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Chapter 1: What happened on Liberation Day and why is it significant?
Well, folks, yesterday was Liberation Day, and we are going to go through everything tariff-related you could possibly imagine. First, your reminder, we exist to cut through the noise and bring you the unpleasant facts that others will not. Uncensored ad-free daily shows, investigative journalism, live chats with my producers. Breaking news first. No filter, no nonsense.
The Daily Wire is where the real story lives. Go to dailywire.com slash subscribe and join the fight today. Okay, so yesterday, President Trump declared that it was, in fact, Liberation Day. He said this is our economic declaration of independence. And I want to start with his announcement yesterday.
And then I want to talk about what it is that he actually announced, because the markets are getting rocked and there's a reason they are getting rocked. Here was President Trump yesterday in the Rose Garden celebrating Liberation Day. To be fair, he had warned everybody a month in advance that he was going to do this sort of thing. Here he was.
My fellow Americans, this is Liberation Day. Waiting for a long time. April 2nd, 2025 will forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America's destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again. This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history. It's our declaration of economic independence. Sounds cool.
Sounds cool. So how are we going to actually do that? Well, here's the thing. The president's vision of international trade is, I am sorry to say, mistaken. The president seems to believe that international trade is a zero-sum game. Here is the president explaining that actually the United States is a victim of everyone else when it comes to international trade over the past several decades.
Nearly a century later, in the face of unrelenting economic warfare, the United States can no longer continue with a policy of unilateral economic surrender. We cannot pay the deficits of Canada, Mexico, and so many other countries. We used to do it. We can't do it anymore. We take care of countries all over the world. We pay for their military. We pay for everything they have to pay.
And then when you want to cut back a little bit, they get upset that you're not taking care of them any longer. But we have to take care of our people, and we're going to take care of our people first.
Okay, so he's actually making a separate case here, which is that people should pay their own way when it comes to their welfare and defense spending. Totally agree, 100%. That is absolutely true. Also, that has literally nothing to do with what the president of the United States did yesterday.
It seems to be predicated, his giant tariff policy that he just dropped on the market unilaterally, probably unconstitutionally yesterday. And I'll get to that in a moment. It's predicated on a few false notions about the American economy. One is that the American economy has been a giant fail for the last 40 years. That is simply not true. This is a myth that is propagated by both parties.
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Chapter 2: How did markets react to Trump's tariffs?
And by the way, everyone got richer, including the poor, because the stuff you can get as a poor person in America in 2025 is way the hell better than the stuff that you could get as a poor person in America in 1980. That's just a reality. How about wages? We keep hearing that wages are stagnant, that they stagnated since 1979. Here, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, is a chart.
It shows you the average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory employees. And it shows you what happened to wages between 1980 and 2025. And what you see is a steep increase from the 1990s and up, a very steep increase. I know this cuts against the conventional political wisdom, which is the American economy sucks, and it's because everybody is cheating us.
Now, one of the things that President Trump is predicating his tariff war upon is the idea that trade deficits are inherently bad. A trade deficit is where we import more stuff than we export in terms of value. Now, as I pointed out before, you have a trade deficit with literally every business that you do business with unless they are buying your product.
So I have a trade deficit with my local Publix, a large trade deficit. They have bought pretty much nothing from me. And I've bought tens of thousands of dollars over the years from my local Publix. Clearly, they are screwing me. Or maybe they're not because I'm getting value for my dollar in the form of food and supplies.
Or maybe I should go over my Publix and just beat the living out of the general manager. I don't know. One of those two things. Trade deficits, they're an accounting procedure, trade deficits. You label something in export and you label something in import. But trade itself is about mutual benefit where you wouldn't do the trade in a voluntary system.
So the idea that every trade deficit someone is getting screwed is a zero-sum view of how economies work, and it's not true.
As Thomas Sowell points out, the eminent economist, quote, if the goods and services available to the American people are greater as a result of international trade, then Americans are wealthier, not poorer, regardless of whether there is a deficit or a surplus in the international balance of trade.
In fact, I can name you a period in American history where there was a fairly large surplus in America's balance of trade. The entire Great Depression. Now, there were times in American history that were great, where we also had a surplus. There were times in American history that sucked, where we had a deficit. And times in American history that were great, where we had a deficit.
As it turns out, trade deficits have pretty much nothing to do with the health of an economy. They don't tell you very much. In fact, the French economist, Frédéric Bastiat, who's really cutting about this stuff, writing in the 19th century.
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