Tariffs just aren’t the all-purpose economic panacea that Trump and Navarro make them out to be. The truth about tariffs’ destructive effects is amply documented in the historical record. From David Haggith at thedailydoom.com:
There is an old joke that someone was touring heaven and asked St. Peter (definitely not Peter Navarro) why one room had an endless wall covered with clocks.
“Oh, those are meters,” Said the venerable saint. “There is one for each person living, and anytime that person lies, the meter moves ahead one click.”
“And why has one of them been replaced with a fan?”
“Oh that’s Peter Navarro’s meter.”
I’m still sometimes surprised how some people will tell any lie on earth to suit their political beliefs, even when it is easily proven wrong and even after it has been proven wrong. If I were in a hot room, I’d want to stand next to Navarro’s lie meter to keep my cool; however, listening to him does not do well for my cool. Still, what can you expect from a failed liberal Californian politician who was so far Left that political pundit Joe Matthews called him “San Diego’s Bernie Sanders?” His career since petering out as a liberal politician was built on his writing under the fake persona Ron Vara, which focused on China-hatred. So, really his tariff orientation has more to do with absolute China hatred, but then it’s hard to completely fault that, given China’s own history.
Navarro’s big, baldface lie right now is that tariffs do not cause inflation, and the proof of that, he claims, is that Trump’s tariffs during his last shift on duty caused no inflation. Here’s his lie:
We put on significant tariffs on China, steel, aluminum, dishwashers, solar, a lot of increased countervailing duties to stop the dumping [in Trump’s first administration]. We had zero inflation from any of that. It never happened, and it’s the same movie this time. Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, where we run a Federal Reserve that prints too much money, and they do that to accommodate fiscal irresponsibility.
