CPA Conference Day 1: “It’s All Going Our Way.”

The Section 301 tariffs are still in place against China. Global corporations and Wall Street had hoped that the Biden administration would be talking about ending those by now. They have not.

Section 232 tariffs on steel and aluminum are still on. And while Section 201s will expire unless renewed next year, they’re still in place and we have time to keep them in place. There have been no new tariff threats under Biden, but no one at Commerce, Treasury or the USTR are clamoring for them to go away, especially the China ones. And after last week’s Alaska summit when China’s wolf warriors were belittling Anthony Blinken, there is now even less of an appetite to remove those.

“There is no rapprochement coming with China anytime soon,” said Michael Stumo, CEO of CPA during the opening remarkets in a four-day conference that kicked off on Tuesday.

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The people who say ‘let’s help everybody else in the world before we help ourselves’ are no longer leading the conversation on economic policy.

“Our first duty is to get Americans fully employed and have a broad array of industrial supply chains that produce the products of today and of the future, and keep rural America strong so that the communities that they support are not turned into rural ghettos,” Stumo said, highlighting our Market Access Charge model on forex and our Job Quality Index gaining popularity on Capitol Hill and in the press.

“It’s all going our way,” he said. “We want it to go faster.”

Tuesday’s opening included remarks from Missouri congresswoman Vicky Jo Hartzler (R-MO) that highlighted how strengthening US supply chains is gaining bipartisan support in the House and Senate, along with special panels on healthcare led by Rosemary Gibson (author of “China Rx: Exposing The Risks of America’s Dependence on China” for Medicine and leader of our Healthcare Committee) and one on currency led by Marc Fasteau, CPA Vice Chairman and founder of American Strategic Insurance Group.

On Wednesday, Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Representative Bill Pascrell (D-NJ) will join CPA tax authority David Morse to discuss reforming corporate taxation to help with our reshoring efforts. And later, Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) and Representative Claudia Tenney (R-NY) will discuss Buy American rules.

CPA Chairman Zach Mottl started the day off reminding members how far the organization has grown to what it is today: a serious, bipartisan coalition that has an effective presence on Capitol Hill. We’re talking about things that drive the conversation on the economy and China.

“Nobody cared about these issues when we first started out,” he said. “I thought that after the Great Recession, people would see the light, but it didn’t happen. Thanks to Dan DiMicco, Michael Stumo and labor leaders, we watched how the three main candidates in 2016 – Hillary, Bernie and Trump —  all came out against the Trans Pacific Partnership. That was a wake up for us. We have helped move the needle on this since 2007. What is important is creating wealth by creating jobs and economic growth. It’s not just about what we consume on Amazon,” he said. “When my life is over, I want to be remembered by what I made, what I produced, not what I consumed.”

Call it Build Back Better or Make America Great Again, so long as it leads to reindustrialization and takes a hammer to globalist neoliberalism, we are fine.

Harry Moser, President of the Reshoring Initiative, said that reshoring hit an all-time peak in 2020. Moser wasn’t presenting, but a video interview of him with CPA played during the opening ceremonies. His Reshoring Initiative did some research on the topic of supply chain shifts and he found that reshoring exceeded foreign direct investment in terms of job creation last year.

“This is no longer just an Executive Branch issue. It’s bipartisan. It’s bicameral,” Mottl said. “People are starting to see things the way that we are. Our views are starting to make sense to them.”