President Trump is in Canada where the other six members of the Group of Seven are prepared to assault President Trump and his position on tariffs. They will fail.
The United States of America is on track to soon achieve 21-trillion dollars of debt. How did we get here? We have done several things to reach this point. We gave the whole store away.
I was stationed at the American embassy in Brussels Belgium in the early 1970’s when the European Union was getting rolling. I worked in the classified communications center where literally tons of messages were going back and forth between the American Embassy, the U.S. Mission to the EU, and dozens of agencies in Washington. I read many of them. Two major activities were underway. One was the Law of the Sea negotiations which I won’t go into here. The second was the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), which commenced in the late 1960’s, where our “negotiators” with the backing of hundreds of Washington bureaucrats gave the store away by agreeing to let the Europeans set higher tariffs on American goods. The Europeans prospered and America suffered and still suffer the consequences of those dumb giveaways.
By 1972, the Europeans were highly critical of America because of our awful balance of payments (BALPA) – which were a result of those GATT agreements. Treasury Secretary John Connally was authorized by the Congress to announce to the International Monetary fund on May 6, 1972 that the USA would devalue our currency by 8% (by raising the price of our gold) which took pressure off of the balance of payments. The Europeans howled about this – about our taking action regarding those very trade imbalances. Go figure.
We have been borrowing money ever since because we were still stuck behind the eight-ball paying higher tariffs on American exports while they enjoyed lower tariffs so that they could sell their products here on the relative cheap and charge us higher taxes on our exports. American businesses and workers were getting screwed regularly and our economy was slowly degraded while they flourished – at the expense of America.
This same pattern has been repeated with our Pacific/Asian and Latin American trading partners. America – American workers, businesses, and taxpayers have been taking it on the chin for about fifty years and no President has had the gumption or brain power to do anything about it except to whine.
President Trump has the courage and the brains to do more than whine. He is calling them out and is taking action to compel our trading partners to reciprocate by lowering their tariffs to a par with ours. Now, they are whining and bitching loudly about President Trump’s quest for an even playing field. If they won’t lower their unfair and irresponsible tariffs, President Trump will reciprocate by raising ours to be on a par with their tariffs. One glaring example of this terrible situation is Canada’s 270% tax on American dairy products. Another example is to look at all of the Asian and European cars on our roads. You won’t see a commensurate number of American cars on their roads. Japan charges about 900% for American rice. China’s taxes on American goods are outrageous. One can go on and on.
America has fought wars all over the globe to protect and defend others, and in most cases, we did not receive a dime in payment for the lives lost or squandered, ruined, and the huge amounts of national treasure involved in protecting so many others, some not worthy of what we did for them.
President Trump is truly taking the giant steps necessary to raise America up to be on a par with our trading partners. President Trump is the best thing to happen to America since we broke away from the British King.
James E. Horn is a Retired American Diplomat
He is an activist, a writer, and a speaker who knows his subject
He can be reached at james@portervillepost.com
