Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen reaffirmed President Joe Biden’s globalist agenda this week, vowing that the United States is “not attempting to decouple from China.”
“We are not attempting to decouple from China,” Yellen told Sky News on Monday. “We have a deep economic relationship and that kind of competition, trade, and investment is beneficial to both sides and we want an environment in which it can continue.”
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“We are deepening our relationship [with China],” Yellen continued, and said the Biden administration is not looking to “harm progress in China.”
Yellen’s comments come as a growing number of Republican lawmakers are backing a plan that would end U.S. free trade with China, which helped eliminate nearly five million American manufacturing jobs and 91,000 American manufacturing plants from 1997 to 2018.
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In July, for example, Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) introduced the “Ending Normal Trade Relations with China Act” which would effectively end U.S. free trade with China, thus imposing high tariffs on Chinese imports.
The bill was filed in the Senate by Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) in March.
Likewise, Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR), Ted Budd (R-NC), Rick Scott (R-FL), and J.D. Vance (R-OH) have filed similar legislation, called the “China Trade Relations Act,” to end China’s normal trade relations status. Instead, presidential administrations would choose whether or not to authorize China’s free trade status with the U.S.
Stripping China of its normal trade relations status with the U.S., a new study from the Coalition for a Prosperous America found, would create two million American jobs and grow the economy by nearly two percent.
The plan would put tariffs on Chinese imports from a range of 6.7 percent all the way up to more than 70 percent. As a result, the study showed, real American household income would increase by more than $3,600 and American manufacturing output would increase by more than six percent.
“Pursuing further decoupling from the Chinese economy by removing China’s MFN status would not harm the U.S. economy or American living standards,” the study stated. “On the contrary, we find that further decoupling from China would grow the U.S. economy and result in higher incomes and more jobs for Americans and the rebuilding of many critical manufacturing sectors.”
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.