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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsFaulty trade math may not make America greater or richer
Fri Apr 28, 2017 | 7:20pm EDT
By Howard Schneider | WASHINGTON
By U.S. President Donald Trumps math, renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement and other deals will largely pay for the massive tax cuts his cabinet laid out earlier in the week.
He is likely off by a factor of close to 10 - or more - according to trade and tax economists who say it does not make sense to think of the world in the two-dimensional, money-in-my-pocket or money-in-yours way that Trump did in a Thursday interview with Reuters.
The president, for example, said that given the current $61 billion annual trade deficit with Mexico, the United States would be better off if the two countries did not trade at all, saying "You'll save yourself a hell of a lot of money" ...
"These views about the trade deficit and its alleged negative impact...are nonsense, and are views he has held since the 1980s," said <Claude Barfield, a trade expert at the conservative American Enterprise Institute> ...
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-trade-analysis-idUSKBN17U2SL
Wellstone ruled
(34,661 posts)Larry Kudlow is the so called Genius that wrote Trumps so called Tax plan and was one of his advisors on NAFTA,all I can say is Holy Crap. Another supply side Neo-Con.
Docreed2003
(16,876 posts)How any sane person would trust a "businessman" like Trump, who's been bankrupted into oblivion throughout his career, with making rational economic decisions for this country is beyond me! I get it, plenty of his voters were wrapped up in his persona that was built in the 80's and honed over the years until his "ultimate deal" as a reality star. To most average Americans, I'm sure he does seem successful in business from his persona. Sadly, too many people are either too dumb or too disinterested to scrap beyond that and see what he truly is: a scam artist. Government cannot be run like a business, to view it differently is a block headed view of how government functions. I suppose we shouldn't expect any more that that view from trump, but it's frightening that his advisors aren't cluing him in on this fact. If he continues to try to run our government like a business, prepare for national bankruptcy. I know Trump and his ilk will survive unscathed, but the rest of us will certainly suffer.