'It's Not Socialism, This Is Capitalism': Lutnick Defends Intel Deal During Cabinet Hearing

During a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick defended a deal which gave the U.S. government a 10% stake in Intel.

Transcript

00:00Howard please. So making America great again is one of the key statements and people don't always

00:09understand what you mean. So we always talk about 1870 to 1913 but in the mid-1980s America owned

00:18more of the rest of the world than they owned of us. We owned 140 billion dollars of the rest of

00:25the world net of what they owned of us and when you came into office this time the rest

00:31of the world owned 24 trillion dollars more of our assets than we owned of theirs and so

00:41when people argue with you about you know the trade deficit is nothing. The trade deficit

00:49sends 1.2 trillion of our dollars to them and what do they do with it? They buy the great

00:55America because when we learned in college what we learned was that if you keep printing

01:00these dollars they're supposed to devalue but the problem is we're too smart. We invented

01:06the light bulb, the transistor, the GPU so they keep buying us and the only president ever to

01:14understand that you understood it in the 80s and the 90s and I used to you know see you on

01:19TV and you'd say God what are these people doing and finally we've changed it. So let's go over what

01:25we've changed. So Japan and Korea they're never going to open their markets to us so we've negotiated

01:33900 billion dollars that they're giving you to invest in national and economic security in America.

01:41The European Union the second largest economy 20 trillion dollars and all the experts said you'd never

01:48get a deal done with them and watching you in Scotland was my favorite thing right 15 percent

01:55they'll pay us 15 percent and we will pay zero so we we can export to their 20 trillion dollar economy

02:03and they can pay to come to the great American consumer right so a couple of other things

02:12four days before you took office four days before you took office the commerce department which had the

02:18chips money they set up this thing called natcast which was a make-believe not-for-profit and they

02:25signed contracts to wire them 7.4 billion dollars this was just nonsense so we stopped the payment

02:34we've got the money it's an illegal thing to try to set up a department that's not the department of

02:40commerce that kind of acts like the department of commerce and what was it filled with all these

02:45people who worked for the Biden administration I mean it's exact corruption that you talk about

02:517.4 billion dollars now clawed back last week was the most fun in one week intel came in right

03:01the Biden administration had given 11 billion dollars to intel giving it to them done corporate just

03:09a gift and you turned that into really you know it was like less than five minutes of conversation

03:16and intel agreed to give us 10 percent of their company which of course was worth 11 billion dollars

03:23so it's not socialism this is capitalism if you give someone 11 billion dollars who's just building

03:31in america they're not doing something special they're building in america and their ceo told the

03:36president he didn't need the grant and you said well then why don't we get something for it so it's

03:43amazing you're going to watch semiconductors come home right we don't produce semiconductors

03:51we've got 165 billion for tsmc but you're going to watch the whole ecosystem come home because

03:57donald trump is the only president who understands the magnet to make him come home is one word which

04:03used to be a favorite word now it's dropped to number four which is tariffs right tariffs are going

04:08to bring semiconductors home they are going to empower bobby to execute mfm tariffs are going to

04:14be one of those tools that he's going to use to do that we're going to do it for furniture we're getting

04:19autos we got steel aluminum i mean it has been a blast a blast so two more things the department of

04:28commerce is going to start issuing its statistics on the blockchain because you are the crypto president

04:35and we are going to put out gdp on the blockchain so people can use the blockchain for data distribution

04:43and then we're going to make that available to the entire government so all of you can do it

04:48we're just ironing out all the details so we can do it