Senior advisor to GOP frontrunner Donald Trump Stephen Miller tells Breitbart News Daily host Stephen K. Bannon that if elected president, Trump would be willing to renegotiate all trade deals that harm the U.S. and its middle- and working-classes.
“You just addressed currency manipulation,” Miller said. “That alone would bring back as many as five million jobs, depending on some estimates. And that’s just one step. If on top of that, you were to renegotiate our trade deals like NAFTA, or our trade like, for instance, China’s entrance into the World Trade Organization, then you could save millions more jobs.”
“[Trump] said he will be willing to renegotiate every trade deal we have that’s not working for the American people,” Miller continued. “And I would just make this point that the fundamental economic principle that everybody misses is that the United States has all the leverage.”
“If you have a huge trade deficit, what that means is the other country needs your consumers more than you’re using theirs,” he said. “So to give you an example real quick with Mexico, everybody says about the border wall: ‘Oh, you can’t threaten Mexico with a tariff.’ Mexico is completely dependent on us economically, selling their cheap goods into our markets. ”
“By comparison, our high-wage country sells much less to their country, hence the $60 billion trade deficit between the two countries that Donald Trump talks about. So, if we were to raise a tariff, they would have no economic incentive to say, ‘Oh, well, we’ll raise a tariff, too.’ Because they need access to our market more than we need access to their market. So we have all the leverage,” he said.
Miller, former communications director for Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, also criticized pundits who said Trump would start a trade war: “Ironically, it was Mitt Romney who said we don’t have to worry about a trade war, because right now we have a trade surrender. Mitt Romney apparently forgot his words before joining the ‘Never Trump’ movement. But every other country we’re talking about here is fighting against us economically and in their own interest, which is their right, and then we’re surrendering to them.”
“So, we have a trade surrender right now,” he added. “And the surrender needs to end because we basically auctioned off our entire middle class, and that has been economically devastating. Wisconsin, for instance, has seen its middle class shrink more than any other state in the country, according to Pew Research.”
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