Randy Fine: “we have heard the opposition to this take on two things: number one, that this has somehow raised the cost of living and…”

“we have heard the opposition to this take on two things: number one, that this has somehow raised the cost of living and that, somehow, the fentanyl crisis is not a national emergency. I would like to disassemble those two arguments. A long time ago, long before I came to Washington, one of my first jobs was I taught economics. I would say to my colleagues that they need to get beyond Karl Marx's ``The Communist Manifesto'' to understand how the world actually works. When Joe Biden was President, prices went up 5 percent a year. Under the Trump trade regime that is supposedly making things so expensive for people, it has gone up one-half that amount, 2.7 percent. Obviously, tariffs are not the problem. Economic results: The last quarter, our economic growth as a nation was 4.4 percent. The economy is booming. That is almost double what we saw the previous year under Joe Biden. His number started with a two. These tariffs, rather than hurting America, have brought $15 billion, that is just from Canada, that we can use to pay down our debt and pay down our deficit, again, as we have lower inflation and higher economic growth. It has worked. The chairman talked about the cost of 5,000 lives a year in New York, almost 100,000 nationwide, but those statistics are 1 year old. Under President Trump's tariff regime where he has cracked down on it, last year, fentanyl deaths in this country dropped by 21 percent.”