-Welcome to Nevada Week.

I'm Amber Renee Dixon, joining you from CES at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

This year's Consumer Electronics Show is highlighting humanoid robots, robots meant to look and perform like humans.

As for their impact on Nevada's workforce, a new report suggests that robots could impact up to 92,000 hospitality jobs in the state by 2035.

That story is ahead, but we begin with an update on tariffs.

At CES 2025, the Consumer Technology Association warned about their potentially negative impacts on the US economy and American consumers.

We spoke with Ed Brzytwa, the Vice President of International Trade for CTA about that and more.

I want to go back to CES 2025.

And ahead of that, the CEO of CTA Gary Shapiro said about the tariffs that President Trump was proposing that they would be a major inflation-causing tax on Americans and harmful to the US economy.

So fast-forward a year, what has the result been?

(Ed Brzytwa) I think we have seen greater inflationary pressures.

Clearly, Americans are concerned about affordability.

I mean, I remember right after the election in November, there was this sense that somehow all the people who voted for the President, because he said he was going to address inflation and address the affordability crisis, would be comfortable with imposing tariffs, which are regressive taxes that consumers in the United States ultimately pay.

And the data is showing that the pass-through, there's one study that said the pass-through of the tariff cost is 94% through the US economy to consumers.

-Has that already hit?

-That has hit in part, but not in full.

And let me walk you through that.

It's hit in part because some companies did have to pay the tariffs to import their products.

Other companies just front-loaded so much inventory before the tariffs were imposed that their tariff costs were not as great as they could have been.

Now, there are certain retailers that have billions of dollars of tariff costs, and small businesses have tariff costs, but the true hit might not happen until this year when all that inventory dries up.

And that could happen over the next couple months, and then companies have to import again and they're going to be paying the higher tariff rate.

So this story is not over yet, from my perspective.

What's also been interesting to me is that the manufacturing sector has gotten hit really hard.

And because they need inputs, not just from within the United States, from other parts of the world, manufacturing is a very global supply chain.

And there's one particular index run by the Institute for Supply Management, the Manufacturing Index, and it's been in contraction mode for month after month since the tariffs were imposed.

-Manufacturing is an industry that Nevada would like to get into further to diversify the economy, but now might the State want to rethink that?

-I think this administration, if they want to support the manufacturing sector, all tariffs all the time is not going to help manufacturers.

They need to have an understanding of what are the inputs that we need from our friends and allies and close trading partners around the world where it's okay to have zero tariff like we did in the past.

-The President would argue that this is raking in a lot of money for the country, that we are taking back money that was essentially stolen from us.

-Well, you know, when companies go out of business, that's not great for our economy either.

That deprives local jurisdictions, states from revenue as those companies disappear, as they can't employ more people.

I mean, there are costs to these actions that we're seeing play out over the course of time.

-Well, tell me more about that, because I don't know if that has been covered a lot, companies closing.

-Yeah.

What I've read recently is that bankruptcies in the small business sector are increasing.

When we talk to our small business members, the tariff situation and the tariff uncertainty, in general, like the tariffs on/tariffs off, exceptions, the complexity of the tariffs, that has been more devastating to them relatively to larger businesses.

Now, the larger businesses are deeply impacted by this as well, but the small businesses, they're disproportionately impacted.

And we have-- If you look at CES, there's hundreds and thousands of small businesses here.

-And then what about the impact on the tech sector as far as consumers?

They have been buying technology despite tariffs.

-So we did a number of studies looking at the potential impact of the tariffs as proposed by the President during the campaign and then initially imposed back in like April, May.

And what we found was that for certain products, depending on what the pass-through was, you could see a much higher price over the course of time for that product, and that would lead to less purchases by consumers.

So the consumer purchasing power has gone down over time, particularly at the lower end of the economic spectrum.

So for people who can't afford the latest and greatest iPhone or the latest and greatest, you know, video game console, they're going to hold on to products for longer.

So what we estimated was that people would, instead of spending money on new and great products that are launched here at CES, they would hold on to products for a much longer time.

And so when we're talking about-- -But it was a good Christmas for the tech sector.

-Because of the front-loading.

Because of all that product got brought in preholidays with intent to deliver very affordable products to the marketplace for the holidays.

-Which industries have been hardest hit so far, and then what are you expecting in 2026 within consumer electronics?

-Well, it depends on your definition of "consumer technology," right?

I think it's not just these reciprocal tariffs or the fentanyl tariffs, it's also tariffs under a different statute called Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which is-- it relates to national security.

And so the President, in his first term, used that statute to impose tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum-- 25% for steel, 10% for aluminum.

And now in this term, they ratcheted that up to 50% for steel, 50% for aluminum, and an expansive list of what they call "derivative products."

So these are products that are not steel or aluminum, but they contain steel or aluminum.

And that has caused a lot of problems for manufacturing industries, particularly automotive.

And I think every company that has some sort of steel and aluminum now has to pay attention to what is the amount of steel and aluminum in their product.

What's the value?

What's their potential tariff payment in the future?

And so they've done this as well, used that same statute, to impose tariffs on lumber and timber products, copper, and they'll potentially do it in the future on critical minerals and downstream products, semiconductors and consumer technology products that contain semiconductors.

So this is-- The tariff story still is evolving here, but those industries that got hit hard by the steel and aluminum tariffs are really suffering.

-Last question, and this is about the critical mineral supply.

Nevada has the only operating lithium mine in the country.

There are other critical minerals here that can be mined.

It's a big industry here.

Their argument is, this is the time to now really pull away from China and bolster our own national security by having our own supply.

What would you say to that?

-Well, it's one thing if you're just focused on China.

This investigation is not just about China.

This is about the whole world and imports of critical minerals in general, whether they threaten to impair US national security.

So I could make an argument that we actually should have strong critical minerals trade with our treaty allies and close trading partners to create a better supply and a more affordable supply of those critical minerals for our industry in the United States and for our manufacturers.

If we impose tariffs on those inputs as well from whether it's coming from Europe or Australia or Southeast Asia, that doesn't seem to me anyway to be the best decision.

If we're going to focus on China, let's focus on China and not just throw a tariff wall up across everyone else around the world.

-So you would be okay with the tariffs on China?

-I think that's a different conversation compared to talking about our tariffs on our allies and trading partners.

We've always had a concern about China's use of certain policy tools to restrict critical minerals trade.

When I was at the office of US Trade Representative, we worked on a WTO case on China's export restraints on rare earths and other types of critical minerals.

And we won that case against China.

We worked together with Japan and the EU as our allies to effect change in China, and China did change its policies.

We're not doing that anymore.

It seems more in the unilateral world, rather than working with our allies to change China's behavior.

-Ed Brzytwa, thank you so much for joining Nevada Week.

-Pleasure.

Thank you so much.