Tennessee Republican Senate candidate Bill Hagerty told Breitbart News Daily that “Made in the USA” should be the “theme” of America again.
Breitbart News Daily host Alex Marlow asked Hagerty how America can revitalize American manufacturing and reduce its reliance on China for its supply chains. Hagerty said Trump has been working on this since the beginning of his administration.
“Thanks to the policies under President Trump, the actions he took back at the beginning of his administration in 2017, he already began to make the United States the most attractive market in the world,” he told Breitbart. “We went through the first wave of regulation; then we went through an extensive modification of the tax code in 2017, we went from having the highest or that is the least competitive corporate tax rate in the world at 35 percent down to a rate of 21 percent, which at least makes us competitive. So we have a more favorable business climate and certainly better tax regime. Suddenly the economy began to boom.”
Hagerty added that Trump said “no more” to China and imposed tariffs to establish a more fair trading system between the United States and China and that “corporate America and many corporations around the world woke up to the real risk that’s present there in China.”
He further noted that China has continued to steal American corporations’ intellectual property and forces them to compete against heavily subsidized Chinese companies. Moreover, many CEOs had told him that they want to reduce their “exposure” to China.
Hagerty then charged that the new slogan for the country is “Made in the USA” and that this would serve as the best method to combat a rising China.
He hopes to “accelerate that process and working on the White House Economic Recovery Task Force with the president and the team at the White House to do just this: What I want to see is … ‘Made in the USA’ become a theme of America again. This is the way to hit China where it hurts. It’s reduced economic dependency on them. We can no longer be dependent on them for antibiotics, medical supplies, for our high technology and our military technology equipment, so we are in the process of putting in place policies that will accelerate the movement of those industries back to U.S. soil. It can’t happen soon enough in my viewpoint.”
Bringing back manufacturing would be at the “top of his legislative” agenda should get elected to the United States Senate, he said, adding that he hopes to take a “deeper dive” into the tax code to enhance further investment in America, such as a “capital gains tax holiday.”
“Look at more ways to make capital investment attractive here to enhance the returns on capital investment. That’s how you got jobs at the end of the day.”
Hagerty conceded that there is “no single silver bullet;” however, he added that “we will look at every dimension of the problem, making certain that we get these critical industries back to America. As I said, Made in America will become the theme again.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 6:00 A.M. to 9:00 A.M. Eastern.
Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.