Tag: Navarro

The Ignorant Cranks Behind Trump’s Hydroxychloroquine Push

15 Comments


A guy Jared Kushner found on Amazon, a quack, and Rudy Giuliani. What could go wrong?

On a Sunday night, during his 928,365th televised coronavirus briefing, Donald Trump made an extremely hard sell for the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine, whose effectiveness against COVID-19 is still virtually unknown. “What do you have to lose?” the president asked of taking a drug for which there is very little data, as though he was talking about trying a new flavor of Laffy Taffy or experimenting with two-ply versus four-ply toilet paper. “I really think they should take it,” he said of ill patients. “But it’s their choice. And it’s their doctor’s choice or the doctors in the hospital. But hydroxychloroquine. Try it, if you’d like.”

In fact, as health experts and actual doctors have stressed, there is a lot patients could lose by trying hydroxychloroquine just for yucks, given that the drug can cause a heart arrhythmia that could lead to cardiac arrest, for starters. “It causes psychiatric symptoms, cardiac problems and a host of other bad side effects,” Megan Ranney, an emergency physician at Brown University told the New York Times, noting that she had never seen an elected official hype a drug as a miracle cure the way Trump has. “There may be a role for it for some people,” she said, “but to tell Americans ‘you don’t have anything to lose,’ that’s not true.”…

RTFA. The gory details aren’t anything unusual in the smog of incompetency that surrounds the Fake President like the miasma of a stage-fart. Worth knowing to offer to that silly breed of American apparently still dazzled by the porcelain smile of a reality TV “star”.

American consumers will pay for Trump’s trade war

2 Comments

As Paul Krugman pointed out, it’s a fallacy to think that foreigners are the only ones paying the tariff bill. U.S. consumers pay as well. Believing that tariffs are a tax on foreign countries is like believing that sales taxes are a tax on Wal-Mart.

It’s also makes little sense for Trump to brag about the tax revenue his tariffs are creating, when his own tax cuts have increased the deficit by enormous amounts. So far the tariffs have raised a few billion in revenue, while the tax cuts are expected to cost about $100 billion every year.

…The burden of tariffs falls mostly on domestic consumers — in other words, Americans — because the prices of many traded goods are set in world markets. Suppose a Chinese company is selling a washing machine in the U.S. for $1,000. Trump then sets a tariff of $200 on the washing machine. The Chinese company knows that it can go sell its washing machine somewhere else without the tariff — France, or Japan, or Russia — and still get about $1,000 for it. So in order to make it worth the Chinese company’s while to sell the machine in the U.S., it’s going to have to raise the sticker price to $1,200.

That’s an idealized example, of course — in fact, the U.S. domestic market is large enough where it has some power to affect global prices, so Chinese merchants will pay some small portion of the tariff. But much of the cost of the tax will be borne by the American consumer.

Nothing new here. Incompetent economists like Peter Navarro – and crooked politicians like Trump and Reagan have been pushing models like this for decades. They fail to grow our economy every time. American taxpayers pick up the tab every time.

Trump still wrong about Trade Deficits

Leave a comment


Trump shows Pence and Peter Navarro he can count to 10 — or 5 twice!

❝ President Donald Trump has a logically coherent strategy for achieving the goal of reducing the US trade deficit, one of his stated priorities. The problem is that his strategy is based on totally wrong assumptions about trade deficits.

❝ Two logical chains are leading the president and his team to erroneous conclusions. The first is based on the mistaken assumption that foreign barriers to US exports cause the US trade deficit. If that assumption were true, the strategy of trying to lower foreign barriers by threatening to raise US barriers would be defensible. But both theory and evidence demonstrate that barriers reduce exports and imports equally, with no lasting effect on trade balances…The second logical chain starts with the assumption that tariffs inflict more pain on foreigners than on domestic residents…But longstanding economic theory says that both the home country and the foreign country roughly equally bear the cost of tariffs. Tariffs raise costs for consumers and producers in the importing country. Moreover, there is no reason why the war must be fought only through tariffs. US businesses have considerably more direct investment in Chinese operations than Chinese firms have in US operations. On that front, the United States has more to lose from commercial conflict than China.

RTFA. For that matter, wander on through some of the goodies published by the Peterson Institute for International Economics. Unless, that is, you prefer relying to dummies like our fake president.

Pence’s hometown takes a hit from Trump’s tariffs

Leave a comment


gocomics.org

COLUMBUS, Ind. — One company and one family loom large over this city, intertwined for decades. Cummins Inc. is the biggest employer in Columbus, built into a $20 billion heavy equipment manufacturer with the help of Mike Pence, who as governor passed pro-business tax cuts and made trade visits to China on its behalf.

Pence’s older brother Edward joined Cummins after graduating from college and worked there for four decades, running one of its most lucrative engine plants before retiring last December. A second brother, Greg, is running for the 6th congressional district seat and visited Cummins during a recent campaign stop.

But the alliance of the past is being threatened by the administration Mike Pence now serves, as President Trump’s trade war with multiple nations clobbers Cummins and other local companies…

Pence’s hometown oozes internationalism: 40 foreign companies have a presence, more than half of them Japanese engines and auto-parts plants, employing almost 10,000 people. The area’s schools collectively speak 51 languages. The city ranks second in the nation in the per capita percentage of H-1B visas for foreign workers…

Now the aggressive pursuit of foreign trade that made this city a recession-busting economic miracle has made it decidedly vulnerable, with businesses already canceling projects and mulling the depth of job losses.

Stupid overrules ignorant in the Trump White House. Economists working for the Fake President apparently skipped the portions of their degree programs dealing with the history of failed theories.

Navarro gets his 15 minutes of fame for Trump tariffs

2 Comments

❝ Peter K. Navarro has been taking a public victory lap to celebrate his success at persuading President Trump to announce tariffs on steel and aluminum imports…

Navarro, the director of the White House’s Trade and Manufacturing Policy office, has become ubiquitous on television since last Thursday, in appearances that have been at turns triumphal and testy. His outspoken bluntness has quickly turned him into one of the biggest lightning rods in Washington.

❝ After getting sidelined and effectively demoted by Chief of Staff John F. Kelly last fall, many advisers might have looked for other jobs. But Navarro had nowhere else he wanted to go. So he stuck it out. Now he’s back in the room where it happens.

Conservative economists, business executives and Republican elites who support free trade hate him for that, and they now speak of Navarro like he is a boogeyman.

Navarro’s years in academia reflect the slogan oldie – “Those who can’t do, teach?” Certainly invalid much of the time, most economists and financial advisors I listen to say it’s spot on in Navarro’s life and work.