Posted originally on the CTH on February 27, 2023 | Sundance
This is it. This is pure MAGA. President Trump is announcing the big one… “Economic Agenda 47“
This is the economic policy blade to drive a stake through the vampire heart of corporatism, globalism and the exploitation of the U.S. economy by multinational corporate interests. This “universal baseline tariff” approach, is the policy that slays the dragons of the World Economic Forum, destroys the Beijing dragon and simultaneously ends the EU Marshal Plan advantage. This is a big deal.
President Trump makes the economic policy announcement today, and it is an incredible structure of trade and economic proposals that would be resoundingly effective at restoring every financial mechanism within the United States as a sovereign country. The proposal is economic nationalism in policy form.
First, here’s the announcement {Direct Rumble Link} – WATCH:
Agenda47: President Trump Announces America First Trade Platform That Takes Sledgehammer to Globalism
[Transcript] – “Joe Biden claims to support American manufacturing—but in reality, he is pushing the same pro-China globalist agenda that ripped the industrial heart out of our country. It ripped us apart. Biden and the globalists support RAISING taxes on American production. They support MORE crippling regulations killing American jobs. They support skyrocketing domestic energy costs. And they support massive anti-American multinational agreements that send our wealth and factories overseas.
Very simply, the Biden agenda taxes AMERICA to build up CHINA.
China is the big beneficiary. We cannot let that happen. And just a couple of years ago, it wasn’t happening. China paid to the United States hundreds of billions of dollars and no other president got ten cents. Legitimately, ten cents from China.
My agenda will tax CHINA to build up AMERICA.
The heart of my vision is a sweeping pro-American overhaul of our tax and trade policy to move from the Biden system that punishes domestic producers and rewards outsourcers, to a system that REWARDS domestic production and taxes FOREIGN companies and those who export American Jobs. They will be rewarded and rewarded greatly. And our country will benefit.
To achieve this goal, we will phase in a system of universal, baseline tariffs on most foreign products. On top of this, higher tariffs will increase incrementally depending on how much individual foreign countries devalue their currency. They devalue their currency to take advantage of the United States, and they subsidize their industries, or otherwise engage in trade cheating and abuse. And they do it now like never before, and we had it largely stopped and it was going to be stopped completely within less than a year.
As tariffs on foreign producers go up, taxes on American producers will go down and go down very substantially. And that means a lot of jobs coming in.
Not only will this system end our gaping trade deficits—and they are massive right now—and bring back millions of American jobs—it will also bring trillions and trillions of dollars pouring into the U.S. Treasury from foreign countries and allow us to invest that money in American workers, American families, and American communities.
This plan will be the linchpin of a new Strategic National Manufacturing Initiative, that builds on my historic success in ending NAFTA, which was a tremendous thing, a tremendous achievement, nobody thought it could be done, and we did USMCA—US-Mexico-Canada, and it was an incredible thing. But we’re also going to end other unfair trade deals, and we’ll end them quickly.
In addition, as a matter of both economic and national security, I will implement a bold series of reforms to completely eliminate dependence on China in all critical areas.
We will revoke China’s Most Favored Nation trade status, and adopt a 4-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods—everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals. This will include strong protections to ensure China cannot circumvent restrictions by passing goods through conduit countries—countries that don’t make a product, but all of a sudden they’re making a lot of the product, it comes right through China, right out of China, and right into our country.
We will also adopt new rules to stop U.S. companies from pouring investments into China, and to stop China from buying up America, allowing all of those investments that clearly serve American interests. We’re not going to allow bad things to happen to our country anymore. And we will eliminate federal contracts for any company that outsources to China.
Biden will never get the job done. He is weak on China because the corrupt Biden family has received millions and millions of dollars from entities tied to the Chinese Communist Party. Everybody knows that. They try and hide it, and the Fake News doesn’t want to talk about it.
Biden’s pro-China economic program puts America LAST, and it’s killing our country—my cutting-edge trade agenda will revitalize our economy by once again putting America FIRST.
And by the way, we’ll get along very well with China. And you know what the reason is? They’ll respect us again, like they did just two years ago.
We will quickly become a manufacturing powerhouse like the world has never seen before.
Thank you very much.”
[Transcript Link]
~ POLICY ~
♦UNIVERSAL BASELINE TARIFFS: President Trump has announced a plan to replace the Biden system of punishing domestic producers and rewarding outsourcers with a new system that rewards domestic production while taxing foreign companies.
Rather than raising taxes on American producers, President Trump will impose tariffs on FOREIGN producers through a system of universal baseline tariffs on most imported goods.
Higher tariffs will increase incrementally if other countries manipulate their currency or otherwise engage in unfair trading practices.
As tariffs on foreign countries go up, taxes on American workers, families, and businesses can come down.
The Biden administration has proposed nearly $2 trillion in tax increases on American citizens and levied draconian tax hikes on Americans’ household energy, 401ks, and pension plans.
The Biden administration’s globalist policies sell out American citizens and result in a windfall for foreign countries.
In 2022, the United States trade deficit reached $948.1 billion, the largest on record, and the agricultural trade deficit exceeded $2 billion.
President Trump’s trade policy is firmly rooted in American history. America used to impose tariffs on over 95% of all imports, and for decades the federal government took in over 80% of its revenue by taxing foreign producers through tariffs—not by taxing American workers and businesses.
♦ENDING RELIANCE ON CHINA: President Trump’s America First trade policy will completely eliminate U.S. dependence on China–the primary beneficiary of Democrats’ globalist agenda.
In addition to universal baseline tariffs on most foreign goods, President Trump’s plan will reclaim our economic independence from China. President Trump will revoke China’s Most Favored Nation trade status and adopt a 4-year plan to phase out all Chinese imports of essential goods—everything from electronics to steel to pharmaceuticals. This will include strong protections to ensure China cannot circumvent restrictions by passing goods through conduit countries.
President Trump will establish new rules to stop U.S. companies from investing in China and stop China from buying up America, allowing only those investments that serve American interests.
President Trump will ban federal contracts for any company that outsources to China.
Under Biden and the Democrats, American wealth and jobs are being exported to China.
The U.S. trade deficit with China has risen almost 10% under Biden to $382.9 billion last year alone.
♦A BETTER DEAL FOR AMERICAN WORKERS, FAMILIES, AND COMMUNITIES: President Trump’s plans will bring back millions of American jobs and generate trillions of dollars of new wealth to strengthen American society.
President Trump’s tariff plans will be the linchpin of a new Strategic National Manufacturing Initiative that will rebalance the global trading system and dramatically strengthen America.
Raising tariffs on foreign producers while lowering taxes for domestic producers will help keep jobs and wealth in the United States.
Higher tariffs create millions of new jobs, increase real household income, boost GDP, increase domestic manufacturing output, and generate hundreds of billions of dollars in new government revenue.
President Trump’s universal baseline tariffs will restore a level playing field for American businesses worldwide.
U.S. exports have historically faced higher tariffs from foreign countries than nearly all of America’s trade competitors.
President Trump will build on his historic success in abolishing NAFTA, which Joe Biden voted for, after which 60,000 factories closed and 4.5 million manufacturing jobs were lost. President Trump replaced NAFTA with the USMCA, a historic breakthrough in leveling the playing field for American workers, famers, and manufacturers.
Fortunately, we do not have to guess if President Trump is correct. We have his actual economic policy results to look at and see how the expansion of the economy was creating the type of growth that would sustain Social Security and Medicare. This was/is MAGAnomics at work.
…. Make America Great Again!
We know it works, because we have the results to cite.
It was the Fourth Quarter of 2019…..
Right before the pandemic would hit a few months later…. Despite two years of doomsayer predictions from Wall Street’s professional punditry, all of them saying Trump’s 2017 steel and aluminum tariffs on China, Canada and the EU would create massive inflation, it just wasn’t happening!
Overall year-over-year inflation was hovering around 1.7 percent [Table-A BLS]; yup, that was our inflation rate. The rate in the latter half of 2019 was firmed up with less month-over-month fluctuation, and the rate basically remained consistent. [See Below] The U.S. economy was on a smooth glide path, strong, stable and Main Street was growing with MAGAnomics at work.
A couple of important points. First, unleashing the energy sector to drive down overall costs to consumers and industry outputs was a key part of President Trump’s America-First MAGAnomic initiative. Lower energy prices help the worker economy, middle class and average American more than any other sector.
Which brings us to the second important point. Notice how food prices had very low year-over-year inflation, 0.5 percent. That is a combination of two key issues: low energy costs, and the fracturing of Big Ag hold on the farm production and the export dynamic:
(BLS) […] The index for food at home declined for the third month in a row, falling 0.2 percent. The index for meats, poultry, fish, and eggs decreased 0.7 percent in August as the index for eggs fell 2.6 percent. The index for fruits and vegetables, which rose in July, fell 0.5 percent in August; the index for fresh fruits declined 1.4 percent, but the index for fresh vegetables rose 0.4 percent. The index for cereals and bakery products fell 0.3 percent in August after rising 0.3 percent in July. (link)
For the previous twenty years food prices had been increasingly controlled by Big Ag, and not by normal supply and demand. The commodity market became a ‘controlled market’. U.S. food outputs (farm production) was controlled and exported to keep the U.S. consumer paying optimal prices.
President Trump’s trade reset was disrupting this process. As farm products were less exported the cost of the food in our supermarket became reconnected to a ‘more normal’ supply and demand cycle. Food prices dropped and our pantry costs were lowered.
The Commerce Dept. then announced that retail sales climbed by 0.4 percent in August 2019, twice as high as the 0.2 percent analysts had predicted. The result highlighted retail sales strength of more than 4 percent year-over-year. These excellent results came on the heels of blowout data in July, when households boosted purchases of cars and clothing.
The better-than-expected number stemmed largely from a 1.8 percent jump in spending vehicles. Online sales, meanwhile, also continued to climb, rising 1.6 percent. That’s similar to July 2019, when Amazon held its two-day, blowout Prime Day sale. (link)
Despite the efforts to remove and impeach President Trump, it did not look like middle-class America was overly concerned about the noise coming from the pundits. Likely that’s because blue-collar wages were higher, Main Street inflation was lower, and overall consumer confidence was strong. Yes, MAGAnomics was working.
Additionally, remember all those MSM hours and newspaper column inches where the professional financial pundits were claiming Trump’s tariffs were going to cause massive increases in prices of consumer goods?
Well, exactly the opposite happened [BLS report] Import prices were continuing to drop:
[Table 1 – BLS report link]
This was a really interesting dynamic that no-one in the professional punditry would dare explain.
Donald Trump’s tariffs were targeted to specific sectors of imported products. [Steel, Aluminum, and a host of smaller sectors etc.] However, when the EU and China respond by devaluing their currency, that approach hit all products imported, not just the tariff goods.
Because the EU and China were driving up the value of the dollar, everything we were importing became cheaper. Not just imports from Europe and China, but actually imports from everywhere. All imports were entering the U.S. at substantially lower prices.
This meant when we imported products, we were also importing deflation.
This price result is exactly the opposite of what the economic experts and Wall Street pundits predicted back in 2017 and 2018 when they were pushing the rapid price increase narrative.
Because all the export dependent economies were reacting with such urgency to retain their access to the U.S. market, aggregate import prices were actually lower than they were when the Trump tariffs began:
[…] Prices for imports from China edged down 0.1 percent in August following decreases of 0.2 percent in both July and June. Import prices from China have not advanced on a monthly basis since ticking up 0.1 percent in May 2018. The price index for imports from China fell 1.6 percent for the year ended in August.
[…] Import prices from the European Union fell 0.2 percent in August and 0.3 percent over the past 12 months.
[Page #4 – BLS Report, pdf] – BLS press release.
So yes, we know President Trump can save Social Security and Medicare by expanding the economy with his America First economic policy. We do not need to guess if it is possible or listen to pundits theorize about his approach being some random ‘catch phrase’ disconnected from reality. Yes folks, we have the receipts.
This was MAGAnomics at work, and this is entirely what created the middle-class MAGA coalition. No other Republican candidate has this economic policy in their outlook because all other candidates are purchased by the Wall Street multinationals.
America First MAGAnomics is unique to President Trump because he is the only one independent enough to implement them.
That’s just the reality of the situation. They hate him for it…
Author’s note as said in 2016: “If I absolutely did not believe this economic model was doable, I would never expand the concept and place advocacy upon it. I am an absolute believer that we can, as a nation, reignite a solid manufacturing base and generate an expanding middle class.” Yes, I bet on Trump, and he was right.
Centinel2012 