Trump: US Must Get Tougher Because China Is ‘Eating Our Lunch’

The United States needs tougher policies when dealing with China that include GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s plans to declare the Asian giant as currency manipulator, said billionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump.

Big companies have been the beneficiaries of current Chinese trade policies, while U.S. jobless rates remain high.

Take tech and stock-market darling Apple, which makes much of its products in China.

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“China is the beneficiary of Apple. We’re not so much of a beneficiary,” Trump told CNBC.

“We don’t make any Apple products. And they talk about how it benefits us. But China makes the product,” Trump added.

“We have to get the jobs back in this country. We have to take those jobs away, incentivize companies including Apple so they build their factories in this country.”

Romney has said if elected, he would declare China as a currency manipulator.

Many experts point out that China keeps its currency, the yuan, artificially cheap to give it an unfair advantage in the global trade arena.

“Mitt’s 100 percent right on that,” Trump said.

“China’s just eating our lunch.”

Other experts point out that China’s cheap currency is eating away at U.S. fiscal health as a whole.

“The budget deficit is basically the product of the trade deficit. The reason is simply this: If you do the math the equation is pretty simple. If you run a trade deficit, that basically subtracts from the growth rate,” Peter Navarro, a business professor at the University of California, Irvine, and producer of the documentary “Death By China,” told Newsmax.TV in a recent exclusive interview.

“What we have seen, and these statistics are startling, but what we have seen is, prior to 2001 for five-and-a-half decades, our [gross domestic product] grew at a rate of 3.5 percent. Since China joined the World Trade Organization and entered our markets, that growth rate has fallen to 1.6 percent.”

Many attribute China’s success to its cheaper labor costs, arguing that U.S. businesses are headed east to manufacture to cut costs.

That may be true to an extent, but a cheaper currency is sending more value-added businesses to China that the United States must entice back.

“It’s an interest argument but it generally applies to things like t-shirts or maybe cheap toys or things like that,” Navarro said.

“People have to understand two things, one is that what I am concerned about is the higher value-added jobs, the automobiles, the aircraft, the sophisticated medical equipment and we are losing those jobs to China as well.”