Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Avik Roy

Donald Trump is now said that he wants to have a plan that's more harmonized with what House Republicans under speaker Paul Ryan have proposed.

[Donald Trump rhetoric]this is a common rhetorical line used by people who are against free trade that say, we're in favor of trade; we just don't like any of the free trade deals that America has actually signed onto.

I think he [Donald Trump] recognizes that a plan that would increase the deficit by $10 trillion over a decade is not a plan that's likely to get traction in Congress.

What was really interesting in his speech, which, by the way, had (inaudible) footnotes - the written version of it - which might be a personal record for Donald Trump - the source of a lot of his numbers on the free trade section of the speech came from an organization called the Economic Policy Institute, which was a think tank or is a think tank that was founded by labor unions to promote the labor unions' point of view on free trade agreements.

While Donald Trump said, well, our plan won't be exactly like the House Republican plan, the closer it is to that plan, the less likely it is to increase the deficit.

It's far from clear in general that Donald Trump is a guy who really thinks about the details of policy and is going to do the kind of heavy lifting you have to do as president to get those policies through in Congress. I think the hope is that Paul Ryan and his crew will push policies through Congress and Trump will just sign them. That's not really how policy works.

I think, again, the overall intellectual structure of the speech is very much consistent with what Donald Trump has been saying on the campaign trail. He's against free trade. He's against immigration. But he has been in favor of tax reform, and he has been afraid of - in favor of developing American energy sources like through fracking or hydraulic fracturing.

This rhetoric that Donald Trump is used is very consistent with rhetoric he's used on the campaign trail for a long time now. He'll always say - and you look - you can look at the past transcripts of his old speeches. He'll always say, I'm in favor of trade; trade is great, but these deals - NAFTA, TPP, the South Korean Free Trade Agreement - are all terrible.

It might be the first time - certainly the first time in my lifetime that a major policy address by a Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump so heavily relied on data and studies from a labor-union-backed think tank.

Free trade does bring jobs to America.