China Is a Bigger Threat Than Russia: Former U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross (10/11/22)

Intro do you think that some of the work that you and your Administration did with regard to I guess trying to write some of the wrongs when it comes to our relationship with China that those efforts have been continued over the last couple of years yes very much so a general reminder my successor has been very strong on China particularly on semiconductors and other high-tech export controls and while they've had a lot of discussion about perhaps cutting some of the tariffs we had imposed they really haven't done anything yet I think there's a growing realization within the Biden Administration that the ultimate real threat is China not Russia Are tariffs worth it secretary on that note the other side of that says that you need to be looking at cutting tariffs to help with inflation that those tariffs inevitably have been an inflationary force on the American economy do you see tariffs as inflationary and are they still worth it given the also inflationary environment that we find ourselves in well several answers to that first of all the amount of export imports from China on which we have tariffs there's only a few hundred billion dollars if you compare those to the size of the economy it's almost a rounding era so it's silly to say that our Tower of Sun China had any major impact on inflation second what's really been happening there's a lot of goods that were made in China are no longer as cheap as they were and so production is moving to South Korea through South Vietnam to Thailand to South Korea to Indonesia third thing to remember is the dollar is very very strong strong against the Yuan and strong against most currencies and that very much offsets any potential inflationary effect of imports so I think that's just an excuse the real problem with inflation is too much money was pumped into the economy and we have two constrictive and energy policy those are the real factors that caused it and then that's been supplemented by the supply chain dislocations and by the war in Ukraine talk to us about with your Is onshoring inflationary experience I mean prior to being Secretary of Commerce of course you're a chair lead director of more than 100 companies in in 20 different countries when you're looking at perhaps a less globalized world the implications that has that you hear of fed members saying the onshoring effort is inherently inflationary as well is that going to be a longer term sacrifice that has to be made I I think the biggest danger we have in terms of long-term inflation is the failure of our educational system to train people properly we have the least vocational training of any oecd country that's a real problem for getting people who are not College Bound into useful jobs particularly high-tech jobs our schools are also not emphasizing science technology engineering and math how can you survive in an increasingly technological global economy let alone U.S if you're de-emphasizing stem and if you look at the lower grade say K through 12 we keep falling further and further behind in relative math scores relative reading scores to just about relative any scores to other countries that's the kind of thing that's going to cause economic dislocation going forward just as it is already well we've already Solutions yeah we've already seen that economic dislocation I'm curious though about the solutions here we've seen some efforts from the current Administration your Administration and even the Obama Administration to sort of address some of those and as always you know how Washington works it gets put through uh the ringer there and basically what comes out is basically nothing how do you sort of address that in a way that is going to be politically palpable to the to the folks who run this country well in our Administration Ivanka Trump and I co-shared the Workforce Development effort and we got American companies some major some middle-sized some minor size ones to pledge more than 6 million internships over the next five years I don't think the current Administration has been pushing that movement very hard but it is essential and they generally work the companies generally work with the community colleges because they are very open to curricula that are business friendly they don't have the ideological bent that a lot of the high schools have in in the high schools are teaching a lot of what our regard is nonsense rather than the valuable skills both intellectual and physical that people need to survive so there was an initiative that we already had in place I think they could very well build upon that and I think it's a wonderful thing to have collaboration between community colleges and companies many of the community colleges have done is bring the educational the curricula to the workplace so it's much less disruptive of a worker's time Mr secretary just Data security finally wanted to ask you Circle back when you think about maybe China much more so than Russia being a bigger threat to the U.S what about the data security WeChat Tick Tock some of the issues that were underway when you were serving in in the former Administration how big of a risk is data and trying to getting their hands on it data are a very very major risk and in fact they're both an opportunity and a risk properly used they're a great opportunity I think you could say the data is the new oil in terms of stimulatory power to the economy but the risk is it can be used for evil purposes and as you know when I was in office we were very adverse to tick tock getting all this information about young children I still think that's a big big mistake because it's not the right way to use data and it's it's not just that they've been doing a lot of hacking of government files civilian files all kinds of things I'm afraid that at this point the Chinese know more details about the American public like then we know about the Chinese public and it's bad to have a knowledge imbalance