In a statement to tech firm members, Vice President JD Vance outlined the Trump administration‘s financial idea, stating that the United States must stop using” cheap work” while continuing to develop.
At the American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C., he said,” For far too long, we got addicted to low work, both abroad and by importing it into our own state — , and we got lazy.”” The fundamental objective of President Trump’s monetary policy is, I think, to remove 40 years of failed monetary policy in this state,” he said on Tuesday.
Vance, a former venture capitalist who raised his family in an Ohio town that had been devastated by the closure of its steel mill, acknowledged what he described as a tension between Trump populists and tech optimists.
The vice president claims there is a way to combine the two, claiming to be a member of both camps. If the United States does not permit cheap labor from abroad or illegal immigration, he said, jobs will be created.
When we send so much of our industrial base overseas, we stop creating interesting new products right here at home, Vance said, using shipbuilding as an example. During World War II, the United States dominated shipbuilding, but now it controls less than 1 % of the world’s shipbuilding capacity, while China now dominates.
He added that making sacrifices in order to restore manufacturing and innovation capacity, such as eschewing low-wage labor, was what Vance called “fundamentally a crutch” that prevents innovation. Even though Vance did not say it, using that strategy would likely lead to at least some short-term pain, such as higher consumer costs.
Similar assertions have been made by other Trump administration officials. For instance, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stated last week that the American dream does not include access to cheap goods but rather the idea that people can achieve prosperity, upward mobility, and economic security.
According to Vance, cheap goods when imported create a deindustrialized United States where too many people lack meaningful work and are ill-prepared for innovation.
He shared a tale from his early venture capital days about having dinner with a tech CEO and venting his concern that losing good middle-class jobs would undermine the respect and purpose of the work for those who held them, even if they could be financially recovered. The CEO countered that “digital fully immersive gaming” could be replaced with work.
Then, according to Vance, my wife texted me underneath the table and said,” We have to get the hell out of here.” These individuals are absolutely crazy.
While promising to encourage manufacturing employment at home, the Trump administration is now putting that vision to the test as it imposes tariffs on China and even U.S. allies like Canada and Mexico. Even as the president and vice president claim that things will improve over the long run, the stock market and regular people are watching nervously to see if the economy will experience a recession.
Vance claims that the goal is to end 40 years of American economic policy, which has hampered the nation’s manufacturing sector and caused harm to places like Ohio, his birthplace.
He argued that it is difficult and not always desirable to separate the making of things from the designing of things, or to send significant jobs overseas to nations that may or may not be hostile to the United States.
According to Vance,” cheap labor became the drug of Western economies,” whether we were offshoring factories to low-cost labor countries or importing low-cost labor through our immigration system.
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If it can wean itself off cheap labor, the vice president claimed, a change that may prove easier said than done, the country will have more innovation and a healthier economy in the long run.
In fact, I would say that the demand for cheap labor from globalization has been detrimental to innovation, Vance said. The solution, in my opinion, is American innovation.” Both our working people, our populists, and our innovators gathered here today have the same enemy.
