Peter Schiff: America’s Economic Problems Are Self-Inflicted (Video)
SchiffGold.com
MARCH 7, 2019
Peter Schiff has been talking a lot about the prospects of a trade deal lately. His point: an end to the trade war isn’t going to heal America’s economic wounds. And those wounds? Well, they’re self-inflicted.
Peter appeared on RT again on Monday (March 4) to hammer home this point.
Peter once again emphasized that he doesn’t think the US will get a substantive deal.
“I think that there’s going to be a deal. I’ve been saying that since the beginning. I think Trump can’t afford not to have a deal. So, there’s going to be one. But it’s not going to turn around America’s massive trade deficit with China. Donald Trump pretends that the reason we have these deficits is because of incompetent trade deals negotiated by his predecessors. And since he’s a great dealmaker, he’s going to make a much better deal and now we’re certainly going to see a big improvement in our trade balance. The problem is, we’re not competitive in manufacturing. We have an enormous deficit in goods, particularly with China, and there’s no deal that’s going to solve that. We have to get to the root cause of our problems, which is excess regulation, excess taxation, too much government that has undermined our competitiveness in manufacturing, which is something we used to dominate decades ago before government and labor unions screwed it all up for us.”
Steve Malzberg, a conservative radio commentator, also appeared on the show. He agreed that regulation was a part of the problem, but emphasized that Pres. Trump has been working to reduce regulations that Obama unilaterally implemented, and that these trade negotiations with China would move America’s economy forward even further.
Peter said all of these talks “cosmetic” and noted that it wasn’t Obama that caused our trade deficits.
“We had tremendous trade deficits before Obama became president. We finally took out the records that we set under George Bush for goods deficits under Donald Trump. We just had the worst trade deficit ever in merchandise under Trump. So, the trade deficits are now bigger than they were under Obama, and so we haven’t made any significant progress. And the more we want to try to scapegoat it on bad deals, the less we’ll actually pay attention to the real cause. These are self-inflicted wounds that we are suffering from. It’s not the Chinese doing it to us. We did this to ourselves and it’s going to get a lot worse if the Democrats take over in 2020 and try to implement any portion of that Green New Deal or a lot of the laundry list of socialist programs that the Democrats are itching to pull the trigger on.”
