Bill Federer, a brilliant historian, talks about the history of tariffs in America and how they relate to current events. Bill Federer is the founder of Turning Point USA, a powerful youth organization dedicated to fighting for freedom in America.
00:00:27.000He's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:00:34.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
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00:01:12.000Today on The Charlie Kirk Show, we have an amazing guest and friend of mine to talk about history, how it connects with current events, and that is Bill Federer from AmericanMinute.com.
00:01:57.000Coal was what they burned, and they had coal mines that would fill up with water.
00:02:01.000So in 1769, Isaac Watt invented a steam pump to get water out of coal mines, and that quickly turned into a steam engine that ran factories.
00:02:20.000And so women would have to sit at a spinning wheel and take this yarn and turn it into thread and then make cloths.
00:02:26.000Well, factories could make bolts of cloth really quick, really inexpensive.
00:02:31.000And so this is called the Industrial Revolution.
00:02:34.000But the British did not allow manufacturing in the colonies because they wanted to market.
00:02:40.000And so when America becomes independent of Britain, the second bill that George Washington signed as president was the Tariff Act of 1789 to put a 5% tariff on all imports into America to make those 5%.
00:03:10.000Matter of fact, there was no income tax in America until the Civil War.
00:03:17.000And the U.S. Constitution specifically mentions that tariff taxes was the way the federal government was going to get its income.
00:03:25.000Article 1, Section 8, authorizes the federal government to collect duties and imposts, which are different terms for tariffs, to pay the debts, provide for the common defense, and the general welfare of the United States.
00:03:39.000So basically, all federal money came from tariffs.
00:03:42.000And so Alexander Hamilton, the first Secretary of the Treasury, created the Coast Guard to do what?
00:03:50.000To catch ships that were trying to smuggle stuff into America without paying the tariffs.
00:03:55.000And so he's in charge of federal revenue.
00:04:15.000Thomas Jefferson, the third president, stated April 6, 1816, it may be the duty of all to submit to this sacrifice to pay for a time and impost on importation of certain articles in order to encourage their manufacture at home.
00:04:34.000So it's like, look, everybody, we're going to have to pay a little bit extra if we want these foreign goods.
00:05:41.000and near the Civil War, they were at 60%.
00:05:45.000Franklin Pierce, the 14th president, said December 5th, 1853, Happily, I have no occasion to suggest any radical changes in the financial policy of the government.
00:05:58.000Ours is almost, if not absolutely, the solitary power of Christendom, having a surplus of revenue drawn immediately from imposts on commerce.
00:06:20.000Ben Siegelman wrote in 1962 in the commentary magazine article, Tariffs Kennedy Administration in American Politics.
00:06:29.000He said, in the early years of the republic, all but about $20,000 of the $4.5 million of treasury income stemmed from tariff levies.
00:06:40.000Up to the Civil War, in fact, over 90% of the federal government's It's unbelievable.
00:06:51.000The majority of the tariffs were collected at southern ports.
00:06:54.000So the South, like Charleston, South Carolina, threatened many times to stop collecting the tariffs because they were in a position as an agricultural area of having to buy more expensive stuff from Europe or more expensive stuff relatively from the northern factories.
00:07:14.000So the tariffs helped the northern factories, but really didn't help the South.
00:07:18.000So when the Civil War started, The South held back their tariff income.
00:07:23.000And the federal government was like, uh-oh.
00:07:26.000So Lincoln pushed through an emergency income tax, and it raised $750 million to finance the Union during the Civil War.
00:08:19.000I mean, it is the most, you feel like you're in some foreign palace.
00:08:23.000There was so much opulence and wealth in America at this time.
00:08:27.000And then even into the early 1900s, I wrote a book on George Washington Carver, the Tuskegee scientist from down south, and the United Peanut Growers Association in 1921.
00:08:43.000Asked Carver to go to the House Ways and Means Committee and to lobby for a tariff on peanuts imported from China because they could bring them in from China cheaper than the southern farmers could grow them.
00:11:13.000When the income tax was extended to millions of new taxpayers, previously it had been a selective tax imposed on the wealthy.
00:11:22.000And then, of course, FDR had his greatest tax increase in world history.
00:11:31.000You know one of the biggest lies being sold to American people right now is that you're in control of your money, especially when it comes to crypto.
00:11:37.000But the truth, most of these so-called crypto platforms are just banks in disguise, fully capable of freezing your assets the moment some bureaucrat makes a phone call.
00:11:46.000That is not what Bitcoin was built for.
00:12:02.000Not some three-letter agency that thinks it knows better than you do.
00:12:06.000This is how it was intended by the original creators of Bitcoin.
00:12:09.000Peer-to-peer money, free from centralized control, free from surveillance, and free from arbitrary seizure.
00:12:14.000So if you're serious about financial sovereignty, go to Bitcoin.com, set up your wallet, take back control, because if you don't hold the keys, you don't own your money.
00:13:45.000Now, the problem was that other countries would subsidize their businesses to help them produce their goods cheaper so they could sell them cheaper and put out of business the American competition.
00:13:59.000And then once they had a monopoly, then they could flex their muscles when it came to negotiating foreign policy.
00:14:08.000We'll hold back what you need because we're the only ones giving it to you.
00:14:13.000And so we see that what Trump, in a sense, is wanting to do is to go back to the original model that did make America the wealthiest and most prosperous nation on the planet.
00:14:30.000And you're making other countries pay a premium to have access to our customers.
00:14:37.000And so, yeah, let's just kind of go a level deeper here.
00:15:41.000And this is when the British set up HSBC Bank, Hong Kong Singapore Bank, which was used, basically, to take the profits from selling the opium into China.
00:15:53.000Talk about a government involved in the drug trafficking.
00:15:58.000But this is called the Century of Humiliation for China.
00:17:19.000And they began to do a cultural revolution, not just a revolution, but a cultural one, which means they were destroying thousands of years of Chinese culture.
00:17:27.000They destroyed the oldest gates, you know, in Beijing and the oldest Buddhist temple and tens of thousands of ancient Chinese works because they wanted to do the New People's Republic of China.
00:20:05.000And so if if they do anything to to So they're in sort of a box, and Trump is probably the only person on the planet that has the guts to push back against their agenda.
00:20:20.000If you look at the Hutchison-Wempol company, which is a Chinese-owned company, they've been strategically taking control of major maritime ports, Panama Canal, the Dardanelles, different areas around the world that are choke points.
00:23:14.000That brings up another interesting scenario.
00:23:19.000FDR, on his way back from the Alta Conference, stops off.
00:23:22.000His USS Quincy boat in the Suez Canal, and he meets with the King of Saudi Arabia, Aziz Ibn Saud, and they do an oil for security agreement that America will provide security for Saudi Arabia in exchange for Saudi Arabia selling its oil in U.S. dollars.
00:23:42.000The number one commodity sold worldwide is oil.
00:23:45.000And when everybody in the world is having to buy oil in U.S. dollars, and since Saudi Arabia is the biggest seller of it, one of the biggest, then everybody wants U.S. dollars.
00:23:56.000And so we're able to be the reserve currency for the world.
00:24:01.000Biden let that slip, and that's dangerous, because if it ever happens that we're not the reserve currency, there'll be lots of dollars that have been created that nobody needs.
00:24:16.000I think Trump is very effectively trying to push back against that.
00:24:22.000And then you had the Bretton Woods Agreement around 1948, Harry S. Truman, that made the international agreement that the U.S. dollar would be the reserve currency for the world, backed with gold.
00:24:36.000Everybody said, hey, you can put your money in dollars and you know it's the most safest until Richard Nixon got us off the gold standard.
00:24:43.000But even then, it was still responsibly managed.
00:24:48.000But then under Biden and Obama and the spending, spending the trillions and trillions of dollars, we're the most in-debt nation in the history of the world.
00:24:56.000Can a nation survive the amount of debt that we've accumulated?
00:25:31.000It was getting gold from America, but they were spending it as fast as they got it.
00:25:35.000And when they lost their Spanish armada in 1588, trying to attack England, then they lost another armada a few years later, and then another one, Spain, went bankrupt, and they couldn't maintain their global empire.
00:25:48.000And that's when, you know, England and France and others began to settle colonies in America.
00:25:53.000France, under Louis XIV, became the biggest empire in the world.
00:25:57.000But then France helped us with our Revolutionary War.
00:26:10.000They just got nothing but debt and then a couple years of crops failed and France went bankrupt and they had a French Revolution and it collapsed.
00:28:14.000We're just going to take control of your lives.
00:28:16.000But you look at the countries that fell behind the Iron Curtain.
00:28:21.000They were all destabilized, and debt was a chief factor in that.
00:28:27.000So Trump's trying to turn things around.
00:28:29.000I think if he, you know, Kennedy talks about that.
00:28:34.000He says if we could cut taxes, it will spur economic growth.
00:28:39.000And then we'll be able to get our economy growing again.
00:28:45.000And so Trump's taking this attitude of let's free up individuals so they can keep their money and then the economy can grow.
00:28:57.000I did a book called The Interesting History of Income Tax, and John F. Kennedy talks about FDR's high taxes and how they've been chasing money out of the country and doing this outsourcing.
00:29:10.000So February 6, 1961, Kennedy said, I've asked the Secretary of Treasury to report on whether present tax laws may be stimulating in undue amounts the flow of American capital to industrial countries abroad.
00:29:30.000In those countries where income taxes are lower than in the United States, the ability to defer the payment of U.S. tax by retaining income in subsidiary companies provides a tax advantage for companies operating through overseas subsidiaries that is not available to companies operating solely in the United States.
00:29:48.000And so he says we need to give tax cuts to businesses.
00:29:52.000The caveat is that And he says a tax cut.
00:30:02.000A tax cut means higher family income, higher business profits, a balanced federal budget.
00:30:07.000Every taxpayer in his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new convenience, education, investment.
00:30:15.000Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding his business.
00:30:22.000And as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenue.
00:30:27.000So if you cut taxes, people will have more money and they'll spend it.
00:30:31.000And then the factories will have to hire more workers to meet the increased demand, right?
00:30:37.000And so the idea is that you can stimulate the economy through cutting taxes.
00:30:44.000And again, at the same time, replacing that with tariff income.
00:30:50.000Taking a step back with all of this, the direction that President Trump is heading with tariffs and national security, how do you place him in the list of American presidents on the macro of what he's trying to achieve and the realignment, trying to really consolidate our hemisphere?
00:31:27.000I've never seen, in studying all the presidents, you know, FDR concentrated power with his New Deal programs during the Depression, and then World War II, and he hired, and then he gets out, Eisenhower, Republican, gets in, Eisenhower hires Clarence Mannion.
00:31:45.000The dean of the Notre Dame Law School.
00:31:47.000His job is to go through all of the concentrating of power that FDR put in place and basically do doge.
00:31:56.000What can we do to trim back all this stuff?
00:32:01.000And he comes up with a great list, but all the rhinos had gotten to Eisenhower and said, look, look, wait a second, we're in charge.
00:32:11.000It's okay to have big government, because the Republicans are in charge of it.
00:32:15.000And so they basically let Clarence Mannion go, and he pioneered the conservative movement that Eddie Rickenbacker became a part of, and then Phyllis Schlafly, and then all the rest of us sort of followed along.
00:32:31.000he gave a cryptic address at the end of his term and he warns of the military industrial establishment but that was his words for the deep state it's like there's some people here and they got their own agenda and they're wanting to So really quick, I'm sorry to interrupt, Bill.
00:33:13.000He's a friend of FDRs, and it was a debt-stimulated economy.
00:33:17.000So here we are, depression, and he comes up with this idea, hey, it's okay for the government to go in debt, to spend money in the private sector to create jobs.
00:33:25.000Those jobs will pay taxes, and the taxes will pay off the debt.
00:33:29.000Sounds good on a chalkboard, but it never gets implemented because every generation of Congress, right, says, hey, let's go in more debt so I can funnel money to my district to get votes, and then we'll let the next Congress decide how to pay it off.
00:33:45.000And so that's how there's even a guy named Buchanan, James Buchanan, and he won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1980.
00:33:56.000Because he discovered what I just told you.
00:34:46.000And I think that's why we have to support him.
00:34:49.000It may take, like Thomas Jefferson said, it may be the duty of all of us to have a little sacrifice to pay a little more for these goods so that we can encourage the manufacturing at home, get some of these factories back on American soil.
00:35:06.000And I think the good Lord has given us this opportunity, and we need to support the president in it.
00:35:12.000It may take a few months, maybe a year, for it to work through the entire system.
00:35:18.000When Milley took over in Argentina, and he was in debt to the globalists, right, Argentina was, and he cancels all that debt, and for a while it was a little bit of an upheaval, but now Argentina's on solid footing.
00:35:30.000And countries are like investing in Argentina because they say, hey, wait a second, he's got his act together.
00:35:38.000Final thought here, Bill, and then we've got to run, is how would you, in a quick 5-10 minute way, let's just keep it to 5 if you can, say that how Christians should think about government.
00:35:48.000Where in the Bible does it say that we should have separation of powers, consent to the governed?
00:35:52.000Why is it that Western government is grown out of biblical principles?
00:35:59.000Yeah, so the default setting for human government is gangs.
00:36:04.000And a gang leader with enough weapons we call a king.
00:36:08.000And the first recorded instance of this was Nimrod, Tower of Babel.
00:36:11.000And Josephus, the Jewish commentator, said, Nimrod wanted to build a tower so high that if God destroyed the world again with a flood, he could survive on top.
00:36:19.000And he made everybody in town bake bricks and bring them or he would kill them.
00:36:24.000And since the population of the world was centered there in Mesopotamia, and he wanted to control it, in a sense, Nimrod was the first globalist.
00:36:33.000And God comes down, confuses the languages, the people scatter into language groups that turn into nations.
00:36:39.000Lo and behold, nations was God's invention to postpone a one-world government.
00:36:44.000But every generation has some king, pharaohs, caesar, kaiser, sultans are that wants to conquer other nations.
00:36:49.000And if left unchecked, they'd have been happy to conquer them all.
00:36:52.000And they keep getting bigger and bigger with the latest military advancements.
00:36:57.000So instead of cane-killing Abel with a rock, they can kill with a bronze weapon, an iron weapon, a phalanx spear the Greeks had, a scimitar sword that the Muslims had.
00:37:04.000And with the latest technological advancements, the kings can track more people.
00:37:09.000Augustus Caesar wanted a worldwide tracking system, 2BC, called the census.
00:37:14.000If he could add access to 5G and cell phones and facial recognition software, I bet he'd been tempted to use that.
00:37:19.000So these kingdoms keep getting bigger until the king of England had the biggest the sun never set on the British Empire.
00:38:30.000Until the priests went woke and stopped teaching that there was sin.
00:38:35.000And Eli, the high priest, his own sons, are sleeping with women in the tent of meeting, and another Levite with a silver-graven image, and another Levite with a concubine, where the law says the Levite's to marry a virgin of his own tribe, and the poor concubine's raped to death by a bunch of sodomites.
00:38:48.000Something about that behavior that appears at the last stages of a people around themselves.
00:39:07.000Kings of Europe looked to the Bible for their authority, but they looked to the King Saul and on part of the Bible, divine rod of kings, I'm the royal gang leader, and the pilgrims and Puritans that founded New England looked to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible.
00:39:20.000Millions of people, everybody taught the law, personally accountable to God to follow it.
00:39:24.000So King Saul's the divider between England and America.
00:39:27.000And so the idea of people being involved in government goes back to the pre-King Saul part of the Bible.
00:39:36.000And so in New England, you literally had churches founding cities.
00:39:40.000So the first Baptist church in America founded Providence, Rhode Island.
00:39:46.000The first Congregationalist church in America founded Hartford, Connecticut.
00:39:53.000Everybody's involved in city government because it's the church founding the city.
00:39:57.000There's like no non-church members there to be lazy and let them run stuff, right?
00:40:02.000And they had one building in town called the Meeting House.
00:40:05.000That's where the pastor would teach the Bible, and that's where they'd do their city business.
00:40:09.000The word synagogue means meeting house.
00:40:11.000That's where the rabbi would teach the law, and that's where they'd do their city business.
00:40:14.000And so this was a covenant form of government where you get rights from God, you're fair to your neighbor because you're accountable to God.
00:40:22.000You get blessings from God and you voluntarily share them with your neighbor as charity because you're doing it as unto God.
00:40:30.000It's not socialism where the government takes away your stuff without your permission and gives it to somebody you'll never meet and they don't care where the money came from.
00:40:36.000No, this is your money and you're moved upon by the Holy Spirit to be generous.
00:40:41.000And this system worked for a century until it got a little dry.
00:40:46.000And the pilgrims and Puritans taught it academically at Yale and Harvard.
00:41:14.000If you're really a Christian, you're not going to be involved in worldly things like government.
00:41:17.000It's like, huh, that's sort of different than an entire century where Christians are involved in government because it's Christians founding the city.
00:41:24.000They're like, yeah, we're not going to do that anymore.
00:41:26.000Or if you're really spiritual, you're going to withdraw.
00:41:28.000Well, that brings up an interesting scenario, because if all the spiritual people withdraw from government, who's left to be involved but the less spiritual?
00:42:12.000And so in New England, you had churches founding cities, but when this revival happened, they're like, no, if you're really spiritual, don't be involved.
00:42:20.000So if people, Christians are not involved, they're letting non-godly people teach kids there's no God and there's no sin, right?