Sen. JD Vance warned that America would face dire consequences in coming decades if the nation continues to rely on Chinese "slave labor" for manufacturing.
Vance made the statement during an appearance on "Fox News Sunday" with host Shannon Bream. Bream pressed Vance to explain former President Trump's support for extensive tariffs on foreign-manufactured products, questioning whether it could result in major price hikes for Americans.
"William McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt built the American industrial powerhouse we know today using tariffs to ensure that American workers got a fair deal and foreign competitors weren't able to undercut the wages of our workers," Vance said.
"If you're a foreign competitor working in China, [you're] using literal Chinese slave labor at $3 a day. An American middle class worker is never going to be able to compete on cost alone – we can compete on quality – with those foreign slave laborers in China," he continued.
"So if you're going to use slave labor in China, what a tariff says is that you are going to pay a fat penalty before bringing those products back into the United States. That's really the only way to ensure that America has a viable industrial base," he said.
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Vance went on to warn that current policies could lead to a future where the U.S. relies on foreign countries to manufacture virtually all of its goods.
He argued the U.S. must exert economic pressure on foreign competitors or else "we're going to wake up in a country 20-30 years from now where everything that we need, the pharmaceuticals we put into the bodies of our children, the weapons of war that our troops use, are made by foreign countries that don't like us very much."
"We've tried the experiment of shipping our jobs to China and building our prosperity off that. It's a failed experiment," he said.
Earlier this year, Trump rolled out a plan to eliminate China's most favored nation trade status and impose universal baseline 10% tariffs on imports. In private, Trump has even floated tariffs as high as 60% on Chinese goods, according to the Washington Post.
Economists have warned that increasing tariffs would also cause an increase in prices for everyday goods due to American companies relying on cheap raw materials from China.
Fox New's Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.
