No Debt Goes Forever Unpaid ft. Dr. Bill Federer
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What is the importance of tariffs in America's history?
Learn how you could protect your wealth with Noble Gold Investments at noblegoldinvestments.com. That is noblegoldinvestments.com. It's where I buy all of my gold. Go to noblegoldinvestments.com. Okay, everybody, today on The Charlie Kirk Show, we have an amazing guest and friend of mine to talk about history, how it connects with current events, and that is Bill Federer from AmericanMinute.com. Bill, great to see you. You're impeccably dressed, as always. Thanks for taking the time. Charlie, good to be with you. So, Bill, I want to ask a couple of questions, the first of which, what is the history of tariffs in America? The media makes it seem as if we've never done this before. Have we financed our government tariffs before? How did some of our founding fathers think about tariffs?
And how does that connect to some of the news of President Trump using tariffs as a negotiating tool?
Right, for the first century and a half of our country, that's how the federal government raised its money. So a little background, industrial revolution in England, coal was what they burned and they had coal mines that would fill up with water. So in 1769, Isaac Watt invented a steam pump to get water out of coal mines and that quickly turned into a steam engine that ran factories. And wool, if you look at it under a microscope, it has little barbs that if you pull them, they hook together and get tighter. So women would have to sit at a spinning wheel and take this yarn and turn it into thread and then make cloth. Well, factories could make bolts of cloth really quick, really inexpensive. And so this is called the Industrial Revolution.
But the British did not allow manufacturing in the colonies because they wanted to market. And so when America becomes independent of Britain, the second bill that George Washington signed as president was the Tariff Act of 1789 to put a 5% tariff on all imports into America to make those factory-produced items from England more expensive intentionally so that it would provide a cushion for those manufacturing to begin in America. Matter of fact, there was no income tax in America until the Civil War. I'll get to that. And the U.S. Constitution specifically mentions that tariff taxes was the way the federal government was going to get its income. Article 1, Section 8 authorizes the federal government to collect duties and imposts, which are different terms for tariffs, to pay the debts, provide for the common defense and the general welfare of the United States. So basically, all federal money came from tariffs. And so Alexander Hamilton, the first secretary of the Treasury, created the Coast Guard to do what?
To catch ships that were trying to smuggle stuff into America without paying the tariffs. And so he's in charge of federal revenue. He's the secretary of treasury. The fastest ships of the day were called cutters. And so these were called revenue cutters. It was the beginning of the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard was started to get collect tariffs. And so when the. Tariffs began to work.
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