White House trade adviser Peter Navarro on Sunday vehemently denied that President Donald Trump’s tariffs on China hurt Americans more than they do to China.
In a contentious interview on “Fox News Sunday” with host Chris Wallace, Navarro insisted that since the tariffs were put in place last year, China "offset virtually all of these tariffs and the consumers are not seeing any price hikes in any significant way and is not showing up in the data.”
Wallace pressed the issue by presenting Tax Foundation data that showed “as a typical family of four is paying $850 a year or more already under the current Trump tariffs and will pay another $350 more for these tariffs.”
But Navarro, who serves as assistant to the president, and director of trade and manufacturing policy, insisted that “we are not seeing this in the data.”
“China devalued their currency by almost 10%. We are talking about putting 10% tariffs on the remaining $300 billion in goods, we are just getting back to where we were before China started manipulating the currency,” argued.
But Wallace refuted the argument, and criticized Navarro for not being forthcoming, saying: “The point is you're saying I don't have to pay anything, that it's a free lunch and I don't believe it is a free lunch. I believe there is and we would have a better discussion if we discussed what the real cause is.”
Navarro then batted back with his own denouncement of Wallace.
"You spend nine minutes on Consumer Price Index and you let the Chinese get a free lunch basically on all the kinds of economic engaging,” he charged.
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