Peter Navarro

Economist

1949-07-15

Quotes by Peter Navarro

• One of the goals of the Trump administration is to reclaim all of the supply chain and manufacturing capability that would otherwise exist if the playing field were level.

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• It does the American economy no long-term good to only keep the big box factories where we are now assembling 'American' products that are composed primarily of foreign components. We need to manufacture those components in a robust domestic supply chain that will spur job and wage growth.

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• Cheap labor is a small part of the problem at work here. If it were only cheap labor, America would be in trouble. Because it's other things, too, we have a great chance to turn it around. Here's the problem: Our high corporate tax rate pushes our companies offshore. Our high regulatory burden pushes our companies offshore.

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• Al Gore has all of the positive attributes of Bill Clinton but is saddled with none of his negatives. He's a great big teddy bear of a political figure - Teflon coated, road tested, and everyone's nice guy.

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• Politicians need money at election time and money to get the vote. Well, more than half of money in election comes from corporate interests whose interests are in polluting the Chinese environment and making products.

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• The far more likely Trump scenario is this: Chinese leaders realize they no longer have a weak leader in the White House; China ceases its unfair trade practices. America's massive trade deficit with China comes peacefully and prosperously back into balance, and both the U.S. and Chinese economies benefit from trade.

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• The way the textbook works is you have gains from trade that should be distributed across all the trading partners. As soon as one bad actor like China massively cheats, they win at the expense of us; they win at the expense of Europe, and over time, it threatens the entire integrity of the global financial system and the global trading system.

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• If you study how Ronald Reagan won first the 1980 election and then in 1984, what Reagan did is what Trump is going to do, and that is pull in a tremendous amount of blue-collar workers who have felt abandoned by the Democrats.

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• We're already in a trade war with China. The problem is we've not been fighting back. Trump, through tariffs, wants to call a truce.

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• It's that evil twin part of me that always comes out at the absolute wrong political moment, like a demon possessing my soul; it exhibits itself as an arrogance or disdain or obnoxiousness or meanness or anger or pettiness - all traits that are lethal in politics.

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• Would you rather have cheap, subsidized - illegally subsidized - goods dumped into the Wal-Mart and not have a job and not have your wages go up in 15 years, or would you like to pay a little bit more - not much - a little bit more, have a job, and have your wages going up? I think the American people are going to make that choice.

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• We prefer paychecks to welfare checks for the American people and a robust middle class with rising wages.

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• The defining moment in American economic history is when Bill Clinton lobbied to get China into the World Trade Organization. It was the worst political and economic mistake in American history in the last 100 years.

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• It's extraordinary to me - you cannot name a presidential candidate in history who has singlehandedly, through bad trade deals, destroyed more American jobs and more American factories than Hillary Clinton. She did NAFTA, she did China's entry into the World Trade Organization, she did the South Korean 2012 deal - every single one of those.

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• I teach MBAs. And I noticed, starting a few years after China joined the World Trade Organization, that a lot of my students were no longer employed. They were still coming to get their MBA, but they'd lost their jobs. And I started to ask questions why. And, at that point, all roads were leading to Beijing.

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• It doesn't matter to me who's the most powerful or profitable country in the world. All countries want to be prosperous. What's happening is a zero-sum game between China and the U.S., where their gain is our loss.

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