Hayes declares Trump tariffs are closing Fifth District farms

By Scott Benjamin

WATERBURY – First-term U.S. Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-5) says she is frustrated with the “erratic” policy shifts of a president whose trade program is putting farmers out of business.

The New York Times reported that Republican President Donald Trump ordered American companies out of the China because of the skirmishes on tariffs and three days later “he was positive he would get a trade deal.”

“There is no policy,” Hayes of Wolcott said in an interview. “You can’t trust the president’s words.”

The congresswoman, who represents 41 municipalities traveling from Newtown to Salisbury, says the tariff war with China has had a devastating impact on dairy farmers.

“The prices are going way down and the future of the family farms is impacted,” said Hayes, who is a member of the U.S. House Agriculture Committee.

“We’ve had in my district up to 10 dairy farms that have closed,” added the congresswoman, who was the national teacher of the year in 2016.

Hayes said a colleague told her that John Deere is selling fewer tractors as a result of farms going out of business across the nation.

Critics have said since former Democratic President Bill Clinton and former Republican President George W. Bush negotiated Permanent Normal Trade Relations with China – following about 20 years of renewable Most Favored Nation agreements – China has manipulated its currency.

Washington Post economics columnist Robert Samuelson recently wrote that the United States had a $419 billion goods trade deficit with China in 2018. He also has stated that Trump has tried to address China’s efforts to become the leader in high technology industries through, among other things, discrimination toward American firms trying to do business in China.

Victor Davis Hanson, a senior fellow at the Herbert Hoover Institution at Stanford, wrote in his 2019 book, “The Case for Trump,” that, in effect, the president has said: “Free trade is great? If so, then why didn’t China follow it?”

Hayes said, “I can tell you that I can appreciate the president’s concern and his view for the necessity of having a more aggressive trade policy with China. I get it. Again, this erratic trade behavior is what is unsettling to me.”

“We need to have a more permanent document that outlines the mutual benefits for the two countries,” the congresswoman continued. “I get why we need to change our trade relations with China. Actually, I support him in that respect. My challenge is in the way we’re doing it.”

Trump’s aggressive imposition on tariffs appears and his call for American businesses to leave the Asian nation run counter, in general, to the trade policies of every president from Franklin Roosevelt through Barack Obama.

The former Loctite Corporation Vice President for Asia operations, Bruce Vakienier, who used to live in the Fifth Dstrict, has said that China’s 1.3 billion population, the largest in the world, is a potentially huge market for American products.

“We should be tapping into them as a consumer of American goods,” said Hayes.

On another topic, she said that she agrees with Sacred Heart University Government Department Chairman Gary Rose, the author of “Connecticut In Crisis,” that the state’s future economic growth will be largely dependent on the Pentagon budget.

In recent years, former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) offered incentives to the three major defense manufacturing operations to stay in the state.

Electric Boat in Groton makes submarines, the Lockheed Martin operation at Igor Sikorsky in Stratford manufactures military helicopters and United Technologies Corporation (UTC) oversees the making of aerospace for the Defense Department at the Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney plant in East Hartford.

“I voted for the Pentagon budget because I know what that means,” said Hayes.

A number of residents in the district work for defense-related companies.

In June UTC announced a $121 billion proposed merger with Raytheon Technologies to combine Raytheon’s cyber technology and UTC’s aircraft construction.

At minimum, 100 top executives now at the headquarters in Farmington, located in the Fifth District, will move to Boston.

According to news reports, UTC is expected to spin off its Carrier air conditioner and Otis elevator operations, also in Farmington, in early 2020.

It purchased Collins Aerospace for $30 billion in 2017.

Brookfield Patch has reported that former independent gubernatorial candidate Oz Griebel of Hartford has said much of Collins Aerospace is located in North Carolina and Florida, which is where much of the growth appears to be for UTC.

Hayes said she has expressed her concerns about the merger to executives with UTC. The federal Defense and Justice departments are expected to make a decision on the merger during the first half of next year.

Barron’s reported in July that defense contractors are feeling pressure from the Pentagon to conduct more extensive research and development, which has prompted a consolidation of the market.

“Defense and commercial aerospace mergers may become a strategic imperative,” Barron’s stated.

“The Pentagon is calling for money to be spent in a different way and companies have to adjust and make sure that they are of this and can’t be left behind,” Hayes said.

Inside Defense has reported that U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Greenwich) has told the Defense Department that the proposed merger “raises some very significant policy implications.”

Hayes said, “It creates a huge monopoly and a lack of competition. “There’s less of an opportunity to have negotiation.”

Inside Defense reported that Blumenthal said, “The trend toward consolidation is likely to continue, for better or worse, and the Department of Defense ultimately is the consumer here.”

Samuelson of The Washington Post recently wrote that defense spending should be increased, since it represented 52 percent of federal spending in 1960 and had declined to 15 percent in 2018.

“I have a lot of people reach out to my office and say they want to decrease military spending,” said Hayes. “I disagree with that. I think there is a balance. I think we have to include in the budget protections and benefits for people who have served because this is an all-volunteer Army. We have to do more for our veterans. If that would increase our military budget then I would vote for something like that.”

On a separate subject, the Congressional Budget Office recently reported that it projects an additional $12 trillion in debt between 2020 and 2029, up from the $11 trillion that it had projected this last May.

Hayes said to try to tame the deficit spending, which has “ballooned” under Trump, she would support re-establishing the Pay As You Go budget controls in which spending increases would have to be offset by tax increase or by reductions in other line items.

“As we’re developing programs, how should it be paid for,” she said. “I think that is a good policy to follow.”

In his 2015 biography on former President George H.W. Bush, “Destiny and Power,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham noted that the former president called on Congress to institute the Pay As You Go controls in 1990 in response to his signing of a tax increase. Those controls lasted for about a decade and were considered to be part of the reason for the federal budget surpluses from 1998 through 2001.

Hayes said she was “happy” that 90 percent of the provisions to the proposed budget from the U.S. House Democratic caucus were approved in the recent agreement.

That budget also extends the debt limit until 2021.

“Nobody likes to increase our federal debt,” Hayes said.

However, she added that since they have agreed to a package then “we’re not always being threatened with a [government] shutdown. I am content with that.”

Hayes, who grew up in Waterbury, said she supports Obama’s 2008 campaign pledge to increase the limit on income subject to the Social Security tax to $250,000. It is currently $132,500.

“In order to keep Social Security viable and sustainable; you have millionaires that are being taxed as the same rate” as the lower income taxpayers, she said.

“I think we should raise the ceiling, otherwise the program is going to be in deficit,” Hayes said.

Greenwich Patch reported last year that U.S. Rep. Jim Himes (D-4) of Greenwich said that within the next 10 years Congress will have to address the solvency of Social Security.

There has not been a major reform to the program since former Republican President Ronald Reagan’s first term in office.

Hayes said she is “very uncomfortable” with Trump’s criticism of the Federal Reserve Board’s decisions on interest rates and his apparent efforts to influence the adjusting of rates.

Economist Mark Zandi of Moody’s Analytics has said Trump “is using the Fed as a scapegoat for anything that goes wrong in the stock market and the economy.”

Hayes said, “Our Federal Reserve should be independent. I think he’s overstepping his bounds in this area.”

However, Samuelson has reported that former presidents Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon also tried “to control the Fed.”

In their 2017 book, “The Myth Of Independence,” Sarah Binder and Mark Spindel wrote, “Congress sets the rules under which the Fed operates and exercises considerable oversight of the Fed through hearings, confirmation of appointments to the Fed’s Board of Governors and informal contact.”

On another issue, the congresswoman said that even after the recent shootings in Ohio and Texas, she doesn’t expect the federal government to approve universal gun background checks or other stringent protections in the near future.

“I wish I could say ‘Yes’ to that question, but I honestly have to say ‘No.,’ “Hayes said.

“I don’t think that just after Ohio that it is going to change,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to change until we have legislators on both sides that are willing to move that forward in the House and the Senate and that believe it’s time for this country to change,” the congresswoman said. “The people have already said that loud and clear.”

Hayes added, “But we have legislators – and I guess I’m talking about [Senate Majority leader] Mitch McConnell – who are not willing to move to the will of the people. It was as simple as calling the Senate into session to vote on these bills [after the recent shootings].”

As of June Hayes had raised $872,000 for the 2020 campaign, the most money of any of Connecticut’s five U.S. House members. Ruben Rodriguez of Waterbury, a meter technician for the Water Department in New Britain, and former Assistant U.S. Attorney David X. Sullivan of New Fairfield are competing for the Republican nomination.