Watching what’s happened since “Liberation Day” has probably been the best 2 weeks for our Country in my lifetime. Yes, yes, yes, we’ve heard all of the “doom and gloom” from critics of President Trump’s plan, focusing on this piece or that piece of the plan, but it’s like they’re all blind to how we got here. And the “BIG PICTURE” behind what President Trump is doing goes right over their collective heads. We’re going to look at a few of the real pieces.
Most people seem to be singly focused on the tariffs, to us that’s just the attention piece, in response to 50+ years of economic and operational mismanagement by our ever growing National Government. Most people seem to skip right past the actions taken by the Trump Administration before the tariffs were even on the screen. This has been a collection of “strokes of brilliance” that started on the afternoon of January 20th. Let’s hope the Congress will be smart enough to codify as much of this as possible into law.
Now to the tariffs. Not really, let’s look at the foundation President Trump has built to position the tariffs on. I have spent my whole adult life in and around the industrial manufacturing world, which is at the base President Trump is using to advance the tariffs. Most of our fellow Citizens, who are not in this sector, have no real idea how the National Government drove our manufacturing base offshore. I can tell you how in one hyphenated word, “over-regulation”. Yes, it’s that simply complex. Shall I explain? I’ll be glad to, from a personal perspective, and personal history.
I want to say that there is no question as we advanced into the original “Golden Age” of the U.S. industrial advances in the 1950s & 60s, we created a need for some safety and environmental regulations. The operative word being “some”. But over the next 50+ years we got a whole lot more than some. Piece by piece, regulation by regulation, we watched the National Government, in many cases by the entrenched bureaucrats, not the scientists and technical specialists, choke the life out of the manufacturing segment.
We started by using the National Government-controlled “education” system to begin moving the next generation to aspire to move away from manufacturing. You know, leave the “dirty jobs”. In just a generation or two we eliminated the discussion and knowledge of what manufacturing entails, even though we all had the pieces of industry all around us. Do you think kids today ride by a plant and wonder “what do they do there?” I’m sure some do, but as we moved more and more manufacturing offshore, they have fewer opportunities to do so. And that’s when they might look up from their screen. But I digress.
My personal story, getting back to the point at hand, I started my working life in a metal plating shop. Most people weren’t/aren’t even aware this industry existed. It is a very “environmentally intense” industry and needed “some” regulation to help keep the environment clean. But from the early 70s going forward it didn’t get “some” regulation, it was nearly regulated out of existence. Only the deep pocket companies, that had “in-house” processes, could afford to continue to operate. And the majority of “job-shop” plating companies disappeared. Most people are not aware that there is plated metal in almost every consumer, utility and/or industrial product, but most of these producers do not have the volume to justify setting up in house. So what did they have to do? They had to find a source, in many cases, outside of the U.S..
I use this as an example of just one of the industrial “service” businesses, that were forced, through, often unnecessary, National Government regulations, to move offshore to remain competitive and profitable. This opened the door for more and more component manufacturers to move offshore to have some direct contact with how their products were being processed. I’m sure you can see where this is going? And we have to remember that while this was being done to the industrial service sector, OSHA and various other National Government bureaucracies were piling more and more regulations on the final manufacturers. So what happened next? The final manufacturers moved offshore to remain competitive in the now World market.
Now, back to the tariffs. Really. Most of the people “freaking out” about Trump’s tariffs know nothing about ANY of what we just presented, so they just lash out that Trump’s plan is to bankrupt We The People. And what most them haven’t really paid attention to is the incredibly fast and widespread National Government regulatory reforms that have been enacted since January 20. And I know that it’s crazy that, through using modern science and technology, we can now repeal many of these regulations that drove manufacturing out of the U.S., and still keep our clean and safe environments. And the tariffs are the final play in returning our manufacturing base back on shore.
In closing, we hope this gives you a little different window to view the tariffs through, and their purpose. And we haven’t even touched on how important this all is from a national security standpoint. We believe that as the manufacturing base brings their operations, and their high paying jobs, back on shore, we will see the great industrial renaissance that President Trump refers to as the “Golden Age of America”. It won’t happen immediately, but it will happen if we’re patient and follow this course that the President has charted to Make America Great Again”!
God Bless America!! And America, Please Bless God Again!!
