Nov. 28, 2024 - Bannon's War Room
48:09
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The ways that Trump has changed the country in three weeks. | ||
| He's not in control of anything. | ||
| And all of what Timothy Snyder describes as obeying in advance, the examples are so abundant. | ||
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unidentified
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I prefer the phrase preemptive groveling. | |
| It's probably better. | ||
|
unidentified
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Which is what we're seeing a lot of. | |
| I mean, he has changed the country. | ||
| I think one of the things we've learned, I mean, how many times have we sat at this table trying to ponder what he's trying to do? | ||
| I actually don't think there's a particular direction. | ||
| I think he prides this chaos. | ||
| I think what he wants to do with the Justice Department, he doesn't have a particular idea or a law that he wants to prosecute or a criminal that he wants to prosecute. | ||
| He wants to cause chaos. | ||
| And then chaos will lead to destruction, the destruction of the administrative state. | ||
| Yeah, but I think Steve Bannon actually wants it. | ||
| I think Trump wants to be popular. | ||
| And you are not made popular by having a Justice Department that can't deal with crime. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I think it's even deeper. | |
| I think it includes that. | ||
| But look, you know, what Donald Trump has always wanted is what's good for Donald Trump. | ||
| And that means many things. | ||
| I mean, he used to talk about the swamp, and like many things, the swamp is usually what he wanted as long as it was for him and anything that benefited him. | ||
| I mean, being able to interrupt the Department of Justice's going after antitrust, being able to interrupt the Department of Justice going after anyone who is a friend of his, anything that carries favor. | ||
| We, as a fact-based people, what What was the Andy McKay thing? | ||
| And what was the Jim Cumming thing? | ||
| And Jim Cumming impacted the election. | ||
| And to go into another Trump presidency, well, he is selecting people to run DoJ and the FBI who are adherents to a policy of political retribution. | ||
| That is the policy of the Department of Justice and the FBI under the direction of the President of the United States. | ||
| And I wonder what you think and how you've internalized an absence of any sort of... | ||
| I mean, after 9-11, the deep state is... | ||
| Connected the dots and made sure that the United States was never attacked again. | ||
| And Bob Mueller was the head of the FBI. George Tenet was the head of the CIA. And they testified before Congress, I think more than any two government officials in our country's history before or since. | ||
| And so the country got to know the people and the policies that were enacted. | ||
| Across national security agencies will be controversial to the end of time. | ||
| But they told their story and they were out there. | ||
| And the whole inability and reflexive sort of refusal to defend what Trump smeared as a deep state with any sort of explanation. | ||
| Because now you ask every pro-democracy Republican or lifelong Democrat, who's going to stand up to Trump? | ||
| They say, the career prosecutors. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| The much maligned deep state who literally no one defended last time? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, I actually thought people on the left should have co-opted the phrase deep state. | |
| I mean, when we were speaking to the senator-elect and he talked about the career professionals, I mean, we've all worked with those career professionals, those career prosecutors. | ||
| They're the most upstanding people in the world. | ||
| These are the people who don't ever cheat on their taxes, that don't ever cut the margin, that don't hire an undocumented immigrant to do their yard or sit for their babies. | ||
| I mean, these are people who are above reproach. | ||
| And yes, We depended on them last time. | ||
| I think we'll depend on them this time. | ||
| Maya's point about getting a concentration of lawyers. | ||
| Try firing a federal employee who's a lawyer, which is not easy to do. | ||
| And if you can't, institute a Schedule F. They have due process guarantees. | ||
| You have to fire them for cause. | ||
| They will band together. | ||
| So I do think, I do believe in this idea of career professionals, who those on the other side call the deep state... | ||
| You see the resistance that's building right there. | ||
| With Elon Musk and Doge and Vivek Ramaswamy, and of course working with the great Russ Vogt. | ||
| You have many sides of the resistance. | ||
| You've got the sanctuary city mayors. | ||
| And I'm in the Washington Post today saying President Trump, I don't think he's got this phrase, no games. | ||
| He's not going to allow games to be played when he starts the process of these mass deportations, which he's going to do it in a humane way, but he's not going to allow people to game the system. | ||
| And I believe he's going to play smash mouth with the mayor of Chicago and the mayor of Denver and other mayors. | ||
| If they want to be tough guys and say, no, we're going to nullify the law to start these deportations, I think they've got another thing coming. | ||
| But you also see the resistance inside the administrative state, and they're already making big efforts in the budget process and the appropriations process to start going after programs and programmatically deconstruct this. | ||
| But right there, you say, well, I'd try to fire a lawyer. | ||
| Well, they're going to fire a lot of lawyers. | ||
| Just are. | ||
| And they got started in DOJ. They got hit that place with a blowtorch. | ||
| And they have to gut it because it's corrupt and it's destructive. | ||
| And we just had a national referendum on that. | ||
| And guess what? | ||
| You lost. | ||
| The American people had the back of Donald Trump and said, yeah, we've seen Trump. | ||
| He's got 92 felony indictments. | ||
| He's got 32. He's guilty of 32 felonies. | ||
| Guilty of 32 felonies. | ||
| Guilty. | ||
| I should put that in quotes. | ||
| Guilty. | ||
| On some kangaroo court in New York that's now dropped everything. | ||
| American people rendered their verdict. | ||
| I want to go back to one of the big things that's happening, and that is this issue of tariffs. | ||
| And for the positive note, starting last night, and even some today, now their hair's on fire, and they're saying, oh, it's going to cause inflation. | ||
| These are people who didn't care about inflation at all. | ||
| Now it's like, you know, holy writ. | ||
| But everything's inflation. | ||
| But at least you're having a policy discussion about About tariffs. | ||
| It's one-sided. | ||
| They're lying to you. | ||
| But hey, at least we're at a pure Trump hate in talking about Trump's economic policies. | ||
| But I want to bring in Spencer Morrison, the author of Reshore. | ||
| First off, Spencer, you are a prolific writer on this topic of globalization and economic nationalism. | ||
| Just explain to our audience, in your mind, what that means and why globalization has worked against the American workers, sir. | ||
| Well, good evening. | ||
| First of all, thanks for having me on your show. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Globalization has been an utter disaster for the American workers. | ||
| I've been writing on this topic since about 2015. What we've seen time and time again is every time America signs a free trade deal or engages in looser trade restrictions with a different country, there's an asymmetrical trading relationship that develops. | ||
| America, as the developed nation with a technological advantage, runs large and chronic trade deficits with all of these countries. | ||
| And as a result, what we see is a rebalancing of American industry. | ||
| Once America was at the core of the later stages of the Industrial Revolution, and of course the subsequent technological revolution, That's no longer the case. | ||
| A lot of the manufacturing, you know, in the old sort of iron belt steel regions has been moved to countries like China. | ||
| It's been moved to Mexico, Japan. | ||
| And as a result of so-called freer trade, what we've seen is American industry has been hollowed out. | ||
| The American worker has been left with significant unemployment. | ||
| Wages, which were at one time rose in lockstep with worker productivity in about 1971, 1972, that decoupled. | ||
| And what we've seen is that although Americans are working more productively than ever, wages simply haven't kept pace. | ||
| And a big portion of the reason for that Is that there's a lot of downward pressure on wages in this country. | ||
| Because American workers are now subjected to competing directly with workers in China. | ||
| And there's many reasons for that. | ||
| Labor is plentiful in these countries. | ||
| Environmental regulations, labor regulations are very lax. | ||
| So there's just no apples to oranges comparison between a foreign country like China And then the sort of labor markets you have in America. | ||
| So what you have is, when they say it's free trade and free competition, what it is is it's unsymmetrical and unfair trade. | ||
| Let's talk about that because when we first came on the scene and started writing and had people write about this at Breitbart the the classic Republicans like went through full meltdown oh my god it's gotta be free trade tell me about what free trade actually stands for and and and I think we're in a mercantilist system where the Chinese Communist Party is the the smartest and toughest mercantilist around so describe The system and why all these people that talked about free trade all the time and not fair trade really played into the hands of the | ||
| mercantilist, sir. | ||
| Well, it's actually a very interesting point. | ||
| What we have right now, and I've done a bit of research on this topic, what we have, I just want to take you back to the American Revolution. | ||
| One of the main undercurrents A lot of people don't know this, but in the approximately 50 years leading up to the American Revolution, the British government imposed a number of industrial limits on what the American colonies were able to do. | ||
| For example, they banned the export of... | ||
| Blueprints for new industrial processes. | ||
| They banned the opening of new steel mills. | ||
| And this was all a ploy by the British government to make sure that industry manufacturing, you know, the manufacturing of arms, of ships, of new machinery stayed in Britain. | ||
| And what this did is it locked America into a mercantile trade relationship with Britain. | ||
| Where Great Britain was exporting high-value manufactured products to the colonies, and the colonies were in turn selling low-value agricultural output, such as tobacco or cotton. | ||
| This was certainly not in America's best interests. | ||
| A lot of revolutionary material, for example, Thomas Paine in particular, Alexander Hamilton, Pushed very strongly for an industrialization program for America. | ||
| Of course, one of the first acts that were passed after America gained its independence was to institute tariffs on manufactured products from Europe. | ||
| And this led directly to the industrialization of America, which, of course, turned America into the This plan was Hamilton's plan, wasn't it? | ||
| He laid this out. | ||
| This was Hamilton's plan. | ||
| Because he wanted to build the American system, it was called, right? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| It was called the American system. | ||
| The core element of the American system were high trade tariffs on manufactured goods. | ||
| Now, since about 1973 and into the 1980s, These tariffs have all but been abolished. | ||
| In particular, in 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization. | ||
| And we've had exceptionally liberal trade. | ||
| It's been one-sided with China. | ||
| And as a result, the economic paradigm has actually been shifting into that mercantile relationship again. | ||
| I'll give you one good example of this. | ||
| If you compare the sorts of products that America was importing and exporting to China in 2001 when they joined the World Trade Organization, and you compare that to today, what you'll find is that in 2001, America was exporting a lot of high-value manufactured products, such as electrical components, aircraft components, things like that. | ||
| In return, America was buying what we'd say would be low-value manufactured output. | ||
| For example, we bought a lot of clothing, we bought a lot of shoes from China. | ||
| That's been flipped on its head 20 years later. | ||
| At this point, America's largest exports to China are Largely unrefined agricultural products. | ||
| We ship them a lot of soybeans, they buy grain, they buy some oil from us. | ||
| In exchange, the biggest category of goods that we purchase from China now are manufactured products, electronic components, computers. | ||
| Almost all of America's silicone chips that go in everything from our phones to our laptops to our cars. | ||
| It all comes from China. | ||
| But hang on. | ||
| They essentially look at us. | ||
| Our trade relationship with them, we're like a developing nation. | ||
| We send them raw materials and natural resources and lumber and things like that and agriculture products, but we send them very little that's up the value-added manufacturing chain. | ||
| We're essentially, in their mind, the way they look at it, a developing nation as far as at least trade goes. | ||
| Am I incorrect on that? | ||
| You are 100% correct, and it's only got worse since 2001. Is the fact that when Tiananmen Square happened and Bush 41 sent Scowcroft over, | ||
| and they said you've got to clean up your political act because we can become partners, the WTO membership, most favored nation membership, the Clintons, remember the Chinese generals are bringing bags full of money over to the White House? | ||
| But the key, the linchpin to the world global system, the linchpin to the world manufacturing system, and please understand this at your Thanksgiving table tomorrow, is predicated upon the slave labor of Lao Bai Jing. | ||
| The system works because the Chinese common man and woman is essentially a slave and works for slave wages. | ||
| And that has a structural element of the architectonics. | ||
| The architecture of the world economic system is based upon the slave labor of China. | ||
| And since they have such huge excess capacity and they essentially export that excess capacity, right, in lower wages... | ||
| That working men and women throughout the world can never really get appropriate wages because the largest workforce in the world works for slave wages. | ||
| Is that not correct? | ||
| That the linchpin of this is the slave labor of the Chinese people, sir? | ||
| Yeah, it's very important to understand when we're trading with China, China is an authoritarian regime. | ||
| The Chinese workers certainly do not have the same labor protections that American workers have. | ||
| It's not just the Chinese labor, though, and Mr. Bannon, you're correct on that point. | ||
| It's also the desecration of the environment in China. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| Costs that would be borne by American producers, you know, costs to the desecration of rivers or the oceans, pollution in general, those are simply not priced into goods from China. | ||
| Those costs are what we call externalized, right? | ||
| So what we're doing is we're trading for Chinese goods that appear cheap on paper, but they're not actually any cheaper because the environment is being destroyed and there's an enormous cost associated with it. | ||
| They're actually more expensive. | ||
| What Spencer's talking about is since the 1960s that we took this theory of the commons, the environment was, the effluent, the discharge from your production process, the reception of that was not taken into account in the cost of production. | ||
| You just dumped it into a river, you dumped it into a field, you had chemical plants in New Jersey, you just dumped it out back. | ||
| You didn't have to take that into account. | ||
| Eventually, because of environmental laws and other things, you had to include that in the cost of production. | ||
| The waste product of the industrial process obviously has to be included into the production costs. | ||
| And that's why our goods cost a certain amount. | ||
| And people may say, well, certain of it's over-regulated. | ||
| Some people may say it's not regulated enough. | ||
| Whatever it is, whether that's too far or too little, We've put a cost on it. | ||
| And that cost is now included in the cost of production. | ||
| In China, that ain't the way it rolls. | ||
| They just dump it. | ||
| And so there's no full value, there's no full accounting of the full cost, and that's why they can sell it cheaper. | ||
| But to Spencer's point, it's incredibly destructive, not just to the poisoning of Of China for the Lao Ba Jing, which live in essentially a poison... | ||
| You know, they work as slaves for slave labor wages. | ||
| Oh, they also have to live in a poison environment because the Chinese Communist Party and the wealth they accrued themselves, they're not interested in the environment. | ||
| They just dump it in there. | ||
| And that's not included. | ||
| But this is the way... | ||
| The world's economic system works. | ||
| And people have to understand that Wall Street and Silicon Valley, it's very easy for these progressives to sit there and look at you and say, no, no, no, you're not DEI and you're not perfect and you're too white or you're saying bad things about trans people and you're not showing respect. | ||
| They are in business with the most corrupt dictatorship in the history of the world. | ||
| That's killed hundreds of millions of Chinese people, and they're in business with them. | ||
| And they're fine being in business with them. | ||
| They look the other way. | ||
| They go to their parties. | ||
| They live in the Hamptons. | ||
| They're out in Silicon Valley. | ||
| All these guys are thinking great thoughts and big thoughts about going to do this and going to do that. | ||
| And they're in business with them. | ||
| Look at Sequoia Capital. | ||
| They're in business with them. | ||
| Active business. | ||
| This is equivalent to being in business with Hitler and the Nazis in the 1930s. | ||
| This is equivalent to being in business with Joseph Stalin after what he did in the Ukraine in the 1930s when he starved 5 million people to death. | ||
| He starved 5 million people, let me add, in the middle of what is the equivalent of European Kansas in the 1930s. | ||
| These are the crimes of the capitalists. | ||
| These are the crimes of Wall Street and Silicon Valley today. | ||
| And don't think the Chinese people, La Beijing, aren't keeping score. | ||
| They know who's a partner with who's enslaving them. | ||
| And that's why Spencer and others have argued for years, hey, there's a practical thing that we have to do to get high-value manufacturing jobs back for your people and your citizens, but there's also a moral A huge moral component. | ||
| We can't look away. | ||
| It's easy to look away. | ||
| Wall Street looks away. | ||
| Hollywood looks away. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Hollywood will only make movies that are approved by the Chinese Communist Party because they want access to this massive marketplace. | ||
| Silicon Valley, Hollywood, Wall Street, and the puppets in the U.S. government are in business with them. | ||
| In business with them. | ||
| It's equivalent to being in business with Hitler and the Nazis in the 30s, and it's equivalent knowing that the camps were being set up, right? | ||
| Or being in business with Stalin after 1933, 34, 35, after the Moscow show trials and when we knew, although the New York Times wouldn't report, because guess what? | ||
| The reporters were in business with them, that they had starved 5 million people to death In the equivalent of Kansas, which was the breadbasket of the Ukraine, which you referred to at the time. | ||
| So Spencer, you've done this great work on globalization and everything that you've worked on. | ||
| Now you're focused on reshoring and you've got this book, Reshore, that I want everybody to get and to read. | ||
| Walk me through. | ||
| What is Reshore? | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| Why is it important? | ||
| And why is it now that you've been one of these guys pointing out the sins of globalization? | ||
| Why have you focused now on this? | ||
| Well, so in this book, what I've tried to do is two things. | ||
| So number one, we're making complicated issues really simple. | ||
| So I'm answering the big question, how do we grow the economy? | ||
| The second reason that I wrote this book I wanted to explain an effective foreign trade policy. | ||
| What is it going to look like? | ||
| The thesis of the book is tariffs are going to be a key tool to making America rich again and helping us grow the economy, increase our technology. | ||
| I think this book is really important right now. | ||
| This is Trump's second kick at the can. | ||
| And the globalists do not want Trump to succeed on his tariff agenda, right? | ||
| They were pushing back against that enormously in his first term, and it's going to be the same deal in the second term. | ||
| And the reason for that is very simple. | ||
| Political independence is predicated upon economic independence, right? | ||
| The founding fathers knew this, and it's very obvious. | ||
| You can't be free unless you have the ability to manufacture the goods that you need to maintain that freedom. | ||
| So if America wants to be free, if we want to be prosperous, we need to bring the factories back. | ||
| In particular, we need to look into bringing semiconductor technology back to America. | ||
| This is really, really a big problem. | ||
| America imports all of its semiconductors right now. | ||
| From abroad. | ||
| Almost all of them. | ||
| The semiconductor factories are located in Taiwan. | ||
| And even worse, the machinery, the prints, the silicone chips, is actually created in the Netherlands. | ||
| America has essentially no role to play in the manufacturing Of computers at this stage. | ||
| And as everybody knows, I mean, we're talking on computers right now. | ||
| There's computers in your cars, they're in your phones, they're in your home appliances. | ||
| America cannot manufacture silicone chips on a scale that we would need to even perpetuate our economy. | ||
| So right now, America is entirely import-dependent on China in particular. | ||
| But also on other countries for various other goods. | ||
| There's huge national security implications to that. | ||
| If there were, for example, to be a conflict that broke out between America and China, the fact of the matter is that our economy would be completely shut down. | ||
| That puts us in a precarious national security situation, but it also limits our long-run economic growth. | ||
| The point that I make in the book is that long-run economic growth... | ||
| Yeah, go ahead. | ||
| No, no, you keep going. | ||
| Hit your punchline. | ||
| Well, I was going to say, the key to long-run economic growth is developing new technology. | ||
| So right now, what we've done by exporting our manufacturing, especially our high-valued, technologically advanced manufacturing, is we've cut the rungs out from the bottom of the ladder. | ||
| And we're no longer at the cutting edge of technological development. | ||
| I mean, so many research dollars are now being spent in Mumbai as opposed to Boston. | ||
| It makes absolutely no sense. | ||
| We're shooting ourselves in the foot in the long run here. | ||
| Spencer, hang on for one second. | ||
| We're going to hold you over. | ||
| We're going to go out with When the Man Comes Around. | ||
|
unidentified
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home. | |
| One of my favorite songs. | ||
| The cover of the great Johnny Cash song. | ||
| Mo Bannon's also going to join us. | ||
| We're going to talk about the VA. Are Vivek, Vivek, and Elon going to do away with the VA? That's what some folks are trying to spread. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| Captain Bannon doesn't either. | ||
| We're going to get to the bottom of all of it. | ||
| We're going to continue with Spencer Morrison, the author of Reshore. | ||
| When the war room continues in just a moment. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hear the trumpets, hear the piper. | |
| One hundred million singers singing. | ||
| Roll the tooth and march into the big kettle drum. | ||
| Voices calling, voices crying. | ||
| Some are born and some are dying. | ||
| It's alpha and omega's kingdom come. | ||
| And the whirlwind is in the thorn tree. | ||
| The virgins are trimming their wicks. | ||
| The whirlwind is in the palm tree. | ||
| It's hard for me to kick against the bricks. | ||
| We should expect, should he do this day one, 25 percent tariffs on Canada, Mexico, 10 percent of China, like what what that would do? | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Look, the most important thing to understand is that a tariff is a tax on Americans. | ||
| When Home Depot wants to bring a washing machine across the border, it's actually Home Depot who has to pay the tariff to get that washing machine out of customs. | ||
| So even at a very literal level, it's not China or Korea that pays. | ||
| And so then Home Depot has a choice. | ||
| It can swallow the hit to its profit margins or do what in fact it did when this all occurred in the last Trump term, which is, like most businesses, when its costs go up, it passes those costs along in the form of higher prices for Americans. | ||
| And it's not just Home Depot's not... | ||
| The only one that's going to do it. | ||
| In fact, American washing machine companies raise their prices too because competition from abroad is part of what forces American companies to offer us better deals. | ||
| Get rid of that competition. | ||
| We're all going to get worse deals. | ||
| Well, you know, I think that countries right now are trying to figure out what they want to do in terms of retaliatory tariffs and how they want to respond. | ||
| I think, you know, what I would say is like the whole thing is think about it as a human story. | ||
| You know, we have humans are hurt by tariffs because it's not countries that trade. | ||
| It's people that trade. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if I can do something more efficient than somebody in China, and they can do something else more efficient than me, then we get huge gains from China. | ||
| Right now, and the great Tony Lee has sent me through Grace Chong a tweet out, but this is from the last two nights. | ||
| I repeat, blast individual tariffs all you want, but please stop falling into the tariffs are bad or thoughtless or tariffs is a sales tax slogan. | ||
| Tariffs are an essential part of industrial policy, labor policy and environmental policy. | ||
| Tariff absolutism is frankly bizarre. | ||
| This came after President Trump last night talking about 25% tariffs across the board on Mexico, Canada, and in China. | ||
| That was, as Jeff Stein of The Washington Post pointed out, not targeted like on tariffs on avocados from Mexico. | ||
| This was across the board. | ||
| And we trade, I don't know, a couple trillion dollars a year. | ||
| Those are our three biggest trading partners. | ||
| But you see a complete and total meltdown. | ||
| What's the total meltdown? | ||
| Democrats used to support tariffs to make sure that you could protect jobs here in the United States. | ||
| Why is it now that Trump mentions it? | ||
| It's tariffs are evil, tariffs are taxed, tariffs are inflationary. | ||
| Is the progressive left so upside down, they don't even know what side of the argument they're on anymore? | ||
| Spencer Morrison? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we've seen this back in 2015, 2016. We're seeing the exact same rhetoric again. | ||
| And the reality is that these chicken littles were wrong in 2016, and they're wrong again. | ||
| Anybody can go ahead and look at the historical data and see that prices were lower under Trump than they were under Biden or Obama. | ||
| Everybody knows that. | ||
| It's not a secret. | ||
| So this is just forward-looking rhetoric. | ||
| At the logic of how tariffs actually work, what they're saying doesn't make any sense. | ||
| So I'd like to just very briefly explain what a tariff is and how it actually operates. | ||
| So first things first, a tariff is a tax on imported goods. | ||
| Most political commentators... | ||
| Just about everybody on the topic who discusses it actually wrongly assume that tariffs are like a sales tax. | ||
| For example, that gentleman, he mentioned that if there were tariffs on washing machines, you would see higher washing machine prices at Home Depot. | ||
| This is entirely untrue. | ||
| Unlike a sales tax, a tariff is not applied to a product's retail price. | ||
| So if there's a 10% tariff on toasters, for example, You're not going to see a 10% increase on the sticker price at Walmart. | ||
| This is because tariffs are levied on what's called the first sale price. | ||
| That's the price that American corporations or their foreign agents pay to the foreign vendor who originally built the product or the component of the product. | ||
| I just want to walk through an example. | ||
| We're going to make sure that everybody understands exactly how tariffs work. | ||
| And we're going to use an example of a toaster, okay? | ||
| So let's say, for example, America implies a 10% tax or a 10% tariff on all Chinese toasters. | ||
| Companies like Black& Decker, for example, they manufacture toasters in China. | ||
| Let's say, for example, the toaster retails for $60 at Walmart. | ||
| The media says, okay, it's 10% tax. | ||
| Toasters are going to be $66 a toaster. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| This is because the American distributors, they buy their toasters from a vendor usually located in Hong Kong for maybe $14 per toaster. | ||
| That vendor in Hong Kong, he originally purchased the toaster in China for, say, $7 per toaster. | ||
| What this means is that that 10% tariff is not applied on the sticker price of $60. | ||
| It's not even applied on the vendor price of $14. | ||
| It's applied on the initial sale price of $7, which means that on a $60 toaster, a 10% tariff equates to just a $0.70 increase in cost. | ||
| So that's how a 10% tariff Actually, we'd only increase the value of a product by 1.15%. | ||
| And that's going to change depending on which good we're talking about. | ||
| In reality, we're likely not going to see any increases in price. | ||
| A tariff is like a surgical strike on a particular country, right? | ||
| So if America were to levy taxes on taxes, Chinese toasters. | ||
| The supplier or the American company could simply buy them from a different country. | ||
| They could buy them from America and not pay any tax whatsoever. | ||
| So in reality, the American consumer is unlikely to see any increase as a result of a tariff. | ||
| And for good measure, what the government could simply do is reduce the sales tax by an equivalent amount, and Americans will pay zero dollars extra for any price. | ||
| But it's going to do an enormous amount of economic pressure on whatever country is being targeted. | ||
| In our example, that would be China. | ||
|
unidentified
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And I just want to go back to one point you made earlier. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Well, earlier you mentioned that the difference in price between manufacturing in China and America is actually not as big as you'd expect. | ||
| And I just wanted to put some numbers to that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| So there's been research has been done to determine how much it costs to manufacture something in China versus America. | ||
| Not including those externalities. | ||
| So if we're just talking about the sticker price in China versus the sticker price of a manufactured product in the States, what they found is that on average, if it costs $1 to manufacture something in America, the cost savings are only 4 cents to manufacture it in China. | ||
| So it costs 96 cents to manufacture it in China. | ||
| When you add in the price of human suffering, when you add in the price of the environmental degradation, pollution, It's actually more expensive to manufacture in China. | ||
| So what I would imagine is that as we reshore factories to America, we're going to see not an increase in the cost of goods, but actually a decrease in the cost of goods in the long run. | ||
| Well, part of this also is the transportation cost. | ||
| I want to hang on for one more minute. | ||
| Mo's ready. | ||
| But Cameron, my crack producer, do we have Kevin O'Leary? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Spencer Morrison is with us, the author of the book, Reshoring. | ||
| I want to thank Gray Delaney for making this available. | ||
| I'm so busy right now, but he got it under my nose. | ||
| He said, Steve, this is perfect for the war room posse. | ||
| You guys got to read it. | ||
| It's a fantastic book. | ||
| I want to play Kevin O'Leary. | ||
| I think he was on CNN. Spencer, let's play it. | ||
| I want to have your observations. | ||
| Go ahead, let her rip. | ||
| I would like to go to DEFCON 1 with China, tariffs 400%, I brought it up, bring the supreme leader to Washington, or crush his economy until he has riots in the streets for food. | ||
|
unidentified
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Again, we've had strategies to deal with China. | |
| No, we haven't. | ||
| Oh, absolutely we haven't. | ||
| Not one administration says 99 has dealt with them. | ||
|
unidentified
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I thought Trump was going to be tough on China. | |
| He had four years to do that. | ||
| He's going to get tougher on China. | ||
| I was going to say the TPP. So is 35% tariff enough for China then? | ||
| Because he says it's going to be 10% higher than Mexico and Canada. | ||
| Kevin O'Leary dropped a bomb there last night. | ||
| He has said out loud what many of us have been talking about and saying behind the scenes. | ||
| You need to go to DEFCON 1 to go right at the Chinese Communist Party. | ||
| They're teetering because they just had to infuse their economy. | ||
| With a trillion dollars at the local and regional level because of all the commercial and residential real estate that's just sitting there. | ||
| Your thoughts, Spencer? | ||
| We've got to balance, but I'd like your thoughts about the 400% tariff to go to DEFCON 1 to destroy the opium war that the Chinese Communist Party is playing on the American people, killing, I don't know, 70,000 or 80,000 Americans every year of fentanyl, sir. | ||
| We need to get the factories out of China and we've got to bring them back to America. | ||
| So whether or not the tariff is 400% or 4000%, it really doesn't matter. | ||
| What we need to do is we need to come up with a number that's going to be big enough to bring the factories back. | ||
| If it's only 4%, good enough. | ||
| But, you know, going forward, there's no way out of this. | ||
| We need to bring the factories back home. | ||
| It's going to make America rich. | ||
| It's going to make us powerful. | ||
| And it's going to guarantee our freedom, economy, and national security for generations to come. | ||
| Where did they go to get your writings? | ||
| Where did they go to get the book? | ||
| What's your website, social media? | ||
| I want people to get to know you, sir, because you're going to be a big part of this conversation going forward. | ||
| Right, I appreciate that. | ||
| So the book Reshore is coming out on January 22nd. | ||
| It's available from Calamo Press. | ||
| I'm also the editor-in-chief of the National Economics Editorial. | ||
| You can find my work there. | ||
| I often have columns that are picked up by other publications, including Real Clear Politics. | ||
| I've been on the Daily Caller, the Foundation for Economic Education, American Greatness. | ||
| Well, Spencer, thank you so much. | ||
| The book comes out in January. | ||
| We want Spencer to get in here because the last 48 hours they've melted down on President Trump, thrown down on tariffs. | ||
| It's a central part of his economic policy to bring high-value-added manufacturing jobs back here to the country. | ||
| Spencer, have a great Thanksgiving and I look forward to having you back on the show. | ||
| You know, we're losing Besant. | ||
| You may lose E.J. and Tony. | ||
| We're losing Navarro. | ||
| We're maybe losing Jason Trenert. | ||
| We got to restock. | ||
| All of our contributors on the economic side are going in the White House. | ||
| So they'll be very limited in their media appearances and then only in an official capacity. | ||
| So but we're very proud that Scott has been designated as a nominee for secretary of the Treasury. | ||
| Of course, Kevin Hassett, we know very well. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| The head of the National Economic Council. | ||
| Rumor has it that Peter is going to be doing something in the White House, or maybe one of the agencies, who knows, but a senior economic job. | ||
| Rumor is about Jason Trenner, who's on here all the time, EJ and Tony. | ||
| We don't know where the team's going to fall out. | ||
| We hope that President Trump takes the entire gang over there, because they're absolutely, absolutely incredible. | ||
| And very proud to have them as our commentators and analysts over the last couple of years. | ||
| But we recommend everybody, and we would hope that every commentator and contributor to the show gets a shot to help President Trump. | ||
| There's 3,000 non-Senate confirmed jobs. | ||
| Of course, Russ Vogt, who's been a contributor since 2021, and Scott Besant have to be Senate confirmed. | ||
| Russ is head of OMB. Scott Besant as Secretary of the Treasury. | ||
| Of course, Bill McGinley is over there as White House Counsel. | ||
| So good on you. | ||
| Whether you're taking a Senate confirmation job or one of the other jobs, good on you. | ||
| Patriot Mobile, Glenn Story and the team. | ||
| Texas Wouldn't Be Red was not for Glenn Story and the great work. | ||
| Remember, and we're going to talk about this on Friday, the Patriot economy, stop giving your money to people that hate you and your values. | ||
| Patriot Mobile is a Christian company run by Christians that believe in the Judeo-Christian West and the values and tenets of it and give back a portion of the profits to charities and to people doing the work for, like, first responders and Second Amendment. | ||
| Also, Tax Network USA, TNUSA slash Bannon. | ||
| Don't let that envelope from IRS. IRS now has got to get as much revenue as possible if you've got a letter from them. | ||
| Don't think by putting it in a drawer it's going to go away. | ||
| It doesn't go away. | ||
| They're pretty good at tracking people down. | ||
| It's not the end of the world. | ||
| It's just a process. | ||
| Take a deep breath. | ||
| TNUSA.com slash Bannon. | ||
| Go talk to them before you call them. | ||
| It'll wait a little while. | ||
| You don't have to call them right away. | ||
| Get the envelope out. | ||
| Look at what they're saying. | ||
| Call TaxNowCrateUSA.com. | ||
| They'll take the anxiety away and show you that this is a process like every other thing in life. | ||
| Just a process. | ||
| But you have to engage. | ||
| If you keep it in the drawer, it only kind of grows and we don't want you to fear it. | ||
| Fear not. | ||
| You're part of the war room posse. | ||
| You're resilient. | ||
| We're Path Coffee. | ||
| The Navy SEALs, Tej Gill and the team said, hey, I got the best weapons. | ||
| We got the best diving equipment. | ||
| We got the best parachute equipment. | ||
| We're Navy SEALs. | ||
| With sea, land, commandos everywhere. | ||
| They're paratroopers. | ||
| They're frogmen. | ||
| They can go ashore. | ||
| They got the best weapons. | ||
| They're, you know, the bravest of the brave. | ||
| Some of them have gone a little Hollywood. | ||
| A couple of three progressives in there. | ||
| But generally, overall, great guys. | ||
| And of course, the Navy's so proud of their frogmen, so proud of their commanders. | ||
| But what Tej said is, hey, we drink standard Navy brew. | ||
| You can get on some, you know, crappy destroyer, Bannon, that you served on. | ||
| I said, back off. | ||
| Don't talk about the USS Paulette Foster. | ||
| But Tej had a vision to make a coffee as great as the equipment of the Navy SEALs, and he's done it. | ||
| Warpath.coffee. | ||
| Do not take my word for it. | ||
| Do not take Captain Bannon's word for it. | ||
| Do not take Grace Chong's word for it. | ||
| Go to the site, warpath.coffee.com, and check out the 5,000 five-star reviews from Posse members. | ||
| You will check it out, and you will never go back. | ||
| The bitterness has been taken out. | ||
| You can drink it all black, which is the way coffee should be consumed. | ||
| Captain Bannon, thank you for joining us, Mo, on this holiday weekend. | ||
| I got a question I saw and I knew you would have the answer. | ||
| They had a story. | ||
| Now, when I read it, it wasn't a lot of details, but the headline was to, it's one of these things to stir the pot. | ||
| It said that Vivek and Elon Musk are going to do away with the VA. I think the headline said they're going to do away with the VA. Then it turned out that, hey, they're looking at every government agency, and they're looking at discretionary spending, and that's going to be thinking clearly they're going to shut down the VA. Is there any truth to that rumor that Vivek and Elon are looking to shut down the Veterans Administration, ma'am? | ||
| There is no truth to that. | ||
| And like you said, that was a headline to stir the pot, and that actually came from an employee of Ron Filipkowski's, And it is meant to strike fear in so many people, especially so many veterans that are in our communities. | ||
| And Elon and Vivek, they want to get rid of the bloat that we have in government agencies. | ||
| So it's going through each government agency and seeing what's In their budget needs to be actually there and what we need to spend the budget on and what we can get rid of within each department. | ||
| In the VA, there are things that need to be removed from the budget. | ||
| The budget needs to be audited. | ||
| You and I have had this discussion. | ||
| There are elective surgeries that are done that should not be done, that were not service-connected issues, should not be done. | ||
| We should not be paying for gender reassignment surgery with our taxpayer money for the VA. We're good to go. | ||
| By the way, I think they may actually take it a step further than that. | ||
| I think besides the bloat, look, I know it's about waste, fraud, and abuse. | ||
| I got that part. | ||
| I know they're going to go for the bloat. | ||
| That's their first pass. | ||
| I do think with Russ' vote, and this is why Russ is so important, we're so proud he's over at OMB, and we're so proud the fact that Mali Zhang Fast is in full meltdown. | ||
| Because of this, because she knows he's a gentleman and also knows he's a brilliant hammer, that they're going to start looking at the deconstructing administrative state that's saying, hey, there's just certain things, and maybe these things are efficient, but we just shouldn't be doing that, that the government shouldn't be doing this, or we can't afford to do it. | ||
| So I think you're going to get some of that. | ||
| What's come out, I know because you're very close to a lot of people at the VA, are people at the VA starting to get concerned now? | ||
| Are they starting to get worried? | ||
| Not Certain people within the VA system, but we also need to look at the fact that a lot of VAs are actually underemployed. | ||
| We're not hiring employees at a rate for the amount of veterans that are coming into the system. | ||
| And we also need to look at the fact that we are treating veterans. | ||
| We have two age gaps, 65 and over and under 65. We have an increase in veterans under 65 coming into the system, but we don't have enough providers for those veterans. | ||
| So that's something else that needs to be looked at. | ||
| A lot of people within the VA are not concerned because we need those positions filled. | ||
| We actually need more positions filled within the VA. 30 seconds. | ||
| Give me a Sacred Human health read, ma'am. | ||
| So I have, I know your favorite is the grass-fed beef liver. | ||
| I am actually a fan of the other three products that Sacred Human has. | ||
| We have the sleep. | ||
| So if you don't get a good night's sleep on your MyPillow, if you don't have your MyPillow and you don't get a good night's sleep, like when you're traveling and you can't bring your MyPillow with you, you can take your sleep from Sacred Human Health. | ||
| We also have the magnesium and vitamin D3 that helps. | ||
| It's a good help. | ||
| And Sacred Human actually just came out with immunity. | ||
| So it's flu. | ||
| It's cold and flu season we're heading into, especially if you have young kids that are at daycare, picking up all kinds of germs. | ||
| Make sure you have your immunity from Sacred Human Health. | ||
| No flu shot. | ||
| Take the immunity from sacredhumanhealth.com. | ||
| Go check the information. | ||
| Mo, let's enjoy Thanksgiving together. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Check you after the show. | ||
|
unidentified
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And happy birthday, too. | |
| Oh my gosh, there you go. | ||
| I knew you'd do it. | ||
| Okay, thank you, girl. | ||
| Tomorrow, I'm going to be around for a special Thanksgiving special that the producers and I worked out. | ||
| You're not going to want to miss this. | ||
| It's one of the most eclectic shows we've done. | ||
| The Thanksgiving special and then Black Friday special on Black Friday. | ||
| We're here tomorrow, Friday, and Saturday in the War Room. |
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