DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell spoke against tariffs and in support of Ukraine at the Bowling Green Country Club.

McConnell on Wednesday spoke on these matters and others in a “fireside chat” for the Bowling Green Rotary Club. He fielded questions from Joe Arnold, who oversees media relations and advocacy communications at the Kentucky Electric Cooperatives.

McConnell said the budget this year “is not great.”

“I’m trying to advocate and lobby for avoiding the inevitable … , ” he said.

A Trump-supported budget bill was approved by the House but faces opposition by even some Republican senators.

McConnell said he wants to spend his final two years of his career focusing on what he’s most interested in and followed up with, “This is an extremely dangerous world right now,” naming five adversaries in China, Russia, North Korea, Iran and Iran’s proxies.

“The way you get respect is, have your enemies not want to mess with you,” McConnell said. “It’s not complicated: They don’t pick a fight with you if they don’t think they’re going to win it.”

One of the major mistakes before World War II, he said, was the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 — which had raised U.S. tariffs on imported goods. He noted that it is widely considered to have worsened the Great Depression.

“Does some of this sound familiar to you all?” The slogan during the ’30s: ‘America first,’ ” he said.

“I’m skeptical, on the tariffs side, on kicking off tariff wars … ,” he said. “Virtually everybody impacted by the back-and-forth on tariffs are allies.”

On the national security side, he added, “what we have to hope we will always avoid is a big headline that says, “Russia wins, and America loses.’ ”

“We’re not in the fight ourselves; we’re just helping a democratic country avoid being taken over by an authoritarian … the Russians are up to no good, and no amount of acting like we want to be their friend is going to change that,” he said. “Ukraine is extremely important to us.”

Speaking on why the U.S. is spending money in Ukraine, McConnell pointed to how spending on defense was roughly 37% of the GDP during WW II, 13% during the Korean War and 9% in Vietnam — and, in comparison, it was about 6% in the defense buildup under former President Ronald Reagan.

“So, you can see, it’s a lot cheaper to prevent a war than to have one, and a hell of a lot less people get killed, and right now, we need to be showing strength and determination — not weakness and isolation,” he said.

He added that supplying Ukraine equipment creates American jobs as well.

He also pointed to impacts of tariffs on Kentucky, given how especially trade-dependent the commonwealth is. A National Association of Realtors report last month highlights Kentucky as a top-ranking state in both imports and exports.

As for who pays for the tariffs: “You do,” he said. “So, it’s inflationary as well.”

Concerning the budget, he noted that the federal discretionary budget is 28% of the total budget, given that government services such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — entitlements, as he refers to them, as funding doesn’t require reauthorization — are “enormously popular,” and “huge numbers of people depend on them.”

Horowitz writes for the Daily News through a partnership with Report for America.