Thread by @FreeTradeBryan

Peter Navarro on @tomkeene @BloombergRadio just now: "We have the lowest tariffs, the lowest trade barriers in the world."

"Countries can charge US higher tariffs than we charge them, it’s endemic, it creates a large trade deficit, almost a trillion dollars a year." (Paraphrasing Navarro)

Q: What has been the impact (of tariffs) on US consumers and businesses?
Navarro: “Zero.”

“We’ve had the tariffs for over a year and we’ve seen no negative impacts on the U.S. economy.”

Q: What would a successful G20 deal look like?
Navarro: "I can’t speculate on that."

FYI all of the answers from Navarro I just posted, except of the last one, are factually incorrect.

Or half-truths

Re "we have lowest tariffs in the world" (note: Navarro is correct that other countries can impose tariffs that are higher or lower than those imposed by the U.S.)

Re: Foreign tariffs are responsible for trillion-dollar trade deficit. His # exceeds the actual US trade deficit by 60%. Many economists point to the US fiscal imbalance, the US saving rate, dollar as reserve currency, attractiveness of US to investors as factors (NOT tariffs).

Re: "no negative impact on U.S." Agree w/Navarro on strength of U.S. economy. It would be STRONGER w/out trade war though. As others have commented, if he talked to soybean farmer or one of the 100's of companies that submitted comments on new tariffs he would see he is wrong.

https://twitter.com/DallasFed/status/1143171482748694530

h/t @scottlincicome

2 more comments I just caught via the Bloomberg Surveillance podcast: "If you have [the] multilateral Trans Pacific Partnership, which would have torn apart our auto industry, that’s dead (ha)."

“Q1 2019, we came in a little over 3% growth rate, and a full point of that was due to a reduction in the trade deficit, primarily because of the China tariffs.”
(Note: If this was how things worked, we could boost GDP by shutting down trade w/the world & ending trade deficit.)