Vice President JD Vance said Thursday he isn’t going to “shy away” from the short-term pain the Trump administration’s sweeping “Liberation Day” tariffs could potentially have on Americans — but insisted the US needed a “big change.”
“We cannot keep going down the Joe Biden globalist pathway where we have $2 trillion of peacetime debt and deficits. We have manufacturing disappearing,” Vance told Fox News’ “Fox & Friends.” “That is not working for Americans. We’ve got to take this country in a different direction.”
“Yes, this is a big change. I’m not going to shy away from it, but we needed a big change,” he added.
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The veep also warned Americans living paycheck-to-paycheck that things weren’t likely to get better overnight — insisting Team Trump was left to clean up the Biden administration’s mess.
“We know people are struggling, we’re fighting as quickly as we can to fix what was left to us but it’s not going to happen immediately,” he said.
“We really do believe that if we pursue the right deregulation, we pursue those energy cost-reducing policies, yes, people are going to see it in their pocketbook. They’re also going to benefit from the fact that foreign countries can’t take advantage of us anymore. That means their jobs are going to be more secure.”
It comes after President Trump on Wednesday announced a 10% baseline tariff on all imports to the US, as well as higher duties on some of the country’s biggest trading partners — ranging from premium Italian coffee and Japanese whisky to sportswear made in Asia.
Trump, who argued the “reciprocal” tariffs were a response to duties and other non-tariff barriers put on US goods, would boost manufacturing jobs at home.
“This is one of the most important days, in my opinion, in American history. It’s our Declaration of Economic Independence,” the president said.
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Vance expanded further on Thursday, insisting the tariffs would work hand-in-hand with expected tax cuts in a bid to “reward hard-working Americans.”
“For 40 years, we’ve had an economy that rewards people who ship American jobs overseas and raises taxes on American workers. We’re flipping that on its head. We’re going to cut taxes for American workers and for American companies that build here,” he said.
“We’re going to make it harder to ship American jobs overseas. It’s a total shift in the way that we’ve done economic policy in the United States of America, but it was necessary,” he continued.
“Yeah, we’re going to cut your taxes, you’re going to have more money in your pocket, and that’s, of course, going to help you deal with the cost of inflation.”
Still, the veep insisted that tax cuts would not just be about offsetting tariffs.
“But that’s not about offsetting the tariffs. They work together. We want to penalize people for shipping our jobs overseas. We want to reward hard working Americans. It’s all part of the same policy,” Vance said.
