'I almost choked': Economist highlights gobsmacking moment of Trump's speech - Alternet [View all]

[justaprogressive]

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman found himself particularly floored by a moment in President Donald Trump's address to Congress on Tuesday in which he made boasts about boosting auto manufacturing even as his tariffs on Canada and Mexico threaten to cripple auto supply chains.

Writing on his Substack page, Krugman explained how car production in the United States will be hampered by the tariffs on America's two biggest trading partners given the way that cars are assembled across all three countries.

"Automobile production, which is deeply integrated across our northern and southern borders — there really isn’t a U.S. auto industry, there’s a North American industry operating in all three countries — will be especially hard hit," he wrote. "I almost choked when Trump declared last night that 'we are going to have growth in the auto industry like nobody has ever seen.' Well, I guess we’ve never seen a large downturn in auto production outside a major recession, which is not to say that we won’t get a recession too."

Taking stock of Trump's economic policies as a whole, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk's slash-and-burn approach to federal workers, Krugman argued that the United States right now is "trapped in a burning Tesla."

https://www.alternet.org/send/trump-economist-gobsmacked/