Robert Lighthizer
speaker
237 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Robert Lighthizer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
real real emergency i couldn't agree more it changes the kind of country we live in it's not the kind of country i don't care whether you're well off or not it's not the kind of country you want your children living in it's not america and and we have to do something about it and and these are this is i believe this is the motivation for for donald trump this is the motivation
for the people in his administration who are informed on these issues. Some of them obviously deal with other kinds of issues.
So the first thing you do is you acknowledge you have a problem. Second thing you do is you put your finger of what is the nature of the problem. The problem is industrial policies of other people. Now, this is a really important point, Tucker. The president and some others will say the tariffs are different. They're ripping us off on tariffs. And for sure that's true.
But in terms of what is causing the harm to the global economy, I would say, but particularly to America, the most important thing is not tariffs. Tariffs are the most visual thing. The easiest to see. But the real problem goes far deeper than that. So that if you end up with equal tariffs, you will still have a catastrophe for America. It will not resolve the issue at all.
So what are the things in industrial policy that tilt the scale against tariffs? We would say open markets and free trade and fair competition. All right. They are everything from the banking system. So in China, they have a banking system. They tell you to put your money in the bank. They make you have low interest rates. They take the money.
They can loan it to manufacturing at what we would consider to be a below market rate. And that encourages manufacturing. And they've done that. They've increased that. those loans from $60 billion a few years ago, this is according to the, to the New York times to, to almost $700 billion in the last year or so, but for a year. So it's the bank. It's the labor system.
If you have a system that keeps labor from getting its fair share of the pie, you're keeping wages down because of it, because of the, the, the statutory system. An example of that is this Huku system in, in, um, In China, where you can't really move around and be part of the system and get wages, just kind of stay where you were born.
But there are lots of other ones, not allowing unions, not allowing organization. I mean, there's a lot in the labor law. But it's subsidies. It's denying market access. It's fake money.
non-scientific standards to get products in it's it's it's value-added tax it's a tax system and explain that a little more fake standards so so so it's one of the big things we have fake is a see that just shows you that i'm a trump person right so a person a more sensible person than me would say non-scientific
So, I mean, you could take a case, a simple case, that how long should a tractor have to break before it stops? And you could say, okay, fine. You know, safety is – I'm making these numbers up. Safety is 40 feet, and maybe the Europeans would say, well, it's got to be 10 feet. We have to be very safe. And the net of that would be to eliminate products coming in, that kind of a standard.
Or health and safety. For example, the Europeans saying chicken shouldn't come in if you chlorinate it. That is to say when you're done, you put chlorine on it to make sure there's no microorganisms. They would say, well, that's unsafe. So it's sort of non-scientific standards like that. And there's a lot of them.
They're absolutely trade barriers. Everything I'm talking about either basically shifts national wealth from consumers to manufacturers to give them an edge. And the tax system, currency manipulation, there's all these things. These things are – the point I'm trying to make is are multiples – in terms of importance versus tariffs.
If we have equal tariffs with everyone in the world at zero, for example, we won't have a middle class. We won't have manufacturing because all these other factors will give them this unfair, uneconomic advantage. And we can go through – and the president, to his credit, in his truth where he laid this out, he said it's not just tariffs. It's all these other things.
And the – Jameson Greer of the USTR is looking at all these other things. But when we think of – The kind of migration for me, let me just say, was like, okay, we need free trade. And then you said, okay, we need fair trade. The reality is you can't get fair trade because there's too many ways to twist it. What we really need, I've evolved to, is balanced trade.
We need a system that enforces kind of trade balance, not with countries, but globally. Countries shouldn't be able to be huge surplus countries year after year, like China, of course, being the worst example, but also Germany. Ireland is evolving to that. There's a bunch of other countries we could talk about. Countries shouldn't be able to do that. And so you say, well, how do you achieve that?
You really need to put in place, I would say, some kind of tariffs to offset this fundamental unfairness. You're not just offsetting their tariffs. Europe's 10% on autos. We're 2.5%. If Europe went to zero, we still wouldn't sell very many cars in Europe. We just wouldn't. Our companies basically make small trucks. They don't need them there.
I mean, it's just there's a lot of reasons why that wouldn't happen. But what you need, you can't have countries have huge trade surpluses over long periods of time. You have to enforce and you have to penalize countries that have surpluses all the time and let countries that have deficits all the time get back to balance. If you do that, you then get the benefits of trade.
And he says what we should do is have export-import certificates. So in order to import, you need an export certificate. So you want to bring in T-shirts. You go to a steel mill and say, okay, fine. You export it. I'm going to buy that. And that would get you to balance. And I would certainly support that. Another way you could do it is you could put – and this is a little more complicated –
You could put a tax on the money that comes back, this $23.5 trillion, this trillion dollars that comes back every year where they buy U.S. assets. You could tax that. So that really wasn't worth a dollar. It was only worth 80 cents. In that case, there would be less incentive for people to run up these rail buses.
That's called a capital access fee, and there are people that will propose that, and that also would work. And then there's tariffs. So, I prefer tariffs, one, because people understand them. Two, every country in the world has a system set up to deal with tariffs right now. They all have the legality. They all have the process of how to do it. Three, they're flexible.
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