It’s not clear who White House advisor Peter Navarro speaks for but on Sunday he spoke up loudly for more tariffs.
On Fox News Navarro claimed Sunday that President Donald Trump’s new tariffs would raise more than $6 trillion in federal revenue over the next decade.
Exactly why that’s a good idea wasn’t clear from Navarro’s appearance since it would amount to the largest peacetime tax hike in modern U.S. history. (Consumers would wind up paying the higher tariffs in the price of stuff they buy.)
Navarro said the president’s tariffs on auto imports, set to take effect Wednesday, would raise $100 billion per year. Meanwhile, a raft of additional tariffs–details of which have yet to be released–would raise another $600 billion per year, or $6 trillion over the next decade, Navarro said.
Navarro’s remarks suggest Trump is preparing dramatic new measures for Wednesday, which the president has referred to as “Liberation Day.” Navarro is among the most hawkish voices on trade in the president’s inner circle. He offered no details to explain his revenue projections. But Trump has in recent days revived the idea of imposing a single universal rate on all imports to the United States, regardless of the product or the country of origin.
Also on Fox News on Sunday, Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, declined to outline Trump’s tariff plans. “I can’t give you any forward-looking guidance on what’s going to happen this week,” said Hassett, who is widely regarded as more skeptical of tariffs than Navarro. “The president has got a heck of a lot of analysis before him, and he’s going to make the right choice, I’m sure.”
A tariff that generated $600 billion per year would amount to the biggest increase in federal tax revenue since World War II, Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, told the Washington Post. “We’ve never seen a president propose such a drastic tax increase at a time where there is no national emergency requiring it” and the economy is already slowing, Riedl said. “You just do not hear numbers like $6 trillion over 10 years in legislation or executive orders.”
Extending Trump’s 2017 tax cuts is projected to cost roughly $4 trillion over the next decade, adding roughly $400 billion a year to the national debt.
