Trump White House senior counselor for trade and manufacturing Peter Navarro said Sunday that President Donald Trump’s tariffs will prove to be “tax cuts” for Americans, a claim that has been disputed by top economists.
On Fox News Sunday, Navarro joined network anchor Shannon Bream to discuss the implementation of 25 percent tariffs on foreign cars and car parts beginning next month.
Trump made an exception for imported car parts during similar tariffs in his first term.
In spite of warnings from some economists, Navarro argued to Bream – who challenged him on the issue – that the tariffs would equate to “tax cuts” for Americans:
BREAM: Investopedia says this, “If dealerships pass on the full cost to consumers, that would mean an additional $5,000 to $15,000 on imported cars. And because parts that are imported and end up U. S. cars, they could go up substantially some estimates by thousands of cars as well.” You heard [Lucas Tomlinson’s] reporting there where the president says he doesn’t care if the prices go up on U.S. cars, so what’s the message to the US consumer?
NAVARRO: The message is that tariffs are tax cuts, tariffs are jobs, tariffs for national security, tariffs are great for America, tariffs will make America great again.
Navarro further argued Trump’s tariffs on some cars during his first term did not harm consumers as some economists predicted. He did not address the lack of an exemption for imported auto parts.
Many economists — including numerous conservative-leaning economists — vigorously dispute the White House argument. Economist Art Laffer, who Trump gave a Presidential Medal of Freedom award in 2019, wrote in an analysis of Trump’s tariffs on foreign-made cars that a failure to exempt parts “risks causing irreparable damage to the industry, contradicting the administration’s goals of strengthening U.S. manufacturing and economic stability.”
Laffer later told the Associated Press, “Donald Trump is more familiar with the gains from trade than any politician I’ve ever talked to in my life” but that his analysis was based on the “facts,”
Brown University Professor of Economics Şebnem Kalemli-Özcan said last month:
Research has shown that consumers ultimately pay. Economists don’t typically agree on all things, but if you ask me, “What is one thing they do agree on?”, it’s that tariffs are costly to the American consumer in the end. If the Trump administration moves forward with the tariffs it has planned, I believe that American consumers will pay the price, and they are also going to hurt American businesses. When a good is more expensive for a company to buy, the company is going to sell it for more to the consumer, so the consumer will have to either pay that higher price, or say, “I’m not going to buy that” — or if it’s available, go to an alternative that is made in America, which will also put upward pressure on the prices of those domestic goods.
Last week, Creighton University economics professor Ernie Goss said he supported much of Trump’s agenda but “not on tariffs.”
Goss concluded Trump was making a “costly misstep.”
Watch above via Fox News.
The post ‘Tariffs Are Tax Cuts!’ Top Trump Trade Official Peter Navarro Doubles Down On Wild Argument Disputed By Scores of Economists first appeared on Mediaite.
