Recently, while on Trump’s campaign trail, I met renowned economist Dr. Peter Navaro. Talk about a hero for the American people! Dr. Navaro battled the DC swamp of globalists as President Trump’s Director of Trade & Manufacturing and fought the people who have sold out the American worker.
The protectors of the status quo and special interests sent him to jail for his efforts. He told the crowd at a recent rally I attended, “I went to jail, so you won’t have to!” He is the only presidential appointee in the history of the United States who has been thrown in jail by the weaponized Department of Justice for Congress holding him in contempt. He rightfully refused to divulge private conversations he had with the president, citing executive privilege.
Dr. Navaro was one of the first economists to explain that the American manufacturing sector has been hollowed out by foreign competition that has cheated the fair-trade rules by dumping their cheap, government-subsidized products on the American economy. Although American consumers did benefit from cheaper prices, American workers lost their jobs by hundreds of thousands over the past 30 years.
As reported by the CATO Institute in 2023, China has explicitly violated World Trade Organization rules and “uses an intricate web of industrial policies, including subsidies, forced technology transfer, and market restrictions, to distort market behavior, achieve dominance in global markets, and increase US dependency on PRC imports,” (12/13/23).
Dr. Navaro then led the fight for President Trump to push back and fight for our economic interests. The tool for such a fight is a tariff, also known as an import tax. Very few of today’s politicians take the time to realize that part of Alexander Hamilton’s genius in building the original American economy was using tariffs to give American manufacturers a level playing field with the British and the French. We used to fund our entire government with just tariffs.
Professional politicians, globalists, the liberal elite, corporate titans, and even moderate Republicans have howled that the use of tariffs would damage free trade, lead to tariff wars, and cause inflation, but the naysayers were wrong. There was no inflation during the Trump Administration, and foreign countries started backing down. This success of tariffs under the Trump administration should reassure us all. We all want free and fair trade, but we need to use tariffs when necessary to force bad actors like the Chinese towards better behavior.
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