Peter Navarro's transformation from Globalist to Protectionist, in his own words:
https://www.axios.com/peter-navarro-...6cab63098.html
At what point and why did you change your view on the impact of tariffs on consumers?
"By the time I published Death By China in 2011, I had come to realize that the typical economic model to measure the costs and benefits of with tariffs failed to properly analyze the complete problem. The typical approach is to assert that the market is free, impose a tariff, observe a rise in price and a fall in quantity, calculate an efficiency loss (known as the 'deadweight loss') associated with a misallocation of resources, and declare tariffs to be 'bad.' One obvious problem with this approach is that it ignores that the starting point of the analysis is typically a market highly distorted by unfair subsidies which is far from the optimal outcome. On this basis alone, a tariff can move the market towards a more efficient solution. The bigger problem is that the traditional approach to evaluating tariffs ignores the external costs or 'negative externalities' associated with unfair trade.
When China, for example, dumps heavily subsidized products into the U.S., it leads to a loss of factories and jobs and a diminished defense industrial base. China’s unfair trade practices can also put downward pressure on wages and result in a U.S. tax base lower than it would otherwise be. Some of the more enlightened economists also now recognize that unfair trade also imposes heavy socioeconomic costs in the forms of higher crime, divorce rates, drug use, and suicide rates. None of this was evident to me in 1984 when I wrote the Policy Game, and it would take China’s non-market economy industrial policies to underscore the failures of the traditional tariff analysis."
I'm not sure how the negative impact of replacing manufacturing jobs with service industry jobs is not readily apparent to everyone, but there ya go.
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Originally Posted by sturg33
