From 1947 to 2001, the American economy grew annually at a rate of 3.5 percent. After China got into the World Trade Organization, got access to our markets and flooded our markets with its illegally subsidized exports, we grew at a rate of 1.8 percent from 2002 to 2015. That's almost cut in half.
Peter NavarroNo one should be surprised just because somebody isn't successful 100 percent of the time.
Peter NavarroUnfair trade practices drive up rents for younger people. They will drive up home prices for first-time home-buyers. So it's not just that we're losing jobs and factories. We're giving away our homes, our businesses, our companies, our technologies.
Peter NavarroWhen we run these big trade deficits and send our jobs offshore, we hold our wages down and our income down. That feeds right back into the biggest part of this whole equation, consumption. This drags GDP down as well.
Peter NavarroThe policy goal is to persuade China to stop cheating. But here's what's interesting - Donald Trump intuitively understands what things should be. I did a study in 2008 where I estimated the impact of China's unfair trade practices on their competitive advantage - the so-called China Price. You know what it came out to be? Forty-three percent. Forty-three percent - very close to what his intuition said we needed in order to equalize things.
Peter NavarroIf you've been to China, you know there are over 100 cities in China, and the pollution levels are just horrific - 60,000 people a year die in Chinese factories and facilities, because they don't have any safety regulations. It's a carnage; it's Dickensian.
Peter NavarroWe're going right down the toilet, and it's a made-in-China toilet. I teach MBAs. And I noticed, starting a few years after China joined the World Trade Organization, that a lot of my students were no longer employed. They were still coming to get their MBA, but they'd lost their jobs.
Peter Navarro