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Where does JD Vance stand on key economic issues?
JD Vance’s career has followed a classic American rags-to-riches trajectory: After growing up in poverty in rural Ohio, he was accepted at an Ivy League university, finished a law degree, and leveraged his new connections into wealth and a seat in the U.S. Senate.
While that part of Vance’s biography may be familiar to voters, thanks to his best-selling 2016 memoir “Hillbilly Elegy” and frequent media appearances as a senator, his economic views are less well known. But with former President Donald Trump having picked him as his running mate for November, Vance’s economic views on everything from trade to tech are drawing scrutiny.
While Vance, 39, is known for changing his views – he once called Trump “cultural heroin” — he’s long espoused the idea that Americans in economically struggling regions of the country need to exercise willpower to improve their lives, rather than rely on government programs.
At the same time, Vance has also championed trade policies that align with Trump’s “America first” vision, which include imposing tariffs on imports from China and other nations as a way to promote U.S. manufacturing and project American jobs.
“Given that Vance is a true believer in Trump’s protectionist trade policies, this pick is just the latest sign that trade will be near the top of Trump’s agenda if he returns to the White House,” Isaac Boltansky, director of policy research at investment bank BTIG, said in a report on Tuesday.
Support for protectionist policies helped Vance win his Senate seat in Ohio, and should be popular with the Great Lakes battleground states of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Boltansky added.
Here’s what to know about Vance’s career and economic views.
Trump praised Vance’s business career
In announcing Vance as his running mate, Trump highlighted what he called “a very successful business career in technology and finance.”
That career has made Vance a multimillionaire, according to his 2022 Senate financial disclosure form. He’s worth at least $4 million thanks to investments in public companies such as Walmart, as well as bitcoin and real state.
That career came about at least in part because of an encounter with right-leaning billionaire Peter Thiel in 2011, when Vance was attending Yale Law School. In a 2020 essay, Vance writes about how Thiel condemned an obsession with achievement among elite students because he believed they tended to lose sight of investing time on worthwhile projects in favor of chasing status.
“He articulated a feeling that had until then remained unformed: that I was obsessed with achievement in se — not as an end to something meaningful, but to win a social competition,” Vance wrote.
Thiel’s talk spurred Vance to begin “immediately planning for a career outside the law,” he wrote. In 2016, Vance got into venture capital, joining Thiel’s firm Mithril Capital that year. In 2017, he joined Revolution, a venture fund started by former AOL executive Steve Case, where Vance was charged with finding startups in “left behind” cities.
Vance then struck out on his own by creating his own fund, Narya, an early-stage venture firm that invests in startups including conservative social media site Rumble and a prayer app called Hallow.
Some venture capital executives praised Vance’s pick as Trump’s running mate, with Delian Asparouhov, a partner from the Thiel-based Founders Fund, writing on social media, “WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY.”
What are Vance’s views on tech?
Although some denizens of Silicon Valley see Vance as one of their own, he has championed some views that run counter to the interests of the country’s most dominant tech businesses.
While Vance’s tech experience “is a clear positive, and his comments on innovation should be heartening to the industry, it is important to note that Vance has regularly chastised the ‘Big Tech oligarchy’ and called for breaking up Alphabet’s Google,” Boltansky wrote.
Notably, Vance has also praised Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan, who is known for stiffening antitrust enforcement under the Biden regime and taking on tech giants like Microsoft, which the agency sued to block its acquisition of Activision. Khan is “doing a pretty good job,” said earlier this year.
Vance’s antitrust views mean that Big Tech may continue to see “headwinds” if Trump wins in November, although there may be “an overall thawing in the M&A regulatory landscape that proves beneficial for deal activity,” Boltansky said.
What does Vance say about trade and tariffs?
Vance supports Trump’s protectionist trade policies, including tariffs on Chinese goods, which indicates that this could be a priority for a second Trump administration.
“I certainly agree that we need to apply some broad-based tariffs, especially on goods coming in from China and not just solar panels and EV stuff,” Vance told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” in May. “We need to protect American industries from all of the competition.”
However, economists point out that tariffs effectively act as consumption taxes on U.S. consumers, because they raise the cost of imported goods, while domestic manufacturers tend to boost their prices to maximize their profits. Vance told “Face the Nation” he doesn’t agree with the premise that tariffs increase costs for consumers, but didn’t elaborate.
What are Vance’s views on energy and climate change?
Vance has expressed doubts about climate change, and is a strong supporter of the fossil fuel industry. In an interview with Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity on Monday, Vance said, “[Y]ou’ve got to unleash American energy. President Trump is so strong and as we had energy independence, Joe Biden has destroyed it.”
He’s also criticized the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration’s push to encourage Americans to replace their gas-powered cars with electric vehicles through tax credits to buy EVs, as well as to electrify their homes as a way to lower dependence on fossil fuels.
Has Vance said anything about Project 2025?
Project 2025, overseen by the conservative Heritage Foundation, is a detailed blueprint for the next Republican president that would overhaul the executive branch, as well as touch on economic issues including taxes and the Federal Reserve. Trump has sought to distance himself from the project, claiming this month that he knows “nothing” about the project.
In an interview earlier this month that asked about Project 2025, Vance noted, “There are some good ideas in there,” but also claimed the project has no affiliation with the Trump campaign.
The project is spearheaded by ex-Trump administration officials, including project director Paul Dans, who was chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management.
What other financial issues are important Vance?
Vance is a major supporter of digital currencies, and as a senator has co-sponsored legislation “aimed at preventing the banking regulators from forcing banks to stop serving disfavored industries such as crypto,” Boltansky wrote.
“A Trump victory would lead to the regulatory landscape for digital assets becoming more supportive almost immediately at the market regulators and some bank regulators, but there is always some lead time to get people in place and actually shift policy,” he added.
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Sheeba Atiqi’s is on a goodwill tour, and while it may look easy, it’s anything but. As a civilian ambassador for the Tulsa Police Department, her goal is to thaw relations with an often standoffish community.
“People are afraid to approach them, afraid to ask them questions,” Atiqi said. “My job as a police ambassador is basically to be the liaison between the department and the community members.”
It can be challenging, Atiqi says, because people may be “afraid due to their own background to engage with officers.”
Tulsa is proud of its history as the center of the oil industry, but the city also grapples with ghosts — especially the aftermath of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, when local police assisted a rampaging white mob, leading to dozens, if not more, being killed and a Black neighborhood of nearly forty square blocks being incinerated. So the distrust that Tulsa police face runs deep and spans generations.
“If you don’t learn from history, you’re doomed to repeat it,” said Chief Dennis Larson, a 45-year veteran of the department. “I think we’re doing a really good job of learning.”
Larson says building trust is important for every police department in the United States, and agrees that it only “takes one bad moment” to ruin that trust.
In Tulsa, one such moment came in 2016 with the police shooting of motorist Terrence Crutcher. He was troubled and had PCP in his system, but was unarmed. The white police officer who shot and killed him was later acquitted of manslaughter.
“Terrence’s death truly unearthed a century of racial tension in Tulsa, Oklahoma,” said Tiffany Crutcher, Terrence’s twin sister.
When asked if she holds police accountable, Tiffany said, “What does accountability look like when you kill an unarmed man with his hands in the air?”
Tulsa has more police shootings per arrest than 93% of the nation’s major police departments, CBS News found using data from Mapping Police Violence. The city’s own data shows lower-than-average scores when it comes to accountability — resolution of citizen complaints. Tulsa’s own equality review gave itself failing grades on juvenile and adult arrests by race.
“If we did something wrong, we’re gonna own it. We’re gonna say, ‘How do we fix it and how do we make sure it never happens again?'” Larson said.
Tulsa police did not respond to repeated requests for comment about the police data. Tiffany Crutcher says the data speaks for itself.
“What you’re saying is antithetical to the data. I didn’t make up the data — it’s your data,” Crutcher said.
When asked if the department is making inroads with building trust, Crutcher said, “It means getting uncomfortable, and I don’t believe Tulsa’s police department has done that yet.”
Meanwhile, Larson implores critics who see the changes as performative to “judge us by our actions in the future.”
“We need to get into the mindset to help ourselves,” Atiqi said.
CBS News
Trump announces Musk, Ramaswamy will lead newly-created Department of Government Efficiency
President-elect Donald Trump announced Tuesday that billionaire Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy will head up a new agency known as the Department of Government Efficiency.
Trump in a statement said the two “will pave the way for my Administration to dismantle Government Bureaucracy, slash excess regulations, cut wasteful expenditures, and restructure Federal Agencies – Essential to the ‘Save America’ Movement.”
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In his own statement, Musk said the new agency “will send shockwaves through the system, and anyone involved in Government waste, which is a lot of people!”
Musk was a major part of Trump’s reelection campaign effort, while Ramaswamy ran against Trump in the Republican primary before endorsing him.
The department’s acronym, DOGE, is also a dog meme that inspired Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that was created as a joke and is credited with being the first meme coin.
This is a developing story and will be updated.