Trump Taking Care of Business

by John Stossel Trump taking care of business by Daniel Gardner, Special to the Gazette

Governments are in the business of making and spending money just like everybody else. That’s where tariffs come in. Nations control who can buy and sell within their borders by charging tariffs or taxes.

In fact the USA has charged tariffs from the beginning of our nation to the extent that we didn’t even have a national income tax until 1913 when the Sixteenth Amendment was ratified. Before that money to fund the government came primarily from tariffs on foreign nations.

Last week

President Trump defended his use of “reciprocal tariffs” by showing a list of more than 180 nations and territories and what they charge us to do business in their countries. Mr. Trump used a number of visual aids to compare how much more our trading partners charge us for selling our goods and services than what we charge them for selling their goods and services here.

For example one chart showed China charged us 67% to sell our products and services there. Mr. Trump explained we plan to raise our tariffs on China from 34% to 54%.

Vietnam has been charging us 90%. The President said he had set a 10% baseline tariff across the board adding, “We will charge them approximately half of what they are and have been charging us.”

Donald Trump has literally been advocating using tariffs to leverage trade deals since the 1980s, long before politics became a new bailiwick for him.

Before his run for president Trump enjoyed successfully playing “The Art of the Deal” in his many business endeavors. Negotiating trade deals with other national leaders comes naturally to him.

Here at home Mr. Trump has been universally denounced by the usual detractors on the left and in the media, though I repeat myself.

Those on his right flank support him … sort of … with a lot of caveats like, “I’ve seen him win a lot and I won’t bet against him.” They’re voting more for the man than for the policies or the politics.

In the meantime the markets have lost more money than Elon Musk and his merry men ever thought about recouping from all the waste, fraud and abuse inside the federal bureaucracy. Nevertheless, DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) has saved hundreds of billions of dollars for American taxpayers. The young department still has its eyes set on recouping dollars in the trillions.

Detractors of DOGE and Musk claim they are going to destroy Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. GARDNER

Congress is on the verge of passing the renewed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act without changing any benefits of these programs. Renewing this Act also keeps everybody’s federal income taxes as low as they’ve been since the bill was originally passed in 2017 and went into effect January 1, 2018.

The Department of Homeland Security has shut the borders tight and attracted dozens of injunctions from Federal District Judges in left-leaning courts. Those judges are just asking for trouble. Seriously, do they really want to tangle with Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi? The injunctions District Judges have filed are more than enough evidence of their shallow jurisprudence.

Maybe DOGE should inspect the judiciary branch for waste, fraud and abuse.

President Trump and partners in his administration are taking care of business like none of his predecessors ever dreamed.