March 15, 2025 - Epoch Times
03:23
| 
| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Generally speaking, other countries are putting a lot more tariffs on us than we've been putting on them. | |
| Tariffs written out on paper, a lot of them are non-tariff barriers, so they'll block our imports by claiming some environmental or some health rule. | |
| Many of them are VATs, which are a type of income tax or a type of sales tax that most countries in the world impose. | |
| Those hit our goods if we sell stuff to France, but then France exempts its own products. | |
| So there's a variety. | |
| of barriers that countries put on us. | |
| And for Europe, for example, they tax us at roughly 18% more than we tax them. | |
| What Trump is doing is that he is very good at spotting the details of a negotiation. | |
| OK, of understanding who holds which cards and then seeing whether he can get a better deal. | |
| And when he looks at Europe, you know, the striking thing about really every one of our trade partners is that they need us a heck of a lot more than we need them. | |
| So to give a flavor, something like one to two percent of the American economy is producing for export to Canada or to Mexico. | |
| On the other hand, one fifth, 20 percent of the Canadian economy. | |
| is producing for export to the US. One third of the Mexican economy is producing for export to the US. That means that we have massive leverage over these countries. | |
| Now, we could just make them dance to entertain us, but specifically what Trump is interested in doing is getting them to lower those barriers. | |
| And what he's saying is, if you get rid of your barriers, we'll get rid of our barriers. | |
| But in the meantime, we're going to calculate how much we think you're tariffing us with those non-tariff barriers and the VAT tax and all this. | |
| And we're going to put the exact same on you. | |
| And so because the U.S. economy is so important, right? | |
| Mexico cannot give up a third of its economy. | |
| They'll have riots. | |
| They can't do it. | |
| And so what Trump is sort of doing is recognizing the enormous leverage we have over these countries. | |
| Now, that's not even to speak of the military. | |
| So there's a number of countries in the world that only exist because the American taxpayer covers their bills. | |
| For military. | |
| This is true of Europe. | |
| It's true of Japan. | |
| Korea. | |
| Certainly it's true of Taiwan. | |
| It is outrageous that any of these countries should have any trade barriers whatsoever against us, given what we give to them. | |
| So Trump recognizes this. | |
| I think the biggest shock of it has been why for the past 80 years has America been running around shining everybody's shoes when we always had 10 to 1 leverage over these countries. | |
| You can debate perhaps there's something corrupt going on there that, you know, senators in the U.S. get sweetheart jobs when they leave office. | |
| There may be quite a bit of that. | |
| I hope Doge might look. | |
| And I think they will. | |
| But for the moment, what Trump is doing that's different from previous administrations is he's recognizing that. | |
| He's saying to other countries, if you are going to tariff us, not just tariff, if you're going to do other outrageous things. | |
| So, for example, Colombia didn't want to take back its illegal immigrants, criminal illegal immigrants. | |
| They said, nah, no thanks, we don't want them. | |
| And so Trump threatened 25% tariffs. |
Export Selection