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
You know, you can move them around based on need to get to your objective of balance. But any three of those things would work. And I just think and obviously the president thinks that tariffs are the simplest, easiest, most understood way to kind of do it. And the objective has to be to offset all unfairness.
And to get – move towards – over a period of time, move towards balance and ultimately have balanced trade. If you had balanced trade, you'd have another trillion dollars' worth of domestic GDP, right? I mean it would be a huge boom and most of it would be – or a lot of it would be in manufacturing and things spun off by manufacturing. And that's what the president is trying to do.
He's trying to get us – to use tariffs, to move towards balance, to get a better distribution of wealth within our country so that working people end up with a higher percentage of the wealth. And we have this economic boom that's going to come by from reducing that huge perennial trade deficit.
So I think that's, you know, I think that's fundamentally wrong. So the first thing they would say is, manufacturing doesn't matter.
Oh, there are people, yeah.
No, well, you'd have to, you're in a pretty small group of people that have everything in common except sense. So this is a view that, We people who think like I do, and I believe the president's in this category, really think manufacturing is essential. One, the wages are better. The benefits are better. People stay in the jobs better for that group of people that are not going to be.
brain surgeons and astronauts. Secondly, if you look at manufacturing, it employs about 80% of American engineers. It accounts for about 90% of private sector R&D. It disproportionately accounts for productivity gains.
So if you go right down the kind of things you use to measure your economy more and more, manufacturing throws off about eight or nine jobs for every job in manufacturing, and these are good jobs. So – and finally, you need manufacturing to have innovation. You need manufacturing to defend your country. Without manufacturing – and that doesn't just mean on this national security issue.
It doesn't just mean being able to make bombs and submarines. It means being able to make steel and automobiles and batteries and solar panels. You have to make all those things to have – and semiconductor chips. Right. To wage war or to deter a war from happening, which is probably really our objective. So these people who think we're post-industrial are just fundamentally wrong.
And once again, they don't really – it doesn't bother them who owns America. It doesn't bother them, the distributions in the country. And it doesn't bother them that we're following them behind technologically. What they're thinking about is, yes, but we're optimizing consumption.
Well, that's a good question, one on which I think you and I have a lot of agreement, but on which I profess less expertise than I do on other things. It is – I think a lot of these people – Well, some of them just don't like the country because of our history for various – they'll take up a data point in our history and say that means we're bad. A lot of them take it for granted.
But once again, I'm not an expert on that. I certainly agree with your conclusion. It's troubling to me people who are – Not only economic globalists, but sort of geopolitical globalists. They don't realize that there's a force that wants to take over the world. Indeed, there are lots of them. And those forces, if they succeeded, would be very bad for America.
A lot of us who were sort of united in this – In this Cold War, particularly in the early years, it kind of brought the country together. We realized we were in a Cold War. Indeed, I think we're in a Cold War, a second Cold War now. But I think there's just more fifth columnists than there used to be. A lot more, a lot more.
Well, I mean, so I basically, you know, people say, why do I think the way I think? And some people say it's because you're from Ashtabula, Ohio, which was one of the places that was decimated, one of a million.
So Ashtabula was a great town. It was a little town between Cleveland and Erie, Pennsylvania. It was a port town. They had steel. They didn't have steel mills, but they had steel fabrication. They made a lot of auto parts. Indeed, at one point, the fiberglass body of the Corvette was made in Ashtabula, one of the famous things about us.
They brought in ore from the Great Lakes and then trained it down to Pittsburgh where they made steel. Obviously, there was agriculture, a lot of agriculture in the area, a lot of machine tools, those kinds of things. It was the sort of stuff... That was really, really hit first with the Japanese wave that came on.
And which wave was one of the other motivating things in President Trump's mind because he – that was the first thing that we all complained about was Japan and Japanese cars and the like. And then it was all Japanese manufacturing. And once again, I just want to say because I – And I love Japan. I'm not anti-Japanese at all. But that had nothing to do with economics either.
It was they kept their currency low. They had an industrial policy to subsidize all this. And then we sat here and they took our jobs. And now we're seeing that on a far greater scale.
Oh, you know, I cover this in the book. It is – I have to be careful because I love my hometown. But – You know, the poverty rate's probably 35 or 40%. Oh, gosh. Yeah, the college graduation rate's probably 15 or 20%. And by the way, by the way, this is not... Like we're some – the bottom of the pit. This is across the country.
It's everywhere you go. You see these kind of communities. These were wealthy people. I mean they weren't wealthy people. They were people who were well off. A person could have a job, own a car, pay off their house, and support their family. And now they can't do that anymore. And there's this kind of notion that, well, other jobs have come back. And indeed, in many cases, there have.
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