Kenneth Raposa
speaker
133 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Apr 2025
Kenneth Raposa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
tariffs is harder than rocket science, because rocket science, we know where we're going, and we could communicate with the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 satellite right here from the United States, but yet we can't seem to figure out how to manage trade or how to tariff a certain country, so you have an industry in the United States. So it is a lot harder than rocket science.
Now, as far as the tariff story goes, there's three front strategy to Trump's tariffs, right? You have what I call the help a brother out tariff or the tariff threat, which you saw over the past two weekends, where Trump would say, we have a national emergency at the border with fentanyl and drugs.
We are asking you, you're our friends, you're Mexico, you're Colombia, we have a free trade agreement with you guys, we're asking you to help us out. You don't want to help us out? Okay, we're going to hit you with 25% tariffs and maybe you'll change your mind. They did change their mind.
So now there is no tariff and we have supposedly more policing at the border, we added the Colombians taking in their migrants, and we'll see how that goes over a month. That was the deadline that Trump gave to reassess the situation. That's one way that we're going to use tariffs. The other way is as a revenue, and that would be maybe a lower tariff of 10% to 15% across the board.
That would basically wipe out all the free trade agreements we have, because even Korea, which had a free trade agreement with the United States, would now be faced with tariffs for imports, whatever we import from Korea. And the idea there would be that the government is raising revenue, and that revenue would be used to...
enable the government to extend something like the Tax Cut and Jobs Act, or, of course, lower our fiscal budget deficit, which is about $2 trillion today. And then the third is what we heard out today, which is more of a balanced trade situation, right? And this would go after certain countries. We've already had this with China, for example, when Trump was elected the first time.
We have to ask on those guys. The balanced trade issue, which is what we've heard today from the White House, is where you're telling a country, look, We know that we're the big guys. We know that we're the consumers. We know that we love to shop till we drop in the United States. And there's never going to be equal trade among us, right? Because we're a bigger consumer than you are.
But we don't want to have a growing deficit. We don't want to go from a 2017, $16 billion deficit with Canada to a record-breaking $70 billion one. We don't want to go from a $900 billion deficit in goods with the world to a 2024 record-breaking $1.2 trillion goods deficit. We want to see some stabilization, or maybe it's some countries going the other way.
Because that's not the case, those countries are going to face tariffs. So one thing Trump said today was, as an example, Hey, if the Europeans want to import a Jeep Wrangler from the US, it's a 10% tariff at least, not to mention the VAT tax, value added tax on top of that. But if we want to import a BMW convertible made in Germany, it's a 2.4% tariff.
So in the idea of the reciprocity, we will say, OK, we're going to hit that convertible beamer with a 10% tariff and VAT or something equivalent, just like you're doing to our guys. So that's the free-prompt strategy. And that's what we saw coming out of Washington today with the tariffs that would come down the pipe in April to balance trade with our biggest trading partner. Okay.
Okay. So, I work for the Coalition for a Prosperous America. They are in favor of tariffs because their members are companies who are impacted by trade from countries who have low-cost labor, lower taxes, weaker environmental regulations than we have here. And if they want to exist as a company, if they want to exist as a going concern, They need some sort of protection.
They're very in favor of tariffs. The same thing with a lot of our members who work in agriculture, who are beef ranchers, for example. We have free trade agreements with numerous countries like Mexico. We're importing more beef than we ever did before.
The beef that you have on the shelves in the grocery store probably came from Mexico or Brazil, probably didn't come from Oklahoma or your local farmer, unless it's labeled as such, right? So these guys want to have a... I don't want to use the word... It's a level playing field because there's never really going to be a level playing field when you have the strongest currency in the world.
Obviously, our dollar goes much farther in Mexico. If you want to build a beach house and we only have a million dollars, we're not going to be able to build it in Malibu, but we are going to be able to build it in Colombia or Margarita Island in Venezuela. That's for sure. Because the dollar is much stronger for us, it's much easier for us to import.
If you want to have a strong dollar, you want to have the dollar be the world currency and the world reserve currency, then you have to have some sort of protection if you also want to have industry and people who produce things in the United States. Otherwise, as time goes on, as we have seen, it's going to be a market just increasingly penetrated by imports.
And that's going to lead to layoffs and more treatment centers in upstate New York and other areas instead of people working.
Well, the top downside to tariffs, of course, would be, let's say, for example, I'm an auto industry, right? And I have to import an engine from my contractor in Canada. Right now, it's duty-free. So now there's a tariff. I'm importing the engine. The guy I'm importing it from, the customs broker, is going to say, well, that $5,000 engine is now trapped at 25%.
You have to fork up that money ahead of time. Now, imagine if I'm importing 1,000 of those engines. Now, I've got to fork over hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars to pay for the tariff to my customs broker. Now, I might be able to reach an agreement with my customer on the other end, where I can say, what if I buy more volume, or can I take on a loan?
So the tab is a little less impacted than the 25%, meaning that $100 tab to 25% doesn't always mean that the good is going to be all of a sudden $125, is what I'm trying to say.
But for a company like that, like the auto industry in particular, that tab that sends things back and forth across the Mexican and Canadian border all the time, multiple times for the same item, it would be a big headache for those guys, for sure.
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