{"id":6568,"date":"2016-10-04T22:29:31","date_gmt":"2016-10-04T22:29:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/?p=6568"},"modified":"2016-10-04T22:30:33","modified_gmt":"2016-10-04T22:30:33","slug":"trump-economic-ridicule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/blog\/2016\/10\/trump-economic-ridicule\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump’s Economic Plan Faces Well-Deserved Ridicule – Article by K. William Watson"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"The<\/a>K. William Watson<\/span>
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Earlier this week, the Trump campaign released a white paper<\/a> written by senior policy adviser Peter Navarro to elaborate and quantify the candidate\u2019s economic plan.\u00a0 The goal of the paper is to explain how Donald Trump\u2019s promises to renegotiate trade agreements and raise tariffs will promote economic growth and raise revenue for the government.<\/p>\n

The plan betrays embarrassing ignorance of how trade negotiations work and a farcically simplistic and erroneous understanding of economics.\u00a0 In essence, the plan justifies Trump\u2019s policies by reimagining how the world works.<\/p>\n

Trump\u2019s entire view of trade and its impact on the U.S. economy is wrong. \u00a0He believes that trade is good for the United States only if we export more than we import and that trade relations are a contest between countries, which we are losing because they sell more stuff to us than we sell to them. \u00a0He claims to be the tough-guy who will the save the American economy from shrewd foreign cheaters and the inept government officials who let them beat us.<\/p>\n

Since that\u2019s not how things work in the real world, he has to rely on falsehoods and bad economics to justify disastrous policies.\u00a0 This new white paper is just a continuation of that tactic.<\/p>\n

But you don\u2019t have to take my word for it.\u00a0 If you think I\u2019m being too harsh or would like to learn more about the \u201cTrump Trade Doctrine\u201d and what\u2019s wrong with it, I recommend you read lengthier condemnations from experts who have called the plan\u2019s analysis \u201ctruly disappointing<\/a>,\u201d \u201cnot only wrong, but foolish<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0\u201cmagical thinking<\/a>,\u201d \u201ca complete mess<\/a>,\u201d and the sort of thing \u201cthat would get you flunked out of an AP economics class<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Bill Watson is a trade policy analyst with Cato\u2019s Herbert A Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies<\/a>. His research focuses on U.S. trade remedy policies, disguised protectionism, and the institutional aspects of global trade liberalization. He manages Free Trade, Free Markets: Rating the Congress<\/em><\/a>, Cato\u2019s online database that tracks votes by Congress and its individual members on bills and amendments affecting the freedom of Americans to trade and invest in the global economy. Watson received a BA in political science from Texas Christian University, a JD from Tulane University Law School, and an LLM in international and comparative law from the George Washington University Law School.<\/strong><\/p>\n

This work by Cato Institute<\/a> is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

K. William Watson ****************************** Earlier this week, the Trump campaign released a white paper written by senior policy adviser Peter Navarro to elaborate and quantify the candidate\u2019s economic plan.\u00a0 The goal of the paper is to explain how Donald Trump\u2019s promises to renegotiate trade agreements and raise tariffs will promote economic growth and raise revenue for the government. The plan betrays embarrassing ignorance of how trade negotiations work and a farcically simplistic and erroneous understanding of economics.\u00a0 In essence, the…<\/p>\n

Read More Read More<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,5],"tags":[4914,4598,4911,4192,4220,20,83,1200,4912,2483,4913,4915],"class_list":["post-6568","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-politics","tag-trump-trade-doctrine","tag-2016-presidential-election","tag-cato","tag-cato-institute","tag-donald-trump","tag-economics-2","tag-free-markets","tag-free-trade","tag-k-william-watson","tag-mercantilism","tag-trade-relations","tag-zero-sum-fallacy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6568","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6568"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6568\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6570,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6568\/revisions\/6570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6568"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6568"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rationalargumentator.com\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6568"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}