I don’t understand Trumpian economics…

[hudebnik]

From this NY Times article ,

“Peter Navarro, the senior counselor for trade and manufacturing, said in a call with reporters Friday that “disastrous” timber and lumber policies “drive up construction and housing costs and impoverish America through large trade deficits that results from exporters like Canada, Germany and Brazil dumping lumber” into the U.S. market.”

Wait: if Canada, Germany, and Brazil are “dumping” lumber on the US market, wouldn’t that drive construction and housing prices down, not up? It might cost some US lumberjack jobs, in exchange for creating more US construction jobs. (Not to mention jobs making things that we export to Canada, Germany, and Brazil.)

Comments

[dewline]

Speaking of that creep Navarro...I've heard that he's got ideas about redrawing the US-Canada border apart from Trump's annexation dreams. Is there a map of that proposal anywhere? I want to mock it properly.

[hudebnik]

The story seems to have first broken in The Telegraph, and all the stories since then quote this one. I haven't found any specifics, like what words he said, where and when, so there may be no more specifics than that.

[ckd]

The core principle of Trumpian anything is "all bad things are someone else's fault" even when that makes no sense, so this is perfectly consistent.

[hudebnik]

If Trump himself were saying this, my read would be "foreigners doing something without my permission is bad, and high housing prices are bad, so one must cause the other."

Navarro actually has a degree in economics, so he presumably knows this reasoning is nonsense, but it leads to the conclusions his boss wants to hear, so go for it.

Looking at his Wikipedia bio, I see that he was teaching at UCSD for the first two years I was a grad student there. No, I didn't take any of his classes. He narrowly lost election for Mayor of San Diego in 1992, around the time I defended my dissertation and left the city. A lot of his economic publication record has more of a protectionist slant than I would prefer, but seems basically sane and competent. But he got a job in the first Trump administration, and as usual for such people, all hints of sanity, competence, and integrity evaporated.