Is Trump Wrong? Why Tariffs Won’t Save American Jobs

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Free trade or die? Yeah, take off a little live free and die. How about free trade or die? Yeah, I went off on a mega rant yesterday. My intolerance for bull excrement. I also have a little patience when people throw out little historic.

tidbits here and there and they start talking about the wonders of certain areas and certain time periods here in this country and talking how much better it was at that point in time because we had tariffs at that time. We didn’t use an income tax, we used tariffs. Okay, again, this is part of the problem. How do you compare?

How do you compare late 19th century America to today? How do you make that comparison our place in the world then to now? Again, we weren’t really that much of a dominant player. We were, but not the top. So UK was still basically running the show at that point in time. Not to mention the fact

What was our military budget back then?

nothing.

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Was nothing arguments that used to take place whether or not we should even have standing armies for crying out loud. I mentioned this before prior to World War Two after World War One, we kind of shut a lot of things down and that part of the World War Two miracle prior to World War Two. We are our military was smaller than Romania’s. That’s just the reality. You can’t compare them.

You can’t compare the size of government. Think about the millions and millions of people that now work not just for the federal government, local governments around the country. We decided on this. Go back to that point in time. There wasn’t any social security. There wasn’t any Medicare. There wasn’t any of this stuff. There wasn’t section eight housing. How do you compare the financing of a country?

than to now. I mean, it’s almost like comparing the cost of a home, a mansion back in the late 19th century to today.

Different world and they use this stuff all the time and it’s nonsensical Tariffs tariffs they talk about, know, Trump’s talked about the wonders of McKinley. Well, okay Why don’t we look at that period of time? And yeah McKinley most certainly was tariff man. There’s no doubt about it, but he changed

Yeah, he changed his mind because he said, holy cow, we got too much stuff here in this country and we can’t have enough people that can buy it. We’re going to have to start trading with others. He then got killed shortly after that. He got shot. And you go even take a look at Grover. Cleveland was president at that point in time, and he hated terrorists because it was it was all about corruption.

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Things really, in that sense, don’t really change much. You had, was, you know, the Gilded Age, the Gilded Age, and I happen to be a pretty big fan of that show. It’s pretty darn good. You take a look at the power players who ran the country, the oligarchs from that point in time. You know, talk about true oligarchs. They were locked in. They wanted to be protected.

They loved it. I told the story here on the program, Andrew Carnegie and has, you know, talked about socialism. It’s like socialism. Be great for me. Be great for me. Basically put all my competitors out of business. I’d the only game in town. These tariffs were used to protect them and keep them. You think that, you know, and Trump’s alluded to this too, and he’s wrong. Talks about, yeah, we are a richest nation. We were doing great. Are you out of your mind? We, seriously, we.

We could have become a socialist, a communist country. Simply based upon the fact that the way we were treating workers back at that point and through that point in time. Come on, people, you you went to high school, you read Upton Sinclair. You must know about the riots that took place where we had armed forces shooting at striking workers and, you know, the Pinkertons beating people up.

How do you think the mafia got involved? Mafia first got involved in labor unions. Mafia first got involved in labor unions because labor unions needed some muscle.

to go up against the Pinkertons that were coming after. Again, people, you wanna go back to that? I don’t want to go back to that. I want sensible protections for workers and all of these things that where we’re at today, it’s a different world. We are a better place. Our workers are in a much better place today than they were then.

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We don’t need tariffs. We don’t. Do we need to make deals? Do we need to make deals when it comes to countries putting protections and barriers up, not allowing our products in and protecting theirs? Absolutely. That frees up trade. This idea though,

idea that again is floated by many many Republicans out there. Again I apologize I can’t remember her name she is the representative Republican in the Buffalo area in upstate New York it’s Erie County and you know she called out factories up here.

It was a different world. New York was a different place. lot of hollowed out factories in upstate New York for a myriad of different reasons. Not because of China. Not because of China. Yes, yes. Well, I concede. I concede that yes, with certain businesses, did they offshore based upon the ability to cut costs?

Absolutely. But that also has to do with the fact that guess what? not just labor costs. It’s the cost of doing business in this country, which can get very, very high. You’re going to blame China on the fact that the typewriter plant, the Smith Corona plant outside of Rochester is no longer up and running or Kodak because they made the stupid mistake and not going fully digital.

is a shell of its former self?

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Xerox is up there too in Rochester. Xerox had some of the best technology leading up to the era of personal computers. They decided not to do anything with it. They sold it to Steve Jobs.

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Anyway, anyway, you get rid of government regulations to make your area of the state much more attractive to doing business. It’s going to take time, but people will come. The only businesses that set up shop, big businesses that will set up shop in the state of New York, again, we talked about the CHIPS Act, the Micron plant, is if they get a deal. They get government money. They don’t have to pay.

State taxes, they get all sorts of property tax abatements, which I don’t believe in. I think it’s completely unfair. I believe that we should be equal under the law. Nobody should get handouts and giveaways. Nobody should get special deals.

I to talk a little bit. I mentioned it briefly. Talk about how countries can basically shoot themselves by putting up trade protections. China did that. China is system for a while. Again, I talk about the fact that they weren’t a imperialistic country. They kind of absorbed areas in and around.

almost their emperor, you know, was a God and you had to pay tribute, to that, that emperor. they had to recognize any, any country, the, any foreign entity wanted to do business with China had to, recognize the emperor’s authority. He was superior and they had to offer tribute.

And this worked for period of time, but then it didn’t. The Canton system in China was established in the 18th century and that further restricted foreign trade because it limited to this port of Canton and only had a monopoly. Only certain group of merchants were allowed.

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They wanted to control trade. They said they wanted to protect Chinese interests. In essence, what it did, it fostered resentment and unfairness with foreign countries. What did it do? The isolationist powers of this, you know, the Qing dynasty and this Canton system did what to China? Led to economic stagnation, a lack of technological advancement.

China’s focus on being just completely self-sufficient, resistance to any sort of foreign ideas and innovations. The West passed it by.

west, passed it by and that’s when you got into the opium wars. The Brits, wanted to offset, offset the trade imbalance with China, started smuggling opium into the country. Again, China suffered a defeat and then they opened up more ports to foreign

trade, that’s when they Hong Kong became part of the UK. And again, they weakened their dynasty and caused all sorts of problems and they collapsed in 1911. It’s trade protection. That’s what it does. We don’t want that. We don’t want that. There again, it’s me, it sounds good. You get the rah rahs out there on social media.

We’re not gonna bring everything back here to the United States. It’s just not going to work that way. Nor do we want it to work that way. We want other countries to prosper. We want them to do well. Doesn’t it make sense? Doesn’t it make sense, again, if you own a business, don’t you wanna have a business where your customers are doing well?

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and they’re going to be able to spend more money. That’s what you want. You don’t want to shut your country off to the rest of the globe. Now, again, everybody out there is going to come back, what about this? can’t sell cars in Japan. I know, okay. Yes, Japan doesn’t allow us to sell our cars here, but let’s be honest. I think that we should be allowed to sell cars.

in Japan. How many are going to be sold there? I don’t know. I don’t know. Do I think we should force them to buy our cars? No. No, I think we should compete.

Every business is different. Take a look at niche markets. You know what? I’ll use Italian cars as an example. For a while, Fiat was in the United States, then it left the United States, then it came back into the United States. started, remember that advertisement, that really risque advertisement. How could you forget it?

And if you’re not familiar with it, you can go look it up on YouTube when they brought the aberrant Back fiat back here to the country again. It’s They don’t sell a Tremendous amount of them here quality issues was an issue prior quality issues again inexpensive car Japanese cars more reliable more reliable

So yeah, they’ve got their little market they’ll sell in United States, but they can’t compete with Japanese cars. Alfa Romeo, wasn’t here for a period of time, up, brought it back. Again, know, little niche market there, cute design, know, nice look in car, Italian car, not beautiful car. Again, reliability issues. And okay, what else do you have? Okay, you got the high end.

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Italian cars and Again, they control production of those things You you’re on waiting lists for many of them You’re on waiting lists for many of these cars Again, that’s a niche market We here in the United States Again, we got to understand who we trying to compete with we want to sell more cars in Japan

I don’t know, maybe we should start, I mean, make some very high end stuff that’s made in America that could be a niche market over there that they’re gonna be interested in buying. And we gotta take into consideration what type of cars do they buy? There’s a lot of things that need to take place that need to happen in order us to be selling certain products in certain places. Again, you cannot discount as well the fact that the…

the various different service is that we provide, whether it be in tech, whether it be in banking, whatever it may be, that’s something else as well. There’s this other argument that’s brought up all the time by people when discussing, we gotta be able to make more of this and we need to, it’s a national security concern. And I’m like, I get that, but again, do I think that?

We’d like to make more ships here in this country, sure, but guess what? We need more shipbuilders. We need the workers that are going to go ahead and do this. They need to line up contracts and make sure that, okay, I’m gonna do this. And we can bring people and apprentice them, teach them to do this. We’re not there.

We’re not there. You’re not gonna snap your fingers and see all sorts of companies come back here to the United States, factories come back here to the United States. Will certain factories maybe increase some production? Sure, that’s all well and good. The best way, the best way and what we need to be doing, okay? What we need to be doing, what’s gonna bring business here to the United States and the same reason why every company

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wants to be listed on the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. Okay. You want to make the United States as business friendly as possible. And again, we’ve got a lot, a lot going on here in the United States compared with other countries around the globe. know, the worker protections in Europe and you can’t fire people cheaper energy costs here in the United States. Businesses are practical.

They’re practical. They will take a look and they’ll say, cheaper for us to build our product in the United States. Well, you know what? We’re going to do that. That’s what the focus needs to be. And that again, that has to do with some of the things that Donald Trump has talked about. Reducing taxes, reducing regulations, bringing energy costs down. Watchdog on wallstreet.com.