Kudlow has Pauline conversion about protectionism (Apocryphal Gospel News 12:3)

Trump economic advisers Larry Kudlow (top) and Peter Navarro (bottom) have been having their Pauline moment on the road from the G7 in Charlevoix

After beating North Korean cannons into condos at the Singapore summit, other members of the Trump administration have also been getting religion. Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been citing the Bible to justify separating children from their incarcerated immigrant parents.

Now top White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow has had a Pauline conversion epiphany after being released from Walter Reed Hospital for a mild heart attack. "If Canada imposes 270% tariffs on American dairy imports, yet the US exports five times as much dairy as it imports from Canada, then, counterintuitively, absurdly high foreign tariffs are the key to restoring an American trade surplus." Kudlow was previously known as a fervent free trader.

"It's just like the Laffer Curve, which counterintuitively claims that lowering taxes more than pays for itself by disproportionately stimulating economic growth."

"If we could only get America's trade partners to impose 270% duties on all American imports, we'd be exporting five times as much to them as we import, just like with dairy exports to Canada," he now claims. "That I didn't see this before must be due to my old cocaine addiction," he added ruefully.

Fellow Trump trade guru Peter Navarro was dumbfounded when confronted with this argument.

"You mean, instead of imposing 25% punitive duties on Chinese imports, we should get them to levy 270% on our exports?", Navarro asked Kudlow, incredulously.

"Exactly," Kudlow replied. "It's Jesus's message, its in the Gospels, even the fake ones. Turn the other cheek, render under Cesar, the last will be the first, a Saudi camel will pass through the eye of a needle before Jared Kushner!"

In contrast, before his heart attack, Kudlow had attacked Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as “polarizing” and “really kind of stabbed us in the back.” The Canadian leader pulled a “sophomoric political stunt for domestic consumption,” Kudlow said, that amounted to “a betrayal.”

Navarro had been even harsher:

“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door.”

Kudlow confessed "I had to have a heart attack to see how unchristianly I had behaved, but now I have seen the light. The Laffer Curve was trivial in comparison. Only took a few lines of cocaine," he stated, like a true redeemed sinner.

Kudlow and his family have a history of sudden volte-faces and conversions. His Polish-Jewish great grandfather and garment factory owner Samuel Kudlowitz was reportedly murdered in the 1905 Russian revolution, either in a pogrom or by his own workers, leading the family to precipitously emigrate to the US. He resigned from Bear Stearns in 1994 because of his cocaine addiction, which also got him fired from the conservative National Review a year later. In 1997 he was baptized by an Opus Dei Catholic priest.

In that 2000 interview Kudlow stated "My view is that Jesus has given me my life back. I have a feeling that at the right moment, God will give me that thought and express it publicly…."

This now seems to have happened with his Pauline epiphany about high tariffs and the balance of trade.

posted from Bloggeroid

G7 Trade Lessons

Angela Merkel lectures Donald Trump on international trade at the G7 summit: "Maybe America wouldn't run such large trade deficits with the rest of the world if Americans would get off their fat asses occasionally."

Trump trade war toying with national security? Breaking fake news

"With the US exporting less than $200m of such goods to China, toys were about 7 per cent of the $375bn trade deficit between the two countries last year."

"The US last year imported more than $25bn of toys, games and sports equipment from China."

Source: China: being a toy making powerhouse is no longer child’s play (FT.com)

After flirting with a trade war with China and American allies Japan, South Korea, Canada, Mexico and the European Union ("a trade war is easy to win") over steel, aluminum, cars, smartphones and intellectual property, Trump the Unprecedented has finally imposed punitive tariffs on aluminum and steel imports. Trump declared trade war on the world, starting with America's key allies, a soft target, and leaving the tough nuts to crack like China for later.

However, these tariffs are expected to provoke retaliatory tariffs targeted specifically at Trump's electoral base, thus magnifying the economic pain. And the invocation of national security grounds has only elicited general mirth among America's trading partners.

In desperation, Trump's trade advisors have now stumbled upon the philosopher's stone of global commerce: toys!

"Toys are the key to America's trade deficit with China," Trump told a meeting of the American Chamber of Commerce.

"Forget high-tech, heavy industry, Detroit cars. Toys are what made America great, and toys will make America great again!"

To reverse the gargantuan toy trade deficit, the Trump administration plans to declare toys essential to national security.

"We can no longer tolerate American children playing with Chinese-made GI Joes. This is an incomparable symbol of our willingness to serve and of our macho, pussy-grabbing, locker-room culture. Outsourcing them to China is worse than pacifism, it's defeatism."

After the unseemly squabbles inside Trump's trade team, the administration has finally come together on the toy issue.

Trade hawk Pete Navarro boasted that "after repatriating GI Joe, we'll bring back Barbie too!"

While the classic American toy GI Joe is the cornerstone of America's traditional macho fighting spirit, Pentagon sources disclosed that the Barbie Princess Power Super Sparkle superhero doll is a more accurate indicator of their latest strategic thinking after #MeToo. Bringing toy production back to American shores is a precondition of Trump's Making America 1929 Again isolationist philosophy.

posted from Bloggeroid