Donald Trump on Rural America and Agriculture

The following is part of Donald Trump's plan on the economy. The website Agri-Pulse published more on Trump's plans for rural America and agriculture here.

2. Regulatory reform—

• A temporary pause on new regulations and a review of previous regulations to see which need to be scrapped.
• Require each federal agency to prepare a list of all of the regulations they impose on American business, and rank them from most critical to health and safety to least critical. Least critical regulations will receive priority consideration for repeal.
• Remove bureaucrats who only know how to kill jobs; replace them with experts who know how to create jobs.
• Targeted review for regulations that inhibit hiring. These include:
• The Environmental Protection Agency’s Clean Power Plan, which forces investment in renewable energy at the expense of coal and natural gas, raising electricity rates;
• The EPA’s Waters of the United States rule, which gives the EPA the ability to regulate the smallest streams on private land, limiting land use; and
• The Department of Interior’s moratorium on coal mining permits, which put tens of thousands of coal miners out of work.
• Excessive regulation is costing our country as much as 2 trillion dollars a year, and we will end it.

Regulations may have cost us 600,000 small businesses since the start of the recent recession—largely because of new regulations on financing—and some 6 million fewer jobs. The Heritage Foundation has found that the Obama administration has imposed 229 major regulations (those with a cost of $100 million or more) at a cost of $108 billion annually.

3. Trade reform—

• Appoint trade negotiators whose goal will be to win for America: narrowing our trade deficit, increasing domestic production, and getting a fair deal for our workers.
• Renegotiate NAFTA.
• Withdraw from the TPP.
• Bring trade relief cases to the world trade organization.
• Label China a currency manipulator.
• Apply tariffs and duties to countries that cheat.
• Direct the Commerce Department to use all legal tools to respond to trade violations.

Our trade deficit in goods is almost $800 billion on an annual basis. The trade deficit subtracts from growth and costs the US jobs. This has hurt working Americans because good-paying manufacturing jobs are hard to find. Less than half of the population 25 and older without a high school diploma is in the workforce; the unemployment rate of those who are in the almost 30 percent higher than the overall unemployment rate. This leads to poverty and an increase in demands on the nation’s social service network. Better trade policies can reverse this outcome dramatically.

Hillary Clinton has supported every major trade deal responsible for job losses in the United States, and will enact the TPP if given the chance.

TPP will hammer the car industry because it does not resolve, among other things, the substantial non-tariff barriers to U.S. cars being sold in Japan and other countries — including currency manipulation, excess supply and closed dealerships. According to the Peterson Institute, TPP would increase the automobile trading deficit by $23 billion by 2025.