Ben Shapiro: “Scott Bessent is maintaining that companies are saying the tariffs are helping their business. This is not actually, I think, by the data, true.”
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From the September 8, 2025, edition of The Daily Wire's The Ben Shapiro Show
BEN SHAPIRO (HOST): Scott Bessent is maintaining that companies are saying the tariffs are helping their business. This is not actually, I think, by the data, true. By the data, most companies, particularly in the manufacturing sector, have been saying, actually, it's harming their business.
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SHAPIRO: OK. So, again, it may be helping particular — this is what happens. Tariffs have specific benefits at the expense of broad costs. There may be a couple of companies that benefit. There are going to be a lot of companies that do not, and consumers, broadly, are gonna have to pay the price for that. In fact, there was a survey done just a couple of weeks ago by Industry Week that was pointing out that nearly 70% of business leaders who responded to Endeavor Business Intelligence early this month said the trade measures imposed by the Trump administration, as well as some retaliatory actions by trading partners, are significantly affecting their operations. Another 8% say the impact is starting to be felt now. Only 19% of executives say they don't expect any sort of significant impact here.
And again, manufacturing has not increased because of this. The truth is, once again, manufacturing has declined in the United States as a result of labor costs being too high and technology replacing many of these jobs. The reality is that it's not that we shipped all the jobs to China. It's the technology took a huge swath of manufacturing jobs, which is why manufacturing output in the United States is basically increased. It's been on the increase for the last 20 years. Manufacturing employment has been going down because machines are doing more than human beings used to do.