Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) spoke at a Congressional forum on Wednesday about tariffs.
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00:00The last thing I want to be able to talk about, and I'm going to get to your questions.
00:03Have you heard there's a little conversation internationally about tariffs?
00:06Has anybody heard that?
00:08It's not been in the news much, so you might have missed it.
00:11Let me bring this up here really well.
00:14The President's been very focused on trying to be able to negotiate with as many countries as fast as he can.
00:21He said, what can we do to be able to bring down trade barriers?
00:23And just about everybody I've talked to here said, we've got to bring down trade barriers.
00:27We have countries that we do a lot of trade with, like Vietnam.
00:31We do a lot of trade with Vietnam, and by the way, that's a remarkable story of the United States and Vietnam five decades later in the amount of trade that we do with them.
00:40But Vietnam has some very real trade barriers with blocking American products coming into them.
00:46One of our closest allies, Australia, they fought every single war with us.
00:51The Aussies have been right next to us.
00:52We have a very close relationship with the Australian government.
00:56But the Australians also block American beef from going into Australia.
01:01When you go to McDonald's and get your hamburger, 80 percent of that beef is American, 20 percent of it's Australia.
01:08But if you go to Australia, there is no American beef in that, because they block it out.
01:15We need to fix that.
01:16We're friends in Australia.
01:18We should be able to resolve that.
01:19The largest democracy in the world is India.
01:23India has very high barriers to American products coming in.
01:27And I understand they have more than a billion people, and they're trying to be able to work to be able to rise out of poverty.
01:31But they're blocking American goods coming into their country that are open markets for a billion people.
01:38We need to be able to bring those down.
01:39Currently, the Vice President is actually just leaving out from India from sitting down, signing an initial proposal about what to be able to work through to be able to get to bringing those trade barriers down.
01:49That's a good thing, to be able to work on bringing all those trade barriers down.
01:54This crowd knows I'm not a big fan of tariffs.
01:58I'm just not.
01:59The tariffs are a very effective negotiating tactic to be able to say, you need to come to the table to actually be able to negotiate.
02:07I've had all kinds of conversations, even recently, with the United States Trade Representative, with our Treasury Secretary, and members of the administration about how the negotiations are going.
02:16And the negotiations are going as fast as they can go.
02:19And they're trying to lock it in.
02:20My advice to them is, lock down as many deals as you can as fast as you can.
02:25And as soon as you lock one down, announce it and let everybody know we're making progress and we're clicking through the different countries and agreements.
02:31The President has announced, even in the past 24 hours, that he's aggressively working to be able to bring down tariff rates and things like China and to be able to actually engage and say, let's sit down across the table and be able to resolve things.
02:42We do need to get rid of trade barriers.
02:44We do want to be able to open up opportunities for American companies to be more of a business all around the world.
02:49We do need to block out trade barriers with other countries that we're even close to a relationship with.
02:54Israel is one of our closest partners in the world.
03:00Israel has had a 17 percent tariff on American drugs.
03:08Benjamin Netanyahu just announced that is going to zero.
03:13That's a big deal for American companies and the opportunity to be able to settle around the world.
03:18So even with our friends, these things need to be resolved.
03:22But my advice is to solve it as quickly as we can.
03:26Stabilize the opportunity where people can actually do contracts.
03:29Because our worst case scenario is people pause for two, three, four months to be able to figure out what's going to happen in the future.
03:35And we start having supply chain issues like we did during COVID, where there's one or two parts that people just can't get.
03:42And we start to be able to deal with all those kind of things.
03:44So I'm staying engaged on this.
03:47I am very optimistic that they're going to land some very significant trade agreements to be able to open up new markets.
03:53And in the meantime, we'll be able to bring tariff rates back down again so that we can actually continue to advance our trade around the world.
03:59I want the United States to be known as the place to sell, the place to buy, and the place to be able to do business.
04:05We should be that way.