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
Okay, well, let's look at it like this. Do you remember the China tariffs when Trump was first in office? You remember those, obviously. And you don't remember that... Yeah, that really meets a higher cost for you. We all heard about inflation in 2021 and 2022, which was because of COVID and the lockdowns and money printing, right?
So your insurance went up, your health insurance went up, your table bill went up, your food costs went up. None of these eggs, for example, went up. We all heard about that. So many things that went up that drove inflation, gasoline, these were not things that we import.
it's certainly not things that we import from china and china was the main main source of our uh uh tariffs in 2018 and of course they were ascended during the biden presidency as well so tariffs against china our number one trade partner did not lead to inflation okay not not measurable and either janet and even janet yellen our president secretary before our new one scott the zen said the same thing it's not measurable now
Recently, the Boston Federal Reserve came up with a report, and the report was, let's pretend there's going to be a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada. Let's pretend there's going to be a 60% tariff on China. I think if I remember off the top of my head, it was a one-time increase of the inflation rate of 0.8%. percentage point. So what does that mean?
That would be a one-time thing. Now, we can argue, oh, no inflation is good. Okay, I get it. Life is very complicated. But what if I told you that your inflation is higher, but your income is higher, right? You're making more money. You're now working. They're now hiring more people at General Motors. People now have the economy better.
There's more people producing and making things, and I think rather than working part-time jobs in retail and in travel and tourism. There's always a payoff, right? We can't sit back and not be active. We can't be inactive because we're afraid of something happening. That's not what leadership is.
You can't be afraid if you take an action that you're going to break something and something's not going to go right. If something does not go right or goes terribly wrong, you know, tariffs are not permanent. You could remove them, right?
So all of a sudden, like I was telling you, if $100 time and 25% really was a 25% charge in addition to your $100 widget, which it is not, but if it was even close to that, you could always say, ah, that's too much for our consumers. That's too much for our economy. They're now gone. So it's not permanent.
But all the studies show, from the Boston Fed to the US Industry Commission show that tariffs are not a major factor for a play pit. It's money printing, right? Big problem there, government spending. Those are the main reasons for inflation, not power.
Sure. So when you think of the pharmaceutical market, there's two things. There's branded drugs, which would be like Some new drug, right? Some new branded drug that just came out a year or two ago. This is where the pharmacy companies like Pfizer make all of their money. And then there's the generic drugs, which is what most people take.
Somebody's on blood pressure medication or even something like Viagra. This is all generic medication now. So it's commoditized. It's lower cost. And the big pharmaceutical companies have decided that it's much easier for them to either, A, contract manufacture overseas, which India being one of the lead spots, followed by China. or just get out of the business altogether.
And so then those players in India and China, namely India, become the brand, like Dr. Ready or Cipla or Sun Pharmaceutical. These are all brands that they sound American, right? But they're not. They're Indian brands. And on the pharmaceutical side, I believe India is a culture of more than half, at least 60%, maybe more, of our pharmaceuticals, generic pharmaceuticals.
In order for them to even make these pharmaceutical goods, they rely on China for organic compounds and synthetic chemicals that go into your drugs, right? So China is a major component of the generic supply chain in the United States.
And not only that, because of China's Made in China 2025 policy, they're also moving way up the value chain, and China is investing heavily in branded drugs and new treatment, so they can become the Pfizer's and the AbbVie's of the world. And they're getting there. They're on par with a lot of our big biotech guys. For the US.
Well, for generic pharmaceuticals, it's about 80%, right? So, about 80% of your generic farmer is overseas. And the majority of that comes from India. Other markets would be Israel is huge with Teva Pharmaceuticals. That's an Israeli brand. And a lot of companies also from Ireland, believe it or not. A lot of those would be American companies that contract manufacturing in Ireland.
And these guys are a big source of Americans' trade deficit in Ireland because of pharmaceutical drugs, actually. One of the biggest sources of Americans' trade deficit is pharmaceutical drugs because, as we know, Americans are on a boatload of drugs. Right? No one's on drugs like Americans. So we have a huge deficit. It would be great if we... Hey, we're number one.
We're number one.
Well, some people say it is a national security issue, actually, because if you can't get things like antibiotics or when you had COVID, for example, when you couldn't imagine if you're in a situation with COVID and this could happen easily in the future, why not? But you go, we don't have the labs to make vaccines.
Let's pretend you thought the mRNA vaccine was God's gift to mankind to save you from COVID. We don't have the labs to do those things. We don't have the innovators. Well, where are we going to get it? Well, we got to get it from China. We got to get from somewhere else. And as you increase your...
purchase of, as you would actually increasingly depend on imports, then you lose the local lab talent to even want to get in the pharmaceutical business because it's just so small, right? It's just a branded guy. So we're doing R&D and wonder drugs, you know? So it's very important to have a little mix of all of it. You can't just have the branded, the big one, the drugs that are here.
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