Free Republic

Thank you very much. It’s an honor to be here, and I’d like to thank the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute for inviting me to join you. Of course, this year’s forum carries special significance as we celebrate 250 years of the American story. But milestones of this magnitude demand more than ceremony. They ask something of us. They invite us to reflect not just on the creation of our country, but on its condition. And as we focus today on America’s economic future, they compel us to confront—and correct—decisions that have diminished our sovereignty in recent decades. President...

Boy howdy, this article by The Associated Press is very telling. First, it’s worth remembering that in the fine print of the USMCA deal, Mexico and Canada must comply with North American parts origination for anything they want to manufacture for sale into the United States. Meaning, all trade manufacturers must either create their component parts domestically, or purchase them from the U.S, Mexico and Canada. It’s the core point of the USMCA trade agreement. Secondly, in an aspect exclusive to the U.S. part of the deal that President Trump and USTR Lighthizer insisted upon, if either Canada or Mexico...

WASHINGTON — A new survey conducted by a coalition of suppliers for US Navy aircraft carriers reports most vendors are facing increased challenges with inflation, material availability and workforce management. The Aircraft Carrier Industrial Base Coalition survey [PDF], conducted in early November 2023 and published this week, received 150 voluntary responses. ACIBC is a trade association representing about 2,000 vendors across the country who make up the supply chain shipbuilder and prime contractor HII relies on to construct aircraft carriers at its Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard in Virginia. Lisa Papini, ACIBC’s chairwoman, told Breaking Defense the results from the survey...

A long-awaited White House report on the state of the U.S. industrial base finds that "all facets of the manufacturing and defense industrial base are currently under threat," and warns that entire industries vital to national security are facing "domestic extinction." The report, which was directed by an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on July 21, 2017, took a year to complete, involving a dozen federal agencies and 300 workers. Its findings were distilled down to 50 pages plus appendices summarizing the stresses eroding U.S. industrial strength. Many of the recommendations derived from the analysis are contained in...

Any economy that constantly consumes far more wealth than it produces is eventually going to be in for a very hard fall. Many point to relatively stable GDP numbers as evidence that the U.S. economy is doing okay, but the truth is that we have had to borrow increasingly massive amounts of money to keep GDP numbers up at that level. The U.S. government is going to run an all-time record deficit of about 1.65 trillion dollars this year and average household debt in the United States has now reached a level of 136% of average household income. But borrowing...

China’s emergence as the world’s second largest economy plays out in many ways, including the possibility it will lead a fragmentation of the traditional Airbus and Boeing duopoly that provides airlines on all continents with most of their jets. Boeing’s own forecast for the Asia-Pacific region underscores that potential. In the aggregate, China leads a region that is expected to buy $1.1 trillion worth of large new jets during the next 20 years—more than North America, Russia, the Middle East, Latin America and Africa combined. At 7.9%, China’s air travel growth is top-of-the-world. Some analysts even expect it to lead...

The Atlantic Monthly | January/February 2004   State of the Union The Economy America's "Suez Moment" The growing trade deficit threatens U.S. living standards and makes the country dangerously vulnerable to economic extortion. The way out is to make foreigners act more like us  by Sherle R. Schwenninger   .....   espite its unchallenged military might, the United States has an Achilles' heel: its economy depends on foreign capital. Though hardly anyone acknowledges this publicly, China and Japan already hold so much American debt that, theoretically, each could exert enormous leverage on American foreign policy. So far, the economic...