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
That's just not a function. They're against them because the elites, the powers that be that are benefiting from the system object to them. Now, on your question about economists, there are a growing number of economists who see this problem. they don't necessarily agree with me on the solution, right?
But if you see, you know, Angus Deaton is one who would say, we have to reevaluate whether the costs of this thing called free trade were worth the benefits. And that's an important first step. Paul Romer, another Nobel laureate, has the same thing. So you can go through and you can find various ones. There's a guy named Michael Pettis who's,
A Carnegie guy who's thought these things through and he wrote a book 10 years ago called Trade Wars or Class Wars by a guy named Matthew Klein. And it's sort of – so there is some movement, but I don't want to suggest that it's a light at the end of the tunnel. It's maybe a prick a thousand miles away. Yeah.
But I'm hopeful that economists, I've had several of them tell me, well, you're wrong, but you at least realize that we at least agree with you that things aren't good. So there's the beginning of people starting to see it.
I think that's a fair statement. The city and the business community.
First of all, I have complete confidence that the president will do what he said he's going to do. And unlike a lot of politicians, he ran on like real substance and big ideas. And this is probably the biggest of the ideas that he ran on. And I think he's going to follow through on his promises because that's the most important thing. The worst case would be that he doesn't.
So what you have to do is put in place tariffs, as I say, to offset not just tariffs. That's a tiny thing. I just keep going back to this point because it's so fundamental. The problem is not just foreign tariffs. That's a tiny part of the problem. But to offset this unfairness. So he has to put those tariffs in place.
When you do that, I do not believe you'll have inflation, and we should talk about that in a systemic, fundamental way. But you will have – People who have supply chains that are going to have to make adjustments, you've got some things that may go up in price for some period of time. And all these kinds of things will have an impact on people in daily life. But I think it will be short-term.
I call them disruptions. I think it will be short-term. I don't think it will lead to systemic inflation. And I think that the – I have people say, well, what should a businessman do? And I say, the smarter businessmen and businesswomen are going to figure it out, right? And they get paid a lot of money to do that, and they're going to say, here are the rules.
Just on that point, I've had business people, really smart business people, when I would explain this problem, and they would say, Bob, it's the government's responsibility to set up the rules, right? I'll figure out a way to make money in the rules. That's my responsibility. But I shouldn't be doing this social stuff. That's not my job.
My job is to make whatever widgets and to make them profitable and employ my people. And I think that's kind of an important point. It's President Trump's responsibility now. He's the president. To set in place a system where these good results for our people will come out, and I think you will.
So if you're going to have to have tariffs to offset this basic unfairness, that will lead to some disruption over a reasonably short period of time. I think you're going to see this manufacturing renaissance, these new jobs, wages go up, right? I mean, this notion that we're not productive because our wages are going up.
I'm like, I had this conversation with someone in the White House early on, and this is in the first term. And he was concerned about wage inflation. And I said to him, I said, this is by the way – We're paying Americans too much. Yeah, exactly. This is like a person that is playing it out. And I'm sitting – You can guess who it was. I said, we haven't had –
We haven't had a raise in the middle class in 15 years, and you're worried about wage inflation. This is a man with a plane. I'm praying for wage inflation. This is what I want. I want these people to make more money and do better and inspire their children and do all the things you do in a community to make the country great. Yeah. So anyway, there will be changes.
The whole notion on a micro scale, in my opinion, It's to take more resources from the very wealthy and spread them out among the people. So a liberal will say, I diagnose the problem the way Lighthizer does. Let's tax the rich people and give it to the other people. My idea, that's insanity. What you need to do is devise a structure where these people have good jobs and make lots of money.
And that's the way you transfer resources and make the country good. You don't do it by tax policy or things like that.
So when you think about tariffs, you have to kind of think of in two categories. There are, I think, like two buckets. There are national security issues which you have to deal with. And if the issue is a sufficient importance to really merit national attention, you should do everything you can to solve that problem. If we were in a war, people would say, of course, do whatever you have to, right?
Take over, whatever. So he has some things, and in this case, primarily, some others, but primarily this fentanyl issue with Canada and Mexico, mostly a Mexican issue. And that's a national security issue. In my opinion, it's not an economic issue, and it should be separated from it. Do you think fentanyl is a sufficiently important crisis to merit doing everything you can to solve it?
I believe it is. So for me, doing something in that space makes sense. And the president threatened that. And I think we got good results. That's national security. The bigger question is what – and you can use that tool in other times. And the debate is not whether the tool is appropriate. The debate is whether the national security issue is of sufficient importance to pay that price.
So then the other issue is tariffs generally to get us to, I would say, balance. Some people would say fairness. Some people would say reciprocity. But basically to get us to balance, to offset all this unfair balance. Not just terrorists, but unfair practices. And I think what you're going to see on April 2nd is an attempt. You're seeing the USTR and – and the Secretary of Treasury, U.S.
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