The United States will impose tariffs on the countries that "harm" America, President Donald Trump has said, as he named China, India and Brazil as high-tariff countries.
"We're going to put tariffs on outside countries and outside people that really mean harm to us. Well, they mean us harm, but they basically want to make their country good," Trump said at a Florida retreat on Monday, the first after he was re-elected as president last week.
"Look at what others do. China is a tremendous tariff maker, and India and Brazil and so many other countries. So we're not going to let that happen any longer because we're going to put America first," he said.
He said the system would be so fair that, as he added wryly, money will start coming in "to our coffers" to make America, "very, very rich once again," where this is set to happen, "very quick."
He also remarked that it has come to time when the system will take this country back that made America "wealthier and more mighty than ever".
Last week, referring to his inaugural speech, Trump said, "Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich foreign nations, we should be tariffing and taxing foreign nations to enrich our citizens."
"Under the American first economic model, as tariffs on other countries go up, taxes on American workers and businesses will come down and massive numbers of jobs and factories will come home," he said.
Earlier, Trump has already spoken about slapping '100 per cent tariffs' on the BRICS grouping, a bloc that includes India as well.
During his speech, Trump asked companies to come and set up manufacturing units in the US if they wished to avoid tariffs.
"If you want to stop paying the taxes or the tariffs, you have to build your plant right here in America. That's what's going to happen at record levels.
We're going to have more plants built in the next short period of time than anybody ever envisioned before because the incentive is going to be there because they have no tariff whatsoever," he said.
The president mentioned that the US will support companies which construct plants in America, majorly being in the pharmaceutical and semiconductors and steel industries.
Trump further disclosed that his administration would also be imposing tariffs on steel, aluminium, copper, and other materials for which the US military requires.
"We have to bring production back to our country. There was a time when we made one ship a day, and now we can't build a ship. We don't know what the hell we're doing. It's all gone to other locations and other lands," he said.
"To further return production to the United States, we're going to environmentally free up our rare earth minerals.".
We have some of the best rare earth anywhere in the world, but we're not allowed to use it because the environmentalists got there first," said the president in his address.
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