J. D. Vance and Joe Biden may not agree on much, but the Republican vice-presidential candidate offered the Democratic president a bit of backhanded praise during last night's first and only vice-presidential debate between the Ohio senator and Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
"The one thing that Joe Biden did is he continued some of the Trump tariffs that protected American manufacturing jobs," he told viewers.
While Vance and Walz butted heads on issues like immigration and abortion, they projected a surprising degree of unity on economics and the plight of the working class, coming together to lament the commoditization of the housing market and the cost of raising children.
This cycle has seen a particularly broad scope of tax- and tariff-policy ideas from the GOP ticket: no taxes on tips, no taxes on overtime pay, a 10 percent temporary cap on credit-card interest rates, an expansion of the child tax credit, and, of course, a protectionist tariff of 10 or even 20 percent on all imported goods. The former president has even pledged that if elected, he will appoint a manufacturing ambassador to woo foreign companies to move production to the U.S.
Rather than sing the praises of free trade as did Republican nominees of years past, Trump and Vance favor what they call an America-first economic policy, often railing against globalization and the business interests that benefit from the cheap labor provided by illegal immigrants, while praising tariffs as a necessary tool to protect a group they often call the "forgotten men and women of America."
"Strategically, what he's begun to do is return to the economic policies of the late 19th century, which made America the most powerful, most rapidly growing country in the world," former House speaker Newt Gingrich said in a brief interview with National Review on Friday following a celebration of the signing of the Contract with America 30 years ago. "His theory in part, I think, is that tariffs will generate enough revenue to offset all the stuff we're talking about and to enable us to eliminate all these taxes."
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