Free Republic

When he descended the Trump Tower escalator on June 15 last year to announce his run for the presidency, Donald Trump polled near the bottom of the Republican field. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll taken from June 14 to 18 reported Trump was the first choice of 1 percent of Republican voters, behind Rick Perry, Carly Fiorina, and eight others. A RealClearPolitics graphic tracking an average of several polls illustrates the stunning speed of Trump’s rise. For most of June, Trump’s line slithered along the bottom of the 17-person field, then headed by Jeb Bush. Two weeks after his announcement,...

Donald Trump is not a professor, but for years he will be yielding insights to every student of economics. His Tuesday address on trade did a masterful job of combining antiquated fallacies with misinformation and ignorance to create an encyclopedia of error. Instructors have never had so much free help constructing their lesson plans. The vision Trump conjures is one of alluring simplicity. He promises to achieve "economic independence" by abandoning globalization, instead using American workers to produce American goods. This change, he said, would "create massive numbers of jobs" and "make America wealthy again." It's a scam, skillfully pitched...

House Speaker Paul Ryan sought to present a united front with presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump on trade issues, despite their differing perspectives on international trade deals. "He wants to get good trade agreements," Ryan told The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in an interview Wednesday. "So do I." Ryan's remarks come shortly after Trump sharply criticized trade agreements in a speech at a western Pennsylvania Rust Belt town earlier this week, blaming globalization for having "wiped out totally, totally our middle class." Trump further called the landmark Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP), a trade deal that involves a "death blow for American...

Donald Trump took a decades-long Republican consensus in favor of free trade and discarded it like the garbage that formed the backdrop of his economic address Tuesday.

Paul Ryan, the Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, called on Tuesday for Washington, in parallel with its negotiations with Europe, to pursue a separate free trade agreement with Britain, once it has formally separated from the European Union. Ryan, the highest-ranking elected Republican in the United States, echoed a call from many members of his party, who have dismissed President Barack Obama's contention that Britain will be at the "back of the queue" for trade talks. Obama issued that warning in April when he intervened to try to persuade Britons to vote to remain in the June 23...

MONESSEN, Pa. (AP) -- Republican Donald Trump took aim at U.S. free trade deals in a speech delivered in Western Pennsylvania Tuesday that painted his likely Democratic rival Hillary Clinton as a champion of the kind of globalization that has pushed manufacturing jobs overseas.

I seldom watch network or cable TV so I rarely see political commercials. I was over at a relatives house yesterday and they had the TV on. I was shocked by the ads for Senator Rob Portman -R vs. Ted Strickland - D (in Ohio). The ads seemed to be each candidate trying to out-Trump the other one. Portman's ad talked about the Chinese devaluing their currency, dumping steel on the U.S. and how Portman would fight them. Strickland's ad talked about how he was against unfair trade deals that hurt the middle class and export jobs. These candidates might...

During all of that time, TransCanada (the company working to complete the project) was running up some significant bills doing preparatory work, filing reports, paying for armies of lawyers and engineering talent… this was not a low cost, low risk endeavor. And all the while they were being assured that the plan would get a fair hearing and held obvious benefits for both the United States and Canada. Then the plug was unceremoniously pulled. With all of that history as prologue, it may not be surprising that they would now like some of the money which was invested in good...

In recent decades, a revisionist history of American trade policy has developed an almost religious status in Washington D.C. In this context, the candidacy of Donald Trump has been presented as a deviation from America’s historic “free trade” policy when, in fact, America was founded on Alexander Hamilton’s protectionist economic system whose greatest defenders would become Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party.

Critics of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, such as Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, were convinced months ago that it would harm the United States... ...International Trade Commission (ITC) was mandated to deliver its verdict... ...the findings landed with a thud. That was only partly because the document was 792 pages long; it also foretold of modest results. It predicted that, by 2032, U.S. real income would be 0.23% higher with the agreement than without and employment would be .07% higher (128,000 full time jobs). Hardly earth-shattering... ...There are limitations to these workhorse trade models... ...Few -- if any --...

President Barack Obama stands by his comment that Britain would move to the back of the queue when it comes to trade deals with the United States if it left the European Union, the White House said on Friday. "Obviously, the president stands by what he said and I don't have an update of our position," White House spokesman Eric Schultz told reporters at a briefing. Obama urged Britain to remain in the EU when he visited London in April and warned that a trade agreement between the two countries would not happen anytime soon if Britain left the bloc.

Rep. Randy Forbes, GOP establishment stalwart and longtime Obamatrade supporter from Virginia’s 2nd Congressional District, will soon be unemployed. Voters rejected him in favor of his primary opponent Scott Taylor, who stridently opposed Obamatrade. Taylor blasted Forbes for voting to give President Obama fast track authority to ram through Congress the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a sweeping 12-nation international regulatory pact that would merge our economy with some of the poorest and most repressive on earth. This move was especially hypocritical for Forbes, chairman of the House Prayer Caucus. Obamatrade would give special economic privileges to countries that persecute Christians, including Vietnam,...

Generalizing from the particular is one of the biggest — and most common — mistakes analysts make. There’s a natural tendency for people to extrapolate from their own personal experience and conclude that the results are the norm. But that’s a poor analytical frame. If the main stock you chose for your portfolio is off 30 percent, it doesn’t mean the entire stock market is down 30 percent. If home prices on your street are booming, it doesn’t mean that prices in your town, or the country at large, are soaring ahead.We can see this dynamic playing out in some...

Egged on by anti-trade Presidential candidates Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, primary election voters across the U.S. have been in an ugly mood toward global trade and particularly the proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP). At the same time, employers and business associations in Washington state, as elsewhere across the U.S., have voiced strong support for TPP. A recent Washington state poll for the Washington Council on International Trade (WCIT) by Elway Research showed majority support.   The future belongs to workers who develop higher-level, specialized skills. Here, NASA Community College Aerospace Scholars engage in a three-day workshop. Photo: NASA...

If a year ago someone told me I would be an advocate of Donald Trump, I would have laughed, because everyone knew he was a joke with a toupee. But on August 27, 2015, at a rally in Greenville, South Carolina, when Mary Margaret Bannister pulled his hair, we learned he does not wear a wig. And in researching my upcoming book, "Trump The Press," I learned he is no joke. He has developed the leadership skills needed to lead the free world. In December 2014, Peter Economy of Inc. magazine wrote, "The Top 10 Skills Every Great Leader Needs...

Problematic, in a very big way even if the offer was made.Qatar’s ties to Al Qaeda and ISIS aren’t news. They’ve effectively served as intermediaries in everything from ransom exchanges for hostages to Taliban negotiations. But actually trying to secure terrorist swaps for prisoners on their own behalf would have been a new frontier. Before he was released from a U.S. maximum-security prison last week, a confessed al Qaeda sleeper agent was offered up in a potential prisoner swap that would have freed two Americans held abroad.According to two individuals with direct knowledge of the case, the proposition was...

This video shows how CNN also known as Clinton News Network and their hosts will blatantly lie to the American public in order to protect Hillary Clinton. Videos courtesy of CNN and government archives.

In his coquettish refusal to accept the Donald, Paul Ryan says he cannot betray the conservative “principles” of the party of Abraham Lincoln, high among which is a devotion to free trade. But when did free trade become dogma in the party of Lincoln? As early as 1832, young Abe declared, “My politics are short and sweet, like the old woman’s dance. I am in favor of a national bank … and a high protective tariff. These are my sentiments and political principles.” Campaigning in 1844, Lincoln declared, “Give us a protective tariff, and we will have the greatest nation...

President Obama is racing against the clock to cement a massive Pacific Rim trade deal that all of his potential successors oppose, with his administration eyeing a looming fight on Capitol Hill while starting to implement as much of the complicated pact as it can.

"The U.S. Senate approved a bill May 12 that would overhaul the process for businesses requesting tariff suspensions and reductions." "The miscellaneous tariff bill (MTB) establishes a new process for manufacturers to avoid having to pay tariffs on imported raw materials and intermediate products for which there are no suitable U.S.-based suppliers."