NEW YORK CITY, New York — Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee for president, is in a unique position to be able to tell the Wall Street lobbyists and special interests to “go to hell” while he actually fixes the U.S. economy, his senior economic adviser Peter Navarro told Breitbart News Saturday.
Navarro said on the program, which aired on SiriusXM Patriot Channel 125 from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturday:
The basic problem is for a congressman or a president to get elected, they need obscene amounts of money. And the only place you can get obscene amounts of money is from Wall Street and the big corporations who benefit from shipping our jobs and our factories overseas—that’s the fundamental political problem. That’s the beauty of Donald Trump. He’s the change agent. He can tell Wall Street and these big people and corporations that want to ship our jobs overseas to go to hell. He stands up for our workers.
Navarro’s interview came just an hour before Trump’s address in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, where he laid out what he will do in his first 100 days as president if elected on Nov. 8, and made his closing argument to the American people in the campaign.
Navarro told Breitbart News Saturday of the speech:
This is basically a broad overview of the whole Trump policy agenda for America. It’s very exciting news. If you think about what’s going on this year in America, we’ve got the slowest growth since World War II. We’ve got a national security mess in every theater in the world from Asia to the Middle East, and we’ve got a healthcare plan that is imploding, and we’ve got an immigration plan that is overwhelming this country, so in the remaining days until Nov. 8 Mr. Trump is going to lay all of this out and it’s going to be exciting to hear positive policies talked about to the American people instead of anything but policy.
Trump, Navarro noted, has been giving detailed policy-oriented speeches across the United States over the past several months while his Democratic opponent Hillary Rodham Clinton has been running a policy-free campaign focused on insults and the politics of personal destruction. Nonetheless, the media completely ignores Trump’s solutions-focused campaign. So what Trump plans to do now is circumvent the media while taking his message directly to the American people. Navarro said:
What happens is there will be a major speech that goes on for 40 minutes laying out in precise detail exactly what’s going to get done and then the media will take a clip from that that’s unrelated to the policy agenda and make that the news. It’s difficult to push through that when so much of the media has a NeverTrump agenda. So what Mr. Trump’s going to do is just take the case to the American people between now and election day that his agenda is the right one on the economy, immigration, healthcare, and everything on down—national security—this is a critical election.
Hillary Clinton’s agenda, Navarro said, would devastate the United States on every front. He said:
In fact, if we turn the country over to Hillary Clinton at this point we know the following: We know that she can’t possibly be better at economically than we’ve been doing and she’ll probably do worse. We know that she will continue with the Obamacare agenda which is collapsing before our eyes. We know that Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy agenda will continue to be weakness and chaos in places like the Middle East. We know all of this and it’s important for the American people to learn more in more granular detail about the competing policies of each of the candidates and that’s the mission between now and Nov. 8.
One of the key points he brought up during the interview was Gross Domestic Product (GDP) growth in the United States, which since the early 2000s has significantly slowed down compared with the latter half of the 20th century. That crushes Americans’ chances of getting a good job with high-paying wages, as the slowdown in the 21st century has cost the United States around 20 million jobs, maybe more. Navarro went on:
Let me give you just the central statistic of American life right now: From 1947 to 2001, our economy grew at an average rate of 3.5 percent a year. Since 2002, that rate’s fallen to 1.9 percent a year. For every one percent of GDP growth that we have lost over the last 15 years, we’ve lost 1.2 million jobs. If you add that up over the 15-year period, that would be over 20 million jobs, which is about what we need to put everybody back to work at a decent wage. So that’s the grim reality.
Navarro said the reason this has happened is because of a “structural problem” in the U.S. economy that people like Hillary Clinton refuse to solve:
Now, the question is: Why has this happened? The answer is simply that we have a deep structural problem in our economy and the basic answer is we don’t invest on American soil like we used to. That’s a major problem. We invest in Mexico and China and Vietnam and Cambodia instead. That drains our GDP directly, and then we also run a massive trade deficit: $766 billion a year, which alone probably takes a point off our growth rate. Now, Donald Trump recognizes this. He recognizes that two of the most important things are to get more investment on domestic soil by corporations and businesses and to eliminate the trade deficit.
Trump will solve the problem on four separate fronts, Navarro said, something that will take bold leadership and courage in Washington. Navarro continued:
So what do you do? You attack that on four different fronts: regulatory, trade directly, energy, and basically what we need to do is realign the incentives of corporations so that it’s better to invest in Michigan than Mexico. One of the ways to do that is to reduce the corporate tax rate from 35 percent down to 15 percent, which would make us competitive with all of those countries which have lower corporate tax rates and are basically running huge surpluses with us: Germany, Japan, South Korea, China, Mexico. These are the countries that are just killing us strategically. So, if we want to get better growth—stronger growth—we have to attack this structurally. Now, what Obama and Clinton have been doing is treating the problem not structurally but as a cyclical phenomenon that you can simply use what we call Keynesian stimulus — named after John Maynard Keynes, famous economist: the idea that if you simply spend a bunch of government money and print a bunch of government money that somehow that will stimulate the economy. Well, we’ve had eight years of that. Barack Obama has doubled our debt from $10 to $20 trillion using fiscal stimulus and our Federal Reserve balance sheet has been totally destroyed and what do we have to show for it? We have one percent growth instead of 3.5 or 4.
Navarro said Clinton has two separate ideas to “stimulate the economy,” both of which he said won’t work.
“One is to basically tax the rich and give the money to everybody else,” he said, noting that that is essentially classic leftist redistribution of wealth that will “depress savings and investment from the people who save the most and allow the most investment.” Navarro added:
And the other is this wacky thing to significantly raise business taxes to get a pot of money and then build some infrastructure. It might sound good to some people—we definitely need the infrastructure—but the last thing we want to do is reallocate funds in America from the efficient private sector to the less efficient public sector. Trump has an infrastructure plan which will produce twice as much spending without having to raise any taxes. He uses an elegant system of a tax credit to incentivize the private sector to build this stuff.
Navarro said the problem is, in addition to cheap labor overseas, a number of government policies that strangle business development in the United States while encouraging offshoring of U.S. companies. He elaborated:
Cheap labor is a small part of the problem at work here. If it were only cheap labor, America would be in trouble. Because it’s other things too, we have a great chance to turn it around. Here’s the problem: Our high corporate tax rate pushes our companies offshore. Our high regulatory burden pushes our companies offshore. To the extent we put our coal miners and oil and gas industry out of business and raise electricity costs and energy costs, that pushes our corporations offshore. To the extent that we allow China to illegally subsidize goods and sell them into this country, that pushes our jobs and factories offshore. To the extent we don’t hold the World Trade Organization and Mexico accountable for manipulating the rules of the VAT versus income tax is very injurious to this country.
Navarro added that if someone is elected president with the “will and the intelligence” to take on the special interests and fix the problems, America can survive this threat. He concluded:
All of this stuff is in our hands. It simply takes the will and the intelligence to do it, and the ability to resist the special interests who are on the other side of that equation. Trump will solve this problem, Clinton is part of the problem. In fact, it’s extraordinary to me—you cannot name a presidential candidate in history who has singlehandedly through bad trade deals destroyed more American jobs and more American factories than Hillary Clinton. She did NAFTA, she did China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, she did the South Korean 2012 deal, every single one of those. We’re talking about millions and millions and millions of jobs and just misery in all of the swing states in this election. If anybody is listening to this in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Indiana, Wisconsin, North Carolina, please recognize that Hillary Clinton bears a major responsibility for whatever misery your state is going through.
LISTEN TO PETER NAVARRO’S FULL INTERVIEW ON BREITBART NEWS SATURDAY:
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