change its strategy is unclear but for now g twenty finance ministers maybe with the exception of stephen moore present themselves as one big family working together for free trade. cuba has begun a cautious process of reform instigated by its new president. in april he became the first non castro head of state on the island for sixty years and this weekend parliament approved a new cabinet consisting almost exclusively of ministers who already served and our own castro deputies are also debating constitutional reform which among other things will permit to private property but cements the communist party's hold on political power. cuba's parliament has been debating constitutional reform since saturday it would be the first update since one nine hundred seventy six focusing largely on a controlled opening of the economy above all reformers want stronger recognition of private property rights and the right that we already have here paid employment and private property ownership we have to recognise this objectively this is the reality we have to accept and regulate it. the communist party remai

. >> fair question from stephen moore. the end of the day, you and i are going to be paying for tariffs. there's a lot of chinese-made stuff here. those prices go up, we're going to pay for whether it's clothing, electronics, et cetera. what's the best way to pressure china? >> one of the ways that we can do it is kby requiring a level playing field. for u.s. companies and foreign companies to operate in china, oftentimes you have to have a chinese partner, whereas chinese companies operating in america don't have to have a partner. for instance, amazon. if they want to offer or microsoft want to offer cloud computing services in china, they're forced by the government to have a partner. whereas alibaba and the other tech giants of china don't have to have a partner in the united states. many sectors of the chinese economy are off limits to any type of foreign participation, whether american companies or french or german companies. i believe all the foreign countries should band together and say, china, in you're not going

plus, stephen welcomes... mandy moore. sara bareilles and josh groban. and musical guest meghan trainor. featuring jon batiste and stay human. and now, live on tape from the ed sullivan theater in new york city, it's stephen colbert! ( cheers and applause ) ( band playing ) >> stephen: hey, everybody, thank you so much. ladies and gentlemen, welcome to "the late show." i'm your host, stephen colbert. ( cheers and applause ) folks, i want you to brace yourself because here's a sentence i don't often say: donald trump did something good. ( laughter ) oh yeah, no hmm. today, he pardoned alice marie johnson, a great-grandmother, first-time nonviolent drug offender who received a life sentence for cocaine possession. life-- that seems pretty harsh, but if you've ever been stuck in a conversation who's high on cocaine, that feels like a life sentence. ( laughter ) so, anyway, he did the right thing. he did the right thing. she didn't deserve to be in there. he let her off. but maybe he did the right thing for the wrong reason, because there was no formal legal

stephen moore understands the tariffs as few others do, having served the trump campaign as an economic adviser. he is the founder of the club for growth and is a distinguished fellow at the heritage foundation. welcome, stephen. -- welcome, stephen. great to have you with us. let me start with the question of tariffs and trade. you've been progrowth, the president has been progrowth, isn't he getting in the way with his own message with some of these actions he is taking? is -- i have always said it is a high-stakes game of poker. i believe that what happened last week on wednesday when the european union basically came hat in hand to the white house to try to negotiate these tariffs trump is proposing is a game changer in the trade debate. it was a major win for donald trump. europe -- it is a handshake deal. they agreed to lower their tariffs on manufacturing products. most importantly, the europeans said that with the cooperation of donald trump both sides of the atlantic will try to move towards a zero tariff policy, which is a total win for free trade. visited -- is it a dangerous

i want to bring in stephen moore, a cnn senior economics analyst and a former trump economics adviser and lynette lopez, a senior finance correspondent. lynette, how much credit should the president get for this surge in the economy? >> we've hit 4.1% gdp or 4% gdp a couple times before during the obama administration. trump likes to say this is the first time it's happened in a long, long time. that's not a fact. the only difference now is that we have a president who touts these numbers like a flailing balloon man outside of a used car lot. you know, a lot of businesses are very concerned about the fact that tariffs are going to hit. they're concerned about what's coming in the future, so they're making a lot of investments now and i think that's why we saw a surge in investment, which, by the way, the only as great as, you know, it's about the same level as it was in 2012. so, nothing historic there either. and so one concern that economists have is indeed that we're going to see these numbers drop off in the next quarter. >> okay. that's a lot of cold water. so you know the presid