Quotation of the Day…

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… is from the economist Jason Furman in his recent interview with Reason‘s Nick Gillespie:

Basically, every step of Trump’s mentality on trade is wrong. First of all, imports are good. We like to import coffee. We like to import cars. We like to import the inputs we need for American manufacturing. Second, trade deficits don’t reflect other countries’ tariffs and trade policies. There’s countries with huge tariffs that run large trade deficits. There’s countries with low tariffs that run trade surpluses. Third, our retaliation against them is going to shrink imports, but it’s also going to shrink exports. And that hurts consumers on the import side; it hurts American workers on the export side. Every step of his reasoning and fixation on trade deficits is just the wrong way to think about trade.