhere that cacao could grow and all the places that were uh seen as a a new uh opportunity for these colonial endeavors to make money, whether it's through buying and selling uh inappropriate human labor or uh enslavement, yes. Enslavement. Yeah. Yeah. Or the other cash crops that fit on the same ships. Right. Yeah. So I I don't I don't hesitate to share with people that I'm working with a commodity that has this legacy. It's really important to respect and understand and acknowledge where cacao's from. That was a sidebar. It's important. We could do a deep dive into that another day. All right.

SPEAKER_00: 10:43

So the trees only grow within 20 degrees of the equation.

SPEAKER_01: 10:47

The trees only grow within 20 degrees of the equator. They produce a fruit, tiny football-shaped, filled with seeds. And the seeds are what we use for making chocolate. The seeds are fermented where they are harvested and dried, and then they're loaded into burlap bags. They look like coffee bags if you've seen those. And from there they are exported generally in cargo containers on ships to other ports around the world. So I looked up the numbers. Cacao is grown in Hawaii and in Puerto Rico. Yes. Those two combined produce about 100 tons of cacao per year.

SPEAKER_00: 11:27

So Hawaii and Puerto Rico, those two places, 100 tons. Yeah, 100 tons.

SPEAKER_01: 11:33

Global chocolate production or cacao production, the raw beans, is four and a half million tons per year. So the US is less than 0.01% of the global cacao production.

SPEAKER_00: 11:49

But maybe it's because we haven't raised those tariffs high enough, Anna. Have you thought about that?

SPEAKER_01: 11:53

If only we're just pushing chocolate even further and further into the realm of luxury. Oh my God. Truly. Truly. Yeah. Yeah. But I also wanted to share the U.S. consumption of chocolate because maybe we can produce enough for Americans to eat, right? But no. Americans eat about one and a half million tons of chocolate per year. That's about eight pounds a person. And I'll take credit for maybe, you know, a couple people's shares.

SPEAKER_00: 12:18

Our household is doing an outsized portion of that, actually.

SPEAKER_01: 12:22

So the 100 tons produced in Hawaii and Puerto Rico doesn't even come close to producing the one and a half million tons that Americans crave and put away every year.

SPEAKER_00: 12:33

Okay. So this the solution to this issue is not let's grow all of these products in the United States. Because it's physically, environmentally not possible to do that.

SPEAKER_01: 12:44

Correct. The solution is to create economic policy that supports small business and global trade. We we want to continue to do business with other countries. Our economy is based on that. We're living in a global era. We talk to people in other countries, we we buy things, we appreciate culture, we cross borders to live or to study or to to work or to play. You can't even say it's going backwards to say that that's what isolationism is. This economic isolationism is not, it doesn't accommodate the broad and diverse way our businesses in this country and frankly in the rest of the world operate and conduct business with each other.

SPEAKER_00: 13:31

What is the impact on your business when, you know, the news says one day that tariffs are up 10% or, you know, they're going to take effect next Friday and they're going to be 50%? Well, now we're going to go back and we're going to change it to 25%. What does that do to you as a New Hampshire small business owner? How can you adapt to those changes that are happening?

SPEAKER_01: 13:55

As a small business, I think other small business owners would also relate to this statement. One of our primary strengths is that we can make nimble decisions. We can make decisions and pivot our business really quickly to meet our needs as business owners or the needs and desires of our customers or the environment that we're working in. But those decisions require information. And if we have an information flow that is changing constantly, we don't have enough stability to make these decisions. A lot of our pivots or changes that we make in our business might last several years. So even though we can act and change things swiftly, we still have to deal with the implications. And if if the setting keeps changing, the economic circumstances keep changing, the costs of buying our raw ingredients keep changing, then we don't have any foothold to decide what's going to be best for our business next. And for me, this was leading into 2025, was leading into being a big growth year for me. And instead, I am constraining, constricting, and trying to hold tight because I don't know what's going to happen with the larger state of our support for small businesses or the economy or how the consumer attitudes are going to be in six or 10 or 12, 24 months.

SPEAKER_00: 15:29

So you just said that coming into 2025, it was going to be a big growth time. What does that mean? What would that have meant?

SPEAKER_01: 15:37

Yeah. Well, for me, my business has been up on average 10% month by month compared to the previous year, every year since I opened this cafe five years ago. I have learned a lot. I'm a bootstrap startup. I'm learning how to do things as I do them. And this year, year five, in this location with my customer base, just is prime for setting a goal to make more than a 10% increase in business, maybe 20% by the end of the year.

SPEAKER_02: 16:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 16:06

I feel like I went into the year with all the ducks in a row ready for that. And instead, I'm looking at wondering what it's going to cost me to stay in business. And I I have to say, I have another industry challenge that's specific to cacao right now. And that is over the last year and a half, the price of cacao has quadrupled after being relatively stable for about 50 years.

SPEAKER_00: 16:35

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01: 16:36

So we were talking about economic uncertainty and that leading to the need to constrict and just hold tight, not make big business moves. That's already happening for me. And when we talk about a tariff or a tax of 10%, 10% is astronomical. But in the case of cacao, that's 10% on top of an already 3 to 4 X increase over last year's costs of purchasing ingredients.

SPEAKER_00: 17:02

Why did the cost of cacao go up by so much? What influences that?

SPEAKER_01: 17:08

Of course, it's complex. It's a bunch of several reasons. Primarily, the the initial driver is that the harvest has been low for the last couple of years in the world's largest cacao growing countries. Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, these Western African countries produce 60 to 70% of the world's cacao. Wow.

SPEAKER_00: 17:30

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 17:31

And their harvest has been down by half for the last couple of years. So that has caused a cascading uh situation of commodity buyers purchasing cacao from sources from other sources. Say, some of my fine flavor producer farmers who we work with in Central America, for instance, they're suddenly able to sell their cacao for a higher rate to commodity buyers. What's a commodity buyer? What does that mean? That's a very good question. So I like to distinguish myself as a small fine flavor bean to bar chocolate maker. I buy essentially directly. I partner with a broker who specializes in working with small farmers and small chocolate makers in the what we call the fine flavor cacao sector, which is less than 5% of the world's chocolate consumption and economy. Wow. Okay. Commodity buyers are part of a larger exchange like a grain or oil purchasing system where uh large commodity buyers who are purchasing on behalf of large food corporations like Mondeleys or Cadbury or some of these other big companies that put out a lot of they're buying on futures contracts. So they will set a price for an amount, a volume of cacao to be delivered in say May of 2025. And this contract will have been signed 12 months ago. Okay. And then when the harvest comes through and it's ready to deliver, suddenly, say it's with Ghana, they're struggling because they have only produced half of the cacao needed to fulfill their commodity contracts.

SPEAKER_00: 19:16

Okay.

SPEAKER_01: 19:17

Um, so the contract it just it's really a cascade. So I even though I'm not buying that cacao, it has upset everything.

SPEAKER_00: 19:25

Right. Because if they're not getting it from their usual location, they're then going to other places. They have to go elsewhere. Right. Yeah. And then meanwhile, it seems like a supply and demand thing somewhere. There is, yeah, but there's also, yes, it is a supply and demand thing.

SPEAKER_01: 19:42

But that supply is impacted not only by, I mean, you could say there's a shortage, but what is the shortage caused by? It's caused by global warming of the oceans, which affects weather patterns where cacao grows. There's climate change and extreme weather events are caused by climate change. Yes. In addition to the extreme inequity of farmers working to produce cacao in parts of the world where there are other kinds of inequities and legacy of colonialism. And so I said earlier that the cacao prices have remained fairly stable. Another way to put that is that they've been artificially suppressed by the commodity market for decades. So, in a sense, we could also consider that in certain ways the cacao economy is correcting itself to, in hopes, pay the farmers a more appropriate subsistence wage, a living wage, a sustainable rate for the efforts of their labor.

SPEAKER_00: 20:46

Right. So the cacao cost has gone up three to four times what it used to be.

SPEAKER_01: 20:51

So, in a in yeah, in a sense, the tariffs are the icing on the cake of this other economic issue that's much more pressing and substantial.

SPEAKER_00: 21:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:03

But that said, the tariffs, it might not be viable for some small businesses, even like mine, to continue, but overall, the world's still gonna want chocolate. We're still gonna make chocolate, we're still gonna buy it and eat it. But this tariff system is really affecting us across the board. It's not just cacao and sugar, it's packaging materials, it's components. I work with a machine maker who makes some of our custom machines, and it's uh it's the primary piece of equipment, it's the chocolate grinder or melanger. And it's made in the US, but it's made using components that are manufactured in Italy and Japan and Germany.

SPEAKER_02: 21:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 21:45

Because that's where the best components are from. The person who makes these machines is paying an import tariff on those components to bring them to the US. And then he's putting his machines together, building them, and then he's selling them, not just to me in New Hampshire or my friend in California, but he's also selling them to my colleagues in France and Italy and Philippines and China even. And they're all paying more tariffs when those machines get shipped back to them. So at a certain point, it might not make sense for a company that specializes in manufacturing custom machines to continue to manufacture these custom machines in the United States. It might make more sense to move the entire manufacturing operation to, say, Mexico, which will then allow them a more forgiving tariff uh relationship with their European colleagues, my European colleagues.

SPEAKER_00: 22:42

Right. Because at some point, like bringing the components in has a higher cost to be able to do that. You put it together and then you ship the products out, which has a higher cost. And what's the incentive to doing that in the United States? Yeah.

SPEAKER_01: 22:58

For certain sectors, these tariffs or policies could actually drive manufacturing out of the US instead of draw more manufacturing to the US.

SPEAKER_00: 23:07

That's the bottom line, I think, is that is this actually going to be pushing companies and work out of the country instead of incentivizing coming into the United States? Boy, oh boy, don't love, don't love that so much. Not so great. Not so great. Your farmers are already being impacted by the climate crisis and by outside variables like that. How do or how would the tariffs impact them? Would they feel the impact of the higher costs as the farmers?

SPEAKER_01: 23:38

So we, and when I say we in this context, I'm referring to small bean to bar makers who worked to pay a fair wage to farmers. So as an industry or a sector of the industry that specializes in ethically produced chocolate made with ethically produced ingredients, fairly paid farmers, uh, we will not and I will not ask the farmers to absorb that cost, that added expense. Right. And my brokers are working on a thin margin as well. So they're not going to absorb that extra 10%, say. Um, so that tariff cost will be pushed down the line to me. I can't afford to absorb it either. Right. So it will definitely result in increased prices at some point for my customers, for people buying any item that comes in a package, for you name it.

SPEAKER_00: 24:33

So we're in New Hampshire. I'm assuming tariffs are impacting people and small businesses in all 50 states, but in New Hampshire, are there ways that the state can support small businesses in this moment? Can New Hampshire help small businesses navigate this ever-changing landscape?

SPEAKER_01: 24:54

I believe New Hampshire can do more to support small businesses in this environment. I would like to see more opportunities for working capital made available to small businesses, especially when federal money to support small businesses is uh declining or withheld in this moment. Okay. And I would love to see our governor and our local legislators appeal to Congress and to Donald Trump to restrain tariffs. A 10% tariff is a 10% tax. And we need, I'm not sure how to say it.

SPEAKER_00: 25:32

Let's see what you say. We need leadership, support, leadership.

SPEAKER_01: 25:38

We need stable, oh, well thought out and planned economic policy that's consistent and based on supporting positive economic growth in this country and in the state.

SPEAKER_00: 25:54

And so that would not be tariffs that are making you potentially increase your costs because it's hitting you by 10% on every single thing you're bringing into your shop.

SPEAKER_01: 26:05

And yes, tariffs that are willy-nilly applied without rhyme or reason to the amount of the tariff or how or when it's when it's applicable. I've even heard of certain brokers importing goods to the US over the last several weeks who had to pay extra storage fees at customs and border protection because at the port, the customs and border agents did not know how to, did not have instruction or a system to bill for the tariff or the proper tariff. So the product gets there.

SPEAKER_00: 26:40

And the agent is like, I don't have your Venmo, we can't do that.

SPEAKER_01: 26:43

It goes into storage. And then who pays for that storage fee? The end buyer. So my broker. And then so that's another layer of expense that's potentially added on. And I'll just say another layer of expense that I think is beyond hypothetical, we're seeing a huge reduction in freight arriving in US ports, which means there's not like a ready available system of ships and cargo containers ready to provide the supply for our demand for whatever goods. So that, just like with the COVID pandemic, when freight was all locked up in India and other parts of the world, we're gonna see the cost of freight itself increasing.

SPEAKER_00: 27:24

What if we just have individual drones bringing everything at all? Does that work? If we just I would love to drone everything. Get me a chocolate drone. Chocolate drones. We're solving problems on this episode. I am all in. Shaped like an Easter bunny, coming your way this spring. I'm all in. Sign me up. There aren't ships and so forth available to then bring things places.

SPEAKER_01: 27:54

I believe, and this is me, not economist Anna saying, I believe, I foresee that the cost of freight worldwide is also going to increase alongside this imposition of tariffs. I have more to say about how how people can support or encourage. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00: 28:12

What can people do? Like what small business?

SPEAKER_01: 28:14

What should people be doing right now? Our governor should acknowledge, and our our economic policy should be designed to acknowledge that uh small businesses should not absorb the expense of tariffs. I also think that it should be clearly recognized that we're living in a day and age when business is global. We're not isolated to New Hampshire or to the United States. We're working with trade partners in other countries. We're manufacturing products here that we can sell to other countries and other regions of the world.

SPEAKER_00: 28:46

Anna, how many countries do you work with? How many different countries are you buying products from?

SPEAKER_01: 28:52

I'm getting currently cacao beans from about 10 countries. My sugar is grown in Brazil. Coffee I buy from a New Hampshire-based coffee roaster named Flight Coffee Roasters, and that's forcing from also a number of countries throughout the same sort of tropical region of the world.

SPEAKER_00: 29:09

Yep. All right. So governor and Congress need to make a clear statement that small businesses should not be absorbing these tariffs, the cost of these tariffs. And keep going. I sorry that I interrupted you.

SPEAKER_01: 29:22

I'm being redundant here, but small businesses need a stable tariff situation in order to figure out how to navigate. We need economic and policy stability in order to make decisions and navigate and grow our businesses.

SPEAKER_00: 29:36

Yeah. People love chocolate. They need their chocolate. Let's not make this harder for folks. The chocolate makers or the chocolate eaters. That's right. That's right. I talk a lot about advocacy in my job because it's literally in my job title. What would it mean to reach out to the governor or to reach out to our US senators? Like, what do I say if I wanted to do something about this? Hello, governor. Tariff Bad.

SPEAKER_01: 30:02

Oh my gosh, Liz, you're the one I rely on to tell me what to say. I know, but even the case is the city.

SPEAKER_00: 30:07

Look, I know her phone number. Please tell me what to say. Yeah, what do we say? So it sounds like the big things that you're telling me. So, you know, this is me learning in real time. Like tariffs are hurting our small businesses.

SPEAKER_01: 30:24

They're hurting our small businesses. They are a tax on the US people. And hello, we need to take Congress into account to hold themselves accountable for managing our fiscal resources, our our tax money.

SPEAKER_00: 30:38

Have you seen any of our state lawmakers taking action on this? Like, have we seen our state senators or state representatives or our governor? Like, have they come out and said things? Do we know? Have they tried to do things to help?

SPEAKER_01: 30:51

I don't know. I am head down, Liz, trying to run my small business. Um I do know. Yeah, I mean, I know that Chris Pappas, Maggie Hassan, Jean Shaheen are all highly sensitive to these topics and issues. I've discussed them with them before. But it doesn't hurt to raise their awareness with a couple more calls.

SPEAKER_00: 31:13

Yeah. And for our state lawmakers too, who, you know, we're we're recording this in sort of mid-ish to late May. And so the New Hampshire state budget, which I would assume has some impacts on small businesses, like you know, helping municipalities and things like that. Yeah. How are our state lawmakers thinking about the impacts on small businesses across the state as they think about what they're doing with our state budget? I don't know the answer to that.

SPEAKER_01: 31:40

Yeah, I don't I don't know the answer to that either. Also, did you ask me what happens to the money after it's collected by the US distance in border protection?

SPEAKER_00: 31:50

I wondered. I didn't know. What does what happens when the border agent is like, okay, I'm ready to collect your tariff money? It goes directly to the U.S.

SPEAKER_01: 31:58

Treasury. And from there, it becomes part of the general the government's general revenue. So what? So it can be used to fund uh government operations, to reduce the budget deficit or other expenditures, basically everything that that Congress has the power to manage.

SPEAKER_00: 32:17

So you, a small business owner in New Hampshire, will have to deal with 10% tariffs, which is a tax on these imported goods, and that money that needs to be spent by me who's a little bit goes into an unallocated general fund. And not even like a New Hampshire one, not even like, well, at least we'll be able to finally fund child care. It doesn't it doesn't go. No. At least we'll be able to fund housing, at least we'll be able to fund more chocolate. None of those things are happening. Now it's a game of mad libs. What is it gonna fund?

SPEAKER_01: 32:56

Drop in your guess. So I just wanted to drop that down because I think that's an important piece of the picture for uh your average taxpayer.

SPEAKER_00: 33:04

I don't know the answer.

SPEAKER_01: 33:06

I'm just saying.

SPEAKER_00: 33:06

I am just stunned, silent, which is great for a podcast. People love dead air when they're driving. They're like, you know what? I wish Liz would stop talking and we can just sit here and collect our thoughts. That's how I feel right now. What?

SPEAKER_01: 33:19

So for me, like there are some upsides, I will say, at least I'm trying to say, because I'm really feeling the pressure, to be honest. This is an opportunity to raise awareness. We're all getting a crash course in tariffs and international trade.

SPEAKER_00: 33:34

I learned how to spell it on this episode. This is great. It's it's a skill. We all start somewhere. We are all going to learn things.

SPEAKER_01: 33:43

Yeah. So that consumer awareness also leads to a greater understanding for the pricing and the value of the specialty food product that I make. Yeah. Uh, and that's uh really important to me to share because of how special it is, how special the the cacao that I'm working with is.

SPEAKER_00: 34:03

Anna, thank you so much for joining today, talking about teaching me first of all where these trees grow, because I had absolutely no idea. 20 degrees. But thank you for coming on to the New Hampshire Has Issues podcast to talk about an issue that is like so much bigger than New Hampshire in a lot of ways and is impacting so many people. So thank you so much for being on.

SPEAKER_01: 34:24

Thank you, Liz. It's an honor to have a conversation with you anytime. So I really appreciate your inviting me to join you here today.

SPEAKER_00: 34:32

I'm so glad that you're able to do this. And now I've gotta buy the 12-year-old hot chocolate. So the 12-year-old is getting a hot chocolate on Saturday, which is what I promised him. Can I please read it? Please. Alright, this is from 12-year-olds, written on October 2nd, 2024. Exeter, New Hampshire has many chocolate shops, the best one of which is Anna Chocolate. Another chocolate shop in town is I'll just bleep, let's pretend we won't say that. Which will never be better than Anna's. He wrote this for school. The task was write about your favorite place. So this is what he wrote. The owner, of course, is Anna, who is a friendly local who makes everybody feel welcome. He then goes into your actual address for the shop, and it is 975 square feet, which I don't even know how he found that out. That is absolutely true. He doesn't lie. That's why he should be doing this podcast. He says, is 975 square feet of chocolate-making goodness. They even have their own personal drinks that are fantastic. Enna's chocolate is fresh and homemade, unlike big chocolate corporations, like Company and Company. I won't name them. I don't want to get sued. Enna's is a great place to order a coffee or hang out with a friend. The best reason to visit Enna's is the most amazing homemade chocolate you will ever have. Why are we putting a tariff on this? I'm so honored.