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The WallBuilders Show
The Economics of America First - with Congressman Bob McEwin
A masterclass in economic strategy unfolds as former Congressman Bob McEwen joins the WallBuilders Show to dissect President Trump's controversial tariff policies. McEwen cuts through the noise with clarity and historical perspective, revealing how these tariffs represent sophisticated negotiation tactics rather than permanent economic barriers.
"You can stand on any street corner in Europe and not see a single American car go by," McEwen observes, highlighting the 26% tariff European nations place on American vehicles while enjoying relatively unchallenged access to U.S. markets. This stark imbalance frames Trump's approach not as protectionism but as leverage to create genuine free trade through reciprocity.
Drawing powerful parallels between the Carter administration of the 1970s and Biden's presidency (dubbing the latter "Carter 2.0"), McEwen reminds listeners how quickly economic fortunes can reverse under proper leadership. Just as Reagan's policies triggered an economic renaissance following Carter's malaise, Trump's America-first approach aims to restore manufacturing, energy production, and financial sovereignty.
Perhaps most illuminating is McEwen's explanation of market transitions. When policies shift to favor Main Street over multinational corporations, markets initially react with uncertainty. This temporary turbulence ultimately leads to more balanced growth—if leaders have the backbone to weather criticism. "You can count politicians willing to endure this transition on one hand," McEwen notes, "and virtually with one finger."
The conversation culminates with a sobering analysis of America's debt vulnerability. Having surged from a historically stable 30% of GDP to over 100% during COVID, this debt exposure invites exploitation from nations seeking alternatives to the dollar-based system. Trump's focus on eliminating waste and reducing debt emerges as essential to preserving American economic leadership.
Rick Green [00:00:07] You find your way to the intersection of faith and culture. Thanks for joining us today on The WallBuilders Show. I'm Rick Green here with David Barton and Tim Barton, taking on the hot topics of the day from a biblical, historical, and constitutional perspective. Of course, throughout the week, lots of good news lately on so many different things happening. Typically we save that for Fridays, our Good News Friday program, and normally Thursday is Foundations of Freedom Thursday where we take your questions and then interviews throughout the rest of the week which we have a great one for you today, former Congressman Bob McEwin will be joining us a little later in the program. But be sure to check out our websites, wallbuilders.show is where you can catch up on any of our radio programs you might have missed over the last few weeks and months. And then of course our main website wallbuilder.com. And by the way, while you're there at wallbuilds.com, not only checking out the great resources for yourself and your family, but consider supporting what we're doing. So many of the good things that are happening out there right now in Washington DC with President Trump, in states and local governments. It's because of the seeds that were planted and watered over the years, 40 years of doing Wallbuilders, of actually going out there and planting those seeds, watering those seeds training pastors and legislators and all these other folks where you can help to make sure we do that for the next few decades. We've got a great opportunity right now to be sowing some good seed in some fertile ground and we need you to come alongside us to help us do that. So go to wallbuilders.com, make that one time or monthly contribution, get you some good resources there. but make those contributions so that we can get out there and do more of these legislators' conference, pastors' conferences, our teachers' conferences. All the training we do for young people. You're sown into helping us preserve and pass the torch of freedom, and we greatly appreciate it. Later in the program, Congressman Bob McKeown will be with us, gonna be talking about tariffs. And guys, this has come up several times over the last couple of weeks. Of course, a lot of folks thinking of talking about that, but nobody better than Congressman Bob McEwin on those economic issues.
David Barton [00:01:56] Yeah, Bob's a great force in this. A lot of people don't realize, we had Bob one several times, but Bob was really a key influence in getting the Soviet Union to fall. I mean, that is amazing. When it fell and those nations became free, like Poland and others, they asked him to be there for their freedom, because he was so important. So he's a congressman from back in the days of Ronald Reagan, which is kind of like Trump 1.0 maybe, but at least back in those days. And he's just a great perspective on tariffs. That's the kind of stuff he was an expert on back in his day in Congress.
Rick Green [00:02:25] Well, let's jump into that interview with Congressman Bob McEwen. We'll be right back. You're listening to The WallBuilders Show.
Rick Green [00:03:36] Welcome back to the WallBuilders Show. Thanks for staying with us. Former Congressman Bob McEwen back with us, Bob. Always good to have you brother. Thanks for some time today. Y.
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:03:42] Ou know, the honor is mine.
Rick Green [00:03:44] Well, Hey, you know, a lot has happened in the last few months. In fact, we haven't had you in a few weeks and so much the president Trump is doing, everything from, of course, the deportations to the, to the tariffs to supporting Israel. I mean, there's so much we could talk about brother. Let's talk some economics though. You managed to take these complicated topics and make them where even a country boy like me can understand them. And the big one right now is tariffs. What's your take on this? Is it just being used as a negotiating tactic? Is it good or bad? I mean, what's Bob McEwen think about all this?
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:04:18] Well, Rick, let me, it's important that when you're old, that you not reminisce too much, but I think it's appropriate if we recall there were those that didn't go through the 1970s that everything under Jimmy Carter and we've just lived through Joe Biden who is Jimmy Carter 2.0, but it was the same sort of thing. 18% inflation in 1970s, 21% interest rates, declining standard of living, gas lines. everything you can think about was falling apart. architecturally houses seven foot ceilings and it was all of this this natural wood and all had shag carpeting and the cars were falling apart haircuts you name the styles everything was was a mess and in fact we were declining in economically militarily and politically and more countries went communist under Jimmy Carter than any president since Truman and the head of the Council of Economic Advisers, our number one cheerleader, said, the question is not whether or not America will have a declining standard of living in the 1980s. The question is whether or they'll learn to adapt to their declining standard of living. And on election night, 1980, Ronald Reagan said, there's nothing wrong with this country that proper leadership can't cure. And he began to come in by cutting taxes and... and getting the economy going again. We went back to two-story homes, using brick, putting porches again. People began cutting their hair. The styles and three out of every four jobs created on this planet in the 1980s were created in one country, the United States of America. And by 1989, the entire world was chanting USA, USA, USA and so having lived through that we've now seen this thing again.
Rick Green [00:06:07] And that, by the way, that was a total rebirth after a president had said, you know, like you said, like the economic advisor did, you're just going to have to get used to that. You know, this is just the malaise that, you know our best days are behind us. I mean, what a depressing time and to have the leader of the country actually encouraging the depression. And then to go from that to morning in America, big, big change.
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:06:28] But Rick, it was completely agreed. All of the professors and all the general consensus was that America had crushed it and America was through. They formed a thing called, it's now called the African Union. It was called the Conference on African Unity, the first meeting that they had, 56 African countries. They chose the head of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnevich, to give the first speech. And he said, because of what we are doing, that's the Soviet Union, because of what are doing by the end of this decade, by 1990, we will be able to work our will anyplace on the planet because the correlation of forces, economic, military, and political are on the side of socialism and communism. And so, so the, the people that the, the professional bedwetters are from particularly the ivory tower. They don't know what got them into the mess, therefore they don't know how to get out. Now that brings us up to today. And we can, we can see that this country is, is right on the threshold of taking off like a rocket. Now we were on the edge of our precipice. Had we continued the direction that we were going, we would have been in trouble. So what is one of the real prohibitions to success is taxes. When people take money out of your pocket, you can't spend it for yourself. That means you have fewer choices and you have a lower standard of living. And that's what the left always wants to do in any country whenever they take control or any city or any state. And we see the four largest states in the union are California, New York, Texas, and Florida. Two of them are red, two of them a blue. Two of them are prospering and growing. Two are collapsing and people fleeing. So it's not complicated. And so what Donald Trump has said, that these other countries that have said, you can stand on the street corner any place in Europe and you won't see a single American car go by. Why? Because there's a 26% tariff on any cars being sold into the European Union. And so we have for the first time in a long time, a president that says, I'm on the side of the American. I'm on the side of the steel worker, the rubber worker, the auto worker, I'm going to defend an American. That is, if you, Mr. Mercedes, Audi, Volkswagen, if you want to sell a car to America, well, we'll just put the 26% tariff on your car as well. And now they say, oh my goodness, oh, it's so distressing. And I repeat, the professional bedwetters in the ivory towers, they're saying, oh, this is really terrible, but what's going to happen? You just watch what's gonna happen. That is that they're now coming and saying, All right, we'll drop the taxes on American cars. We're going to open up those markets that America has been frozen out of for the last 30 to 40 years. And we're going see a renaissance, and this is just one of the many ways, a new renaisance is now we're going after energy. We're beginning to use our oil and gas again. We're getting to use out coal. The idea of having government sit on people is now being removed and allow the ingenuity and the characteristic and capability of Americans to spring forth and the world is going to be blessed. Just as you and I are.
Rick Green [00:09:18] I'm telling you, no one can summarize it like Bob McEwin. That was, that's exactly what I needed to know because, you know, it's the whole, I think what you just described is that America first foreign policy, tariff policy, tax policy, literally saying I'm going to put Americans ahead of these other countries. And Bob, I didn't even know, I don't do a lot of international travel. I hadn't even thought about that in so many of these countries. You don't see the American vehicles, the American goods yet we still have the, you know, the best economy and these amazing products and all that. But there's so many of these countries where we haven't been able to sell our goods into there, but we gladly accept their goods into our nation. So the president is just leveling the playing field. If we want free trade, we got to actually have free trade.
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:10:02] Well, Rick, what he's doing is so unbelievably good that it's hard to overstate. Now, in order to do these things, like let me just give you an example about taxes. There's a thing that's called expensing. That is, if you spend money to take in money, that's call a capital gain. And so if you tax the capital, then that discourages people from doing it. So. When he got elected the first time, in the last quarter of 2017, his first tax cuts went into effect, and it said that if you take money out of your till, and you don't put it in your pocket, that would be income. If you invested in new equipment in order to make more jobs, we won't tax it between you and the job. So, in the quarter of last 2017, when it dropped the expense and the tax for capital investment went to zero. It was the highest in the free world. It went down to zero. In the last 90 days of 2017, more truck cabs, that's the big truck vehicles, more trucks were ordered in those 90 days than had been ordered in the previous three and a half years in America. So when you quit stealing from people, then they begin to produce. So what we're about to see here is a very interesting time. Now, this is why we need to sit tight and be adults about this because the end is beyond our wildest hopes. And that is, let's take the stock market. During COVID, the stock went up. Now, let me go through it again. During COVID the stock-market went up, why? Because the publicly held companies, see, if you own a store on Main Street, then you and your wife own it or your family. But if you have a big corporation that you sell stock, then you list it on the stock exchange and they report they have certain standards. So the large companies such as Costco and Walmart and all those are publicly held companies, not private, publicly held. Now during COVID, when the government shut down all the small businesses, shut down all the privately held businesses, that meant that every day the competition to these large corporately held companies was diminished. So that means every day they got more and more market share because every day more and more small businesses went out of business, more and more stores closed on Main Street. Now that was wrong, it was it was improper, and Donald Trump, God love him, said that's not fair. Therefore what we're going to do is we're gonna get those same advantages back to the little guy on Main street, and we're going to protect him so that these global deals that the big guys can make, they can't defend themselves against widget manufacturer in India or a widget manufacturer in China. So we're gonna put up a barrier that will protect him so that he can begin to build it here at home. Now what happens? That means that some of the money that's gone to these handful of very large global companies is going to diminish and it's gonna flow back into the capital and financial markets on Main Street. And in order to do that, there's a period of readjustment and you can count the number of politicians with the backbone to do that on one hand and virtually with one finger. Because this has been needed for a long, long time. And as Donald Trump said the other day, and he's exactly right. He says, I'm the only one that would have the guts to do this. And I agree.
Rick Green [00:13:38] Yeah. You know, what you just described is that there's so few that can weather the storm where once you make that policy, you know, just like with Reagan and 81 and the tax cuts and everybody in his administration, trying to convince him to reverse course, it's not working and you had to give it time to work. There's so people that have the backbone to do that. And I think you're right right now today. He's the one guy that can do it. He's proven he can do. He can weather that storm. He's going to stay the course and until those corrections take place. Just an exciting, exciting time to be alive. Hey, Congressman, before I let you go, we had a question from an audience member about just the debt itself and who that's owed to and how, you know, for, for most people, they just hear we got $36 trillion in debt. Well, who do we owe for that? And that you always hear China owns a big chunk of that debt. What's your simple explanation for who owns the debt and, and whether not our enemies can use that as a weapon against us.
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:14:34] Well, let's explain how do you get money. There isn't a window that Uncle Sam goes to borrow. And there's a thing called a bond. And that is that if you and I want to borrow money to buy a car, we go to the bank and they give us money to buy the car. Let us suppose that we're a very, we're General Motors and we want to borrowed $150 million in order to build a new plant. Well, there's no bank that has $150 billion laying around that they could loan it to us. And so General Motors writes on a piece of paper and it puts a seal on there. And it says, if you will give us $10,000 for five years, we will repay it at 5% interest. That's called a piece a paper or called a bond. And when you go out and you try to sell the bond, if people trust the company, then they'll buy the bond. But if they don't trust the the company then it just sits there. Now, with that same principle, that applies to governments. And so when the government of of Greece needs some money, then they make a scroll and they write a piece of paper and they create a bond. And they say that if you loan us the money, we, the government of Greece, will repay it in five years or ten years or whatever the bond is for a certain percentage. And that's the way governments and large corporations, that's That's the way that they burrow money. Now it just so happens that if people lose faith in the, in the company, they don't borrow it or if it's happened with Greece one morning when they needed some bonds and they wanted to sell their bonds, some of those bankers, some of those rich people in Europe looked at that and said, you know, I don't trust those birds. I'm not going to buy it. And so when a major bank said no, well, that ricochets around in about 30 seconds, some other banks said, Oh, they're not buying it either within a half an hour. They find out that nobody in Europe is going to buy the bonds. Now that's called a bankruptcy. That means they have to renegotiate their debt. They have to get a country like the United States to give them additional money in order to bail themselves out to get squared away. Otherwise their system collapses because the banking system no longer has enough to function. Now, the United States is considered the most trusted nation on earth. That is that we have always maintained our national debt at about 30% of GDP. That is, of all the goods and services that we make. Like, if your daughter makes $10,000 a year and she has a $3,000 debt, she can handle that. But if she's making $100,000 in a year, then she could perhaps handle a $30,000. So it's based upon the economy. In the United States, if you look at all since World War II, it's been just about perfectly flat, fluctuating. but right around 30% of GDP for all these many years until COVID and until these people have just lost all control and we now have surpassed 100% of our GDP in debt. So who does that? Well, with those bonds, people like you and I and the local banker and other nations, they have been buying the bonds. But here's the concern. is that there's a great desire to get a substitute for that. And those were called the BRIC, which is Brazil, Russia, India, and China. And they got together and they said, we need to make a currency that's different from America. And so they then began to say, we need back it up. They don't know they trust us. So we'll back it with a percentage of gold because everybody trusts gold. And in the meeting a year ago in October, 22 nations met and let me tell you this, Barack Obama called every one of those nations and asked them to go to the BRIC conference in South Africa and to sign up on their commitment that they were going to go to switch from using American bonds as a source of security in their bank account.
Rick Green [00:18:32] Wow, he actually undermined own currency by encouraging this.
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:18:37] And all 22 of those nations decide and that's where we were headed and it had had we lost this election America's debt is now makes us vulnerable they were developing an alternative and the whole thing would have been a collapse and one of the things that Donald Trump said he wasn't in office 48 hours he said BRIC is dead BRIC is dead now what did he mean he means that he's gonna play hardball he's gonna keep him he's not gonna increase the American debt those people are playing their games And this nation is not only coming back from the brink, it's now gonna take off like a rocket and people are not gonna trust those other folks. And already Saudi Arabia and the others have reneged and they're gonna stay on the American dollar. And every day we go by, it's gonna get stronger and stronger.
Rick Green [00:19:17] So good, so good. So quick summary on that, just to make sure I understood that right. Like when you said, you know, the most trusted that the American Treasury bought, you knew that was one that you knew America is going to pay this. They're going to be good for it, compared to other countries. You're just not too sure it's going to work. And it was because it stayed steady at that 30% of the total, GDP. And then we ratcheted it up to a hundred percent under COVID. And now president Trump is going help get us back down to a reasonable level, which is why we keep hearing Elon and President Trump and all these others saying, we have to get rid of the fraud and the waste and the abuse, and we have get that debt down. So we're, we're finally getting some sense about us and, and taking the, taking the right steps. Congressman barbecue and God bless you, brother. Thank you for coming on and sharing so much with us today.
Congressman Bob McEwin [00:20:06] Rick is my pleasure. Thank you, Brother.
Rick Green [00:20:08] Stay with us folks. We'll be right back with David and Tim Barton.
Rick Green [00:21:18] Welcome back to the WallBuilders show. That was Congressman Bob McEwen, and we're back with David and Tim. And guys, I know we've got a lot of, shall we say disagreement out there in our audience over tariffs and what is free trade? What is free enterprise? And at what point is it good? What point is bad? So that was great to hear from Congressman McEwin on the big picture of the impact that this can have.
Tim Barton [00:21:38] Yeah, and Rick, even as you point out, where there's a lot of people concerned about free trade, and arguably, rightfully so, when we study economics, you know, it's a little bit like the discussion with America and the free market versus cronyism. And people look at crony as I'm gonna say, the free-market doesn't work. And we're going, that's not the free marketplace. I think sometimes there's some of those thoughts with tariffs too in free trade where they say, look, America should never use tariffs because that violates some of those free trade thoughts. The problem is... If we're the only ones not doing tariffs and every other nation is doing tariffs, then we're not actually promoting free trade by not doing tariff. Now, I know this is a very bias objective argument. I get it, but this is the reality. If we were gonna say free, the idea of free means equal. Equal opportunity, equal access, et cetera. And when you have other nations that are putting a 20, a 30, a 70, a 100, a 180, percent tariff on whatever goods you're importing then then then it's not free trade and what Donald Trump has been the master of is in this negotiation he stakes a claim and ground so far It's like he he's hitting somebody upside the head with a two-by-four just so that he can back up and go. Oh, well, no, we never wanted to do that for real he is taking extreme positions because then it makes the idea of the compromise something that's super favorable for America but it's something much less significant than where he was. And dad, I know you have a lot to add to this too, but I do love the fact that Bob McEwin and several times talked about the professional bedwetters, right, the mainstream media. They're gonna bring drama. They're going to cause problems, et cetera. But I so appreciate Bob's take on this, even his optimism, where he's told us so often, all it takes is a good leader and a good can turn things around. And certainly we're seeing a lot more of that with Trump, even though we're not there yet. It might get worse before it gets better. We are on the trajectory for things to get better and that's encouraging to me.
David Barton [00:23:38] And you know, I think that the thing too, Tim, you just mentioned, some people say terrorists are good, some are bad. And I think it's the position of whether you're using terrorists for negotiation or whether you using terrorists for permanent policy. And I thought Bob said it really well when he said, hey, Trump is putting America first in all things, including the fact that you stand on the intersection in Europe and you do not see an American car go by in that intersection at all. I've never even thought of that. It would never cross my mind that we should be selling our, we sell our cars everywhere but that we can't sell them in Europe because they've stuck such a high tariff on us, which we don't do to them. And so, great point, Bob. I mean, yeah, he's putting America first in all things, and that if we sell cars in Europe, then that's gonna help American jobs here, it's gonna the American economy, it's going to help them, the reduction of the deficit, everything is gonna do that. And I don't think sometimes we recognize even the nations put different trade tariffs on different nations. Not everybody's got a 26% on America, but we're a big competitor, so they put a big one on us. For other nations, it may only be three or 4%. So they're not even treating all nations the same. They're singling us out because we're an economic powerhouse. And the fact that Trump is going after that, I think is a really powerful point. And I have to go back to what he started with when Bob was talking and he said, many may not remember Jimmy Carter and he went through 76 through 80 those days. And he said that Biden was 2.0. And I thought, you know, that really is true in so many areas. The description of what Carter did and his term sounded exactly like what Biden did. And I think this is where history is so helpful is every two generations or so, you kind of forget what that third generation was doing. And we're a couple of generations, we're 48 years away from Jimmy Carter now. We're talking two full generations who have no knowledge of him or any experience with what he did. But they saw what Biden did. And for those of us that are three generations or more. Yeah, we remember exactly that. And we said, yep, Biden is exactly Carter 2.0. It's exactly what it is. And I think that Trump, in many ways, is doing exactly what Reagan did, except Reagan did not have a House or a Senate to help him. Reagan did a whole lot of stuff without that help. But what you've got now is you've got Trump with a House and a Senate, and he's able to do a lot of the stuff that Reagan couldn't do. So this is a fun time in history, for sure.
Rick Green [00:25:57] Well, it definitely won't be the last conversation we have about this. It seems to be dominating the news right now. And of course, we'll get more guests on and we'll cover it more in the future. Go wallbuilders.com. As we talked about earlier in the program, check out the website today for some great resources. In fact, if you want to dive into some of these economic and constitutional questions, be sure and get biblical citizenship in modern America right there at the website wallbuilders.com get some friends together, take that class, talk about these things, and then go out there and take some actions, lots of things you're going to be able to do between now and the 250th anniversary of the country. We're down to about, I don't know, 440 days between now and then, and we're going to give you a lot to action items so that you can make a difference right there in your neighborhood. So wallbuilders.com, make that one time a monthly contribution, get those resources and then go out into your community and take action. Thanks so much for listening. You've been listening to The WallBuilder Show.
